Re: Gnome Help Browser

[Alexander Kirillov <kirillov math sunysb edu>]

On Sun, Aug 19, 2001 at 11:30:29AM +0800, Malcolm Tredinnick wrote:
> This just leaves the main component, which is displaying the html in a
> widget somehow. Bex has previously suggested using the Gimp help browser
> to do this. I must adamit to being lazy (well, busy) and not having
> looked at that code very much to see if it's easily compatible with
> GNOME. Alternatively, we can either use gtkhtml or gtkhtml2. The former
> is currently used in the help browser and I'm not sure what it's status
> is as a maintained module, but it's not particularly active. The latter
> module is a new beast from the Anders Carlson and friends and is
> possibly not production ready yet (it's been "nearly ready" for a while
> now, but holding your breath will only give you a headache).
> 
> The final option for displaying results is the easy one: assume the user
> has a web browser of their own choice available. Then we just need to
> provide a wrapper so that a call to display GNOME help will ensure the
> document is already in html/css form and pass the appropriate URI to the
> browser. For a simple solution that doesn't require too much extra
> software, this is probably the way to go.
> 

There is also a problem with links: if you use just a web browser,
then the cross-linking between docs (given by <ulink type="help"
url="gnome-help:nautilus">, or something like this) will likely to be
broken, because a web browser know nothing about gnome-help
protocol. Or this needs to be solved when doing docbook->html
transformation. Same problem with <xref>'s

And I'd strongly suggest looking at GIMP help browser - I've not seen
the code, but I find it quite fast and nice enough. Probably easier to
use it (or adapt to GNOME) than starting from scratch. 



Sasha