Re: Help with Online Help?

[Jeshua Lacock <jeshua OpenOSX com>]

On Jul 24, 2007, at 10:00 PM, Jody Goldberg wrote:

> > I have managed to build Gnumeric 1.7.10 here on Mac OS X, and most
> > everything seems to work, except the online help.
> >
> > When I the "Contents" item of the menu "Help", it just silently
> > fails. No errors/warnings are produced and no help displayed. The
> > menu items "Gnumeric on the web",
> > "Report a Problem" and "About" all work from the help menu (and is
> > displayed in the preferred Mac OS X web browser).
> >
> > I have scrollkeeper installed.
> >
> > Can someone tell me what command Gnumeric attempting to launch for
> > the help?
>
> The code is in
>     goffice/goffice/gtk/goffice-gtk.c : go_help_display
> and depends on how you've configured the help system.  Are you
> building with a full gnome stack ?  In which case it's likely
> defaulting to yelp through some indirections in libgnome.


Greetings,

If I may make a humble suggestion, it might be helpful to add Yelp as  
a listed optional required package? I had no idea to even suspect it  
(but I should know more about GNOME I suppose)


> As you can see we use .chm on windows.  It would be best to use
> something suitable native on OSX rather than yelp.  What do other
> application use ?  The docs are formatted with docbook, we can
> generate  html and chm right now, but something like pdf should also
> be possible if necessary.

I personally think HTML with maybe links to a PDF version might be  
best, but you are correct, either HTML or PDF can be directly handled  
natively in the users preferred application with the "open" command eg:

        /usr/bin/open /tmp/output.pdf
or
        /usr/bin/open /use/share/html/index.html


Thanks for the pointer, as soon as a made a wrapper I was able to  
intercept the message!

So, I will just make a wrapper called 'yelp' that will do something  
like:

        /usr/bin/open `sed 's\ghelp:gnumeric\gnumeric.html\'`


Would you recommend that I use "http://www.gnome.org/projects/ 
gnumeric/doc/gnumeric.shtml"? Is there a tarball?


Thanks again,

Jeshua Lacock, Owner
<http://OpenOSX.com>
phone: 877.240.1364