Re: What an Help browser should give

[José Fonseca <j_r_fonseca yahoo co uk>]

Mikael,

On 2002.02.22 13:49 Mikael Hallendal wrote:
> 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).

Where can I get more information about Yelp?

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

Yes. I made some postings recently... good thing I posted here! :-)

> 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.

Well, actually both. Although I usually feel the need more as developer.

I want to be able to browse trhough documentation either trhough TOC, 
keyword search, or even full-text search.

I summary, I want something as the Windows HTML Help. I already made a 
script for converting texinfo to .CHM when I used gnu/unix utilities on 
Windows and I miss that functionality now that I switched to Linux. It 
takes me so much time to get a reference of a function e.g., because I 
have to fire up the browser, go to the documentation directory/website and 
search myself for the information I'm looking for.

> 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

For curiosity, does Yelp renders the DocBook documents in realtime? Isn't 
this slow?

And what about non-XML-docbook documents? I would want not only the GNOME 
API documentation, but also e.g. Python or any other documentation I may 
wish there, _with_ the same navigation abilities.

> too but in that case you have to manually create XML-files from the
> HTML-documents (this might change in the future).

If Yelp is also the successor of DevHelp then I'd prefer to help on its 
development, but if it's not then I would like to get DevHelp CVS access 
to be able to add these features myself. I already posted some patches 
there...

> 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.

As I said before, between having to learn QT or GTK I really prefer GTK, 
so dox is out of question for this and other reasons.

> Regards,
>   Mikael Hallendal


Regards,

José Fonseca

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