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

[Kalpa Welivitigoda <callkalpa gmail com>]

On Fri, Jul 12, 2013 at 6:22 PM, Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org> wrote:

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.

Hi Shaun,

Thanks for your detailed reply. It's nice that you have developed Yelp to a point that it is so easy to implement a help viewer from yelp implementation itself.

According to the discussion I had with my mentor at Sugar Labs, there are a few contributors in writing help content for sugar activities and they have been using rst as the markup language. My initial plan was to convert rst to Mallard and implement a help viewer in Sugar. But the current requirement is to get more and more help content, display them in the activity and support l10n. So we have concluded to use the current rst markup and fulfil the rest of the current requirement, as far as the GSoC project is concerned. So I'll stick with rst for the moment.

It is great that you developed Mallard and yelp which are two great products. In future, may be when sugar help content is mature enough, we sure would implement it in Mallard. I'll be with Sugar Labs even after GSoC and when it is time, myself or someone else would introduce Mallard to Sugar hopefully :-)

Thanks again for your great help. I'll ping you when I need any clarification.

btw, I noticed that https://wiki.gnome.org/Yelp/Xsl is not working, it's great if you may fix it.

 

--
Shaun

--
Best Regards,

Kalpa Welivitigoda
Junior Treasurer | Electrical Engineering Society
Undergraduate | Department of Electrical Engineering
University of Moratuwa
Sri Lanka
http://about.me/callkalpa