Re: How to develop a Mallard viewer, similar to Yelp

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Thu, 2013-07-04 at 17:19 +0530, Kalpa Welivitigoda wrote:
> Hi,
>
>
> I am developing a Help mechanism for Sugar Labs and I am using Mallard
> as the markup language. I am in the phase of implementing a viewer for
> Mallard formatted Help documents. I found that Yelp is capable of
> viewing Mallard formatted documents. I heard that Yelp uses WebKit to
> render Mallard documents. I highly appreciate if anyone here, could
> tell me or guide to a doc on how to develop a viewer for Mallard.

Hi Kalpa,

Sorry for taking so long to get back to you. Yelp does use WebKitGTK+,
but the bulk of the work in displaying the Mallard documents is in the
Yelp XSLT stylesheets. Yelp actually transforms Mallard to HTML on the
fly when it shows a page.

The easiest way to implement a Mallard viewer is to just use Yelp's
implementation, which is available as libyelp. It's not in a separate
source repository right now (some day, hopefully), but many distros
package it separately. On Fedora, it's yelp-libs.

With libyelp, making a Mallard viewer is as simple as putting a YelpView
widget into a window and telling it the location of a document.

If Sugar wants to base a help activity off of Yelp and Mallard, I'd like
to work with you to finalize the libyelp API so I can finally move it
into its own package.

--
Shaun