Re: Nautilus as help browser - first impressions.

[Ali Abdin <aliabdin aucegypt edu>]

* Alexander Kirillov (kirillov@math.sunysb.edu) wrote at 04:19 on 24/08/00:
> 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:
> 
> -------------
> 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.

Blame hyperbola :) This needs SERIOUS work which I was not willing to do (no
time). Laszlo might look into this if it interests him.
 
> --------------
> 
> 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 

Actually it does - but there is no 'user-interface' to changing the font ;) I
believe they got this working using GConf. I /think/ (but am not sure) that
the font can be set from inside evolution.

>    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
heh - I thought it was my shitty mouse
>    c. mailto: URL is currently not supported
I'm not sure if this is supported in the mozilla component. i.e. what happens
if you click a 'mailto' link - does the Mozilla Mail thing load up (as a
separate app??? I'm not sure I like this) 

> --------------
> 
> 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.

They /should/ work - but perhaps this is a gtkhtml bug. You see the links are
something like this '<A HREF="#lbAB">NAME</A>' and earlier on in the doc we
have <A NAME="lbAB">&nbsp;</A> - Try this again when it renders in mozilla.

Oh - by the way - you could test it now by doing something like this (at the
command prompt):
gnome-man2html2 <manfile> &> test.html
netscape test.html 

(or use mozilla if you want). I am too lazy to startup Nautilus everytime I
want to test something so I do this instead all the time :)

> --------------
> 
> 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. 

Known bug - I'll see about fixing this (although its not a top priotiy)

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

I agree with Sopwith's comments hear

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

Never got this one before. I'll look into it.

>    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!

I didn't write this tool :) anyway fixing "ugliness" is "second priority" to
fixing real bugs right now :) 

>    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

The links should work - but prolly does not due to the same bug as found in #3
(anchor tags not supported).

> --------------
> 
> 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. 

Yup - its been fixed in CVS for a few days now

> -----------
> 
> 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 &mdash; and &hellip;

Weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeelllllll. for mdash and hellip this is a NONISSUE! jade (a.k.a
db2html) does not render them - and neither will we. 

As for the 'other' entities. I dunno. Hopefully mathieu will be looking into
it for me. 

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

Actually - you can xref a figure - but it prolly won't work as you expect it
to :) Actually xref'ing an image that appears before the xref will work fine -
but will fail miserably if you xref an image that occurs after the xref. There
is a bugfix swimming in my head (that will fix this and the Next/Home/Prev
bug)

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

Nobody told me how/where we should display this.

>    d. Some tags are not supported. Among them: 
>      - <variablelist> is poorly supported; for example, <term> is
>        is not shown.

Yeah jrb had this in the gnome-db2html2 TODO list. It would be nice if
somebody told me which tags needs to be supported and what they do (if you
know what HTML output it should generate mail that too).

>      - <qandaset> (used in FAQs) is not supported

Will have to look into this - not a high priority right now

>      - <glossary> and related tags are not supported 

I do not think I want to support glossaries at this time. I can implement a
few tags to get everything to render 'appropriately' (i.e. just print the
characters in between).

> -----------
> 
> 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

Would be nice yes - I don't think this is feasible at this time though :(

>    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. 

Are you proposing DHTML or something here? I don't think we should make it
fancy - just keep it simple for now (oooh aaah - what if we could run Java!)

>    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. 

Nautilus issue really. Not worth it in my opinion (why not generate postscript
or something and then print that?)

>    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. 

I think the real issue is that I do not have enough time to hack on
gnome-db2html2. So for me I try to fix the most 'serious' bugs with a few
"easy ones" in between. So its not a matter of "what can we we live with" but
more of a matter of "how many bugs can be squished before Nautilus 1.0"

Also - it would be nice if somebody (John Fleck?) could add these to
bugzilla.eazel.com so they don't get 'lost' or overlooked by me (No 'duplicate
bug reports please)

Regards,
Ali