Re: Nautilus as help browser - first impressions.

[Dan Mueth <d-mueth uchicago edu>]

On Wed, 23 Aug 2000, Alexander Kirillov wrote:

> 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. 

This is definitely on our wishlist.  We can either embed the TOC into the
Contents List, so you zoom directly from your document list to your
section list in the tree.  (This is how CDE does it.)  Or, we can have the
TOC appear in a new tab (or replace the Contents List). This is a UI
decision we will need to make.  Technically, this should be pretty easy to
do.  It is possible that Sun will contribute another hacker to working on
the help system. If this happens, this will be one thing we will probably
ask him to do.  Otherwise, if anybody finishes with what they are hacking
on or if somebody else wants to join in the fun, this would be a good
thing to work on.

Similarly, we will have to do almost the same type of work for the Index
of a document.  Again, we want the Index to be extracted from the SGML and
put into a tabbed notebook page in the left.  This is a lower priority
right now since we have almost none of the docs indexed.

>    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. 

This is another great feature we want.  This one probably won't happen for
1.4 though, as it requires that every user has a good copy of db2ps, along
with our stylesheet.  I suppose we could just install it as part of
Nautilus which would guarantee that it exists.  The other tricky thing is
that we need EPS figures to make PS output.  Since docs don't currently
ship EPS figures, we would need to either go through and convert them by
hand and have them installed or else have them converted from PNG to EPS
on-the-fly.  I think this is do-able though.  If we could get this to work
with gnome-print so we would get a print preview, that would be *really*
cool.

Dan