Re: Gtk2-perl application help files

[Grant McLean <grant mclean net nz>]

On Thu, 2008-08-14 at 18:28 -0700, MICHAEL MCGINN wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I've completed a Gtk2-perl application and at point of needing to
> create online documentation. This would act as both a user and
> reference guide.
>
> I'd also like to do the help with perl & Gtk2.
>
> I really wanted to make use of the Gtk2::PodViewer widget but I need
> to include many screenshots of the application.
>
> Any ideas you might have would be appreciated.

When I did online help for Sprog ( http://sprog.sourceforge.net/ ) I
used Gtk/Perl to display help text from POD.  In the end I needed more
control than Gtk2::PodViewer gave me so I made my own using
Gtk2::TextView for display and Pod::Simple to parse the POD.

POD supports making up your own custom sections using =for and =begin
which will be ignored by standard POD viewers but your app can get at
them via Pod::Simple.  I used these special sections to have user-level
help and developer-level API documentation in the same source files.  I
also intended to implement =begin inline-image sections containing
Base64 encoded PNG images.  Never quite got around to it though :-)

The Sprog source code is available if you're looking for inspiration.

Cheers
Grant