new help browser

[John Fleck <jfleck inkstain net>]

Folks -

I spent some time with the help system on my Windows NT computer at
work this afternoon, and have one good idea to take away and two pet peeves, things
that we could do better.

The good idea comes in part in response to the index discussion. MS
help gives you two related ways to search through a given help
document or body of documents:

a) What they call an "index" view, in which you can
search through pre-defined <sect1> and <sect2>-like headers, listed by
title in a separate window pane, and 

b) A "find" function in which you have full-text searching
capabilities. When you do the search, you get a window pane listing
the above-mentioned section titles - click on that and the window
opens up with your document.

I find the full text search capabilities of the "find" function to be
most useful, but with a glaring drawback - it only searches the help
document you're in at the time, not all the other myriad help files
resident on your system. Since GNOME is so tightly integrated, it
would seem desirable to have the ability to search across the entire
document collection on one's computer, or across definable
subsets - man pages, GNOME help documents, whatever. (Hackers in the
audience - to make this efficient, wouldn't you have to build a search
index file of some sort in advance? That's how the MS help search
engine seems to do it, building such a file the first time you use the "find"
function.) In sum, I believe some sort of robust searching mechanism
would be a Good Thing.

Second, just as in wandering the Internet, I tend to get lost
wandering help files when I'm trying to figure out how to use obscure
Excel functions that I know I figured six months
ago. If only there was a way to bookmark where I'd been in the Excel
help system!

A way to bookmark places in the help system I've used in the past
would also be a Good Thing.

Cheers,

John