Re: Proposal for Nautilus help display

[László Kovács <laszlo kovacs Sun COM>]

David Merrill wrote:
> 
> On Fri, Jul 13, 2001 at 11:41:19AM +0100, László Kovács wrote:
> > > > The Contents tab is for navigation of installed docs and it is exactly
> > > > the same as the current content list pane in Nautilus.
> > >
> > > One thing I was hoping to add to this is the ability to zoom in and out of
> > > the tree.  You can think of this as either "zooming" and "unzooming", or
> > > just "pan left" and "pan right".  For example, we might have two little
> > > arrows (left and right) (or two magnifying glasses with + and -) at the
> > > top or bottom of the pane.  The default view right now is what I would
> > > consider all the way zoomed out.  If one has a document or section
> > > selected, as they zoom in they lose information about other
> > > documents/sections and probably see more subsections of the given
> > > document(s).  This follows the way people navigate for documentation,
> > > starting at a broad scale and then focussing in on a given part of a given
> > > document.
> >
> > Right now we display all the sections about a doc as part of the content
> > list. I guess this is hardly completely zoomed out. I would imagine this
> > like by default the content list contains one entry for each doc and
> > then when selecting a doc and zooming in we get the subsections. I see
> > two problems in the short term:
> >
> > 1. Gnome docs are small so they don't really justify this
> > implementation.
> 
> The help browser will be used to view more than just Gnome docs. Our
> docs are up to 500 pages (printed) in length. You'd better be prepared
> to deal with large documents.
> 

We'll try our best David, but as I said we have resource problems. The
primary goal is to display the Gnome docs. I clearly mentioned that the
zooming builds on top of the previous content list so if we have time
and people then we will do it. Anyway large docs might have problems
with docbook->html conversion speed.

Laszlo