MATLAB help/documentation not displaying correctly

Question

I'm having a problem with the built-in help/documentation within MATLAB 2013a (issue also present in 2012b).

Upon opening the help files the pages appear with no formatting, only plain text. Search results do appear correctly though.

I have found only one instance of someone else with this issue, on MATLAB central here. However, there are no responses to the author's question. The issue I'm having is exactly the same as described there.

I have tried removing the preference folder and relaunching MATLAB but this doesn't help.

I'm using Windows 8.1 and MATLAB 2013a.

Any help or suggestions on how to fix this would be very much appreciated.

Edit: Thank you everyone for the feedback so far. I don't believe java to be the issue, I have the latest version installed (1.7.0_45) while MATLAB uses it's own version (1.6.0_17). Both of which co-exist on my machine.

Following horchler's thread led me to another semi-related bug report here. The following code is listed at the bottom of the workaround (the script attached to the workaround didn't fix anything unfortunately).

com.mathworks.mlwidgets.html.HtmlComponentFactory.setDefaultType('HTMLRENDERER');

This results in a degraded appearance of documentation pages and loss of some functionality but is still an improvement over the plain text and scrambled pages.

Hopefully from this new information we can work towards a solution!

Answer 1

One solution is to go back to IE-10, or to use the patch on http://www.mathworks.com/support/bugreports/989850

Which basically replaces the localnav.js at <MATLAB>/help/includes/product/scripts

The link to download!

Answer 2

This is an old post, but I had the same issue and have a fix (not downloading R2013b or java related). Just downgrade from IE 11 to 10: Go to System (or System & Security)->Windows Update->View Update History->Installed Updates -> Find IE11 and uninstall it. Your system should revert back to the prior installed version. This fixed the help issues.