Re: What an Help browser should give

[Mikael Hallendal <micke codefactory se>]

fre 2002-02-22 klockan 14.07 skrev José Fonseca:

Hi!

I'm the main-author and maintainer of DevHelp and I'm also developing
the new help browser for GNOME 2.0 (Yelp).

I'm sorry I haven't had time to answer on the DevHelp list (overloaded
with work at the moment).

I'm not sure what you are looking for. Is this a development tool or a
help browser for user documentation. My experience is that these two
areas of use is that they are pretty different.

About GNOME documents for users is that they are already in XML-docbook
so Yelp will have TOC and index-searching available. DevHelp has that
too but in that case you have to manually create XML-files from the
HTML-documents (this might change in the future).

Dox looks pretty much like DevHelp and I guess you are interested in the
developer-tool? From the screenshots the only thing that seems to be
different in Dox compared to DevHelp is that it has full text search. I
would like to see that in DevHelp sometime too, as soon as someone has
the time to implement it.

Regards,
  Mikael Hallendal

> I hope I'm making the enquires in the right list. Please redirect me if 
> not.
> 
> Currently the gnome help browsing system is able to read the man and info 
> files installed in the system besides the HTML files, but I find that the 
> navigation is still cumbersome. Nautilus, for example, provides a TOC but 
> it's not possible to search a function by name or make a full text search 
> on the documentation.
> 
> The problem comes from the HTML files, which alone don't have the 
> information as TOCs or indexes readily avaiable for being parsed by tools 
> such as help-browsers.
> 
> The Windows HTML Help systems solved this problem by bundling with the 
> HTML documentation XML files for this exact purpose. I searched for 
> available tools that provided me the same features and found Dox 
> (http:/dox.berlios.de/) and devhelp (http://www.devhelp.net/).
> 
> Although Dox was as feature rich as devhelp, it was based on QT so it 
> didn't fit on my vision of what a desktop should be (Gnome of course).
> 
> devhelp is still rather limitate: doesn't have the abilitie to have 
> indexes of different categories (e.g., functions, keywords, macros..) or 
> diferent levels (keyword, topic, subtopic...). And most unfortunately 
> seems to be somewhat inactive, judging by it's mailing list...
> 
> I don't have GTK knowledge but I want to get on devhelp development 
> because the effort I may spend on it is justified for my ends alone. At 
> the same time I think that more people may be interested so I would want 
> to do this properly.
> 
> So, besides of searching for people willing to help coding GTK, I would 
> like to get people opinion of what precise information should one have (in 
> XML) about a set of HTML documentation files, besides the obvious TOC, and 
> how should it be structured.
> 
> Once this is established, the existing tools for DocBook, texinfo and 
> latex can be easily modified to generate the required information, since 
> this is all.
> 
> Nothing limits this application to HTML, but HTML is really the biggest 
> problem now. If a help browser dealt with DocBook directly, all this 
> information would be easy to get, but it's not viable to render DocBook in 
> real time.
> 
> 
> Since the GDP deals with the same subjects of documentation organization 
> and is familiarized with these concepts I thought this was a good place to 
> ask.
> 
> I hope I was not wrong.
> 
> 
> Regards,
> 
> José Fonseca
> 
> 
> _________________________________________________________
> Do You Yahoo!?
> Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com
> 
> _______________________________________________
> gnome-doc-list mailing list
> gnome-doc-list gnome org
> http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-doc-list
-- 
Mikael Hallendal                micke codefactory se
CodeFactory AB                  http://www.codefactory.se/
Office: +46 (0)8 587 583 05     Cell: +46 (0)709 718 918