Nautilus as help browser - first impressions.

[Alexander Kirillov <kirillov math sunysb edu>]

Hi:
I installed Nautilus 0.1 on my system (which was easy) and tested it
as a help browser. For the benefit of those of you who do not have
time to play with it, I wanted to share my findings. Ali, Laszlo: hope
it will be useful to you. BTW, I also put some screenshots on the web
http://www.math.sunysb.edu/~kirillov/nautilus


So: first of all, it does a good job of rendering man pages and decent
jopb of rendering sgml docs. But it still has a number of problems:

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1. Help tree (in the left panel): 
    This tree contains "Applications",
    "Development", "info", "manual" and "system". To my surprise, most
    of man pages are *not* in the section "manual". For example man
    pages for user commands (Section 1) are in Applications->Command
    line and man pages for section 5 (File formats) are in System
    ->Configuration. I strongly object. I never thought that xeyes is
    a command line application. On the other hand, tar is a command
    line app - but info page for tar is not in Applications->Command
    line. I'd rather have no attempt in categorization at all than
    such half-baked one.

--------------

2. General problems: at the moment  all docs are rendered using
   gtkhtml (this will change to Mozilla, AFAIK). Gtkhtml is OK, but: 
   a. it provides no means of, say, changing the font used 
   b. I had problems with links: in 4 cases out of 5, when I tried to
      click on a link, a single character was selected. It was very
      frustrating
   c. mailto: URL is currently not supported
--------------

3 Man pages:
  Man pages are rendered very well - even complex ones. URL
  "man:appname" or "man:appname.sectionnumber" both work
  fine. However, it also shows an "index" at the end of a man page,
  and the links in this index were not working for me.

--------------

4. Info pages: 
   Info pages are rendered OK. However:
   a. It can't find info pages if they do not have "info" in file
     name. On my system, many info pages do not - e.g.,
     /usr/info/emacs.gz. Thus, "info:emacs" does not work. 

   b. There is no way to view the top level info file (dir.info)

   c. The headers/footers (with navigation labels "prev/next/up") are
      way too wide

   d. All sections of an info file are shown in one page - but you
   have a footer at the end of each section and a header at the
   beginning. so when one section ends and another begins you have a
   footer of the first section  and immediately under it a header of
   the next. Ugly!

   e. The links to subsections in table of contents of an info doc do
   not work for me, and neither do navigation links in header/footer

--------------

5. html docs 

   at the moment, help:appname can't find "index.html" (fixed by Ali
   in CVS, I believe), but "help:/path/to/file" works, and html docs
   are rendered well. 

-----------

6. sgml docs

   I only tried "help:/pat/to/file.sgml". It works fast (on my system
   - PIII 500Mhz, 128 Mb RAM) even for large ones like "GDP
   handbook". But here are problems (some of them already discussed in
   gnome-doc-list, but anyway): 

   a. It doesn't support enitites, even — and …

   b. <xref> and <link> is only possible for sections/subsections: you
   can't <xref> to a figure, a note, or a list entry. 

   c. It doesn't show <legalnotice> (I believe, Ali is working on this)

   d. Some tags are not supported. Among them: 
     - <variablelist> is poorly supported; for example, <term> is
       is not shown. 
     - <qandaset> (used in FAQs) is not supported 
     - <glossary> and related tags are not supported 

-----------

Wishlist: 
  
   1.  It'd be great if we could put the table of contents (TOC) of a doc in
       the left panel so that you have a section shown in the right
       panel and TOC in the left panel at the same time

   2. I'd love to see TOC "expanding" - i.e., showing only top level
      sections by default, but clicking on a section expands it so you
      can see subsections, etc. 

   3. I think we really need a "print" button - for those who want to
      print out a section of a manual and read it. Nothing fancy. 

   4. List of man pages or info pages is, by necessity, very long. Why
      not group them by first letter (..pages starting with A;
      ...pages starting with B, etc)? Otherwise, you have to scroll a
      lot to get to XFree86 page
   
   
Taht seems to be it - for now. I'd like to hear everybody's opinion on
which of these bugs are critical, and which we can live with. 

Sasha