What an Help browser should give



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


PS: Please CC me since I'm not subscribed to this list.

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