Re: writing help files for gnome 2.0 programs

[Luis Villa <louie ximian com>]

Probably the best place for many of these questions is
gnome-doc-list gnome org, FWIW, though some of the yelp questions are
probably appropriate at desktop-devel-list gnome org  Good luck-
Luis

P.S. Admins, when are we finally going to shut this list down? How long
has it been deprecated for now? :) 

On Thu, 2002-08-22 at 23:27, Allin Cottrell wrote:
> Is there any up-to-date guidance available on this topic? Google turns
> up many references on various combinations of keywords such as
> "gnome2", "documentation", "help" and so on, but most of them are
> quite out of date.
> 
> I have documentation for my app in valid Docbook xml, and for gnome
> 1.4 I was able to turn it into valid HTML and have it display nicely
> in gnome-help-browser (besides turning it into PDF with jade and
> jadetex).  I'm kind of at sea with the new yelp system.  I can
> appreciate the advantages (from some points of view) of having the
> help files in xml rather than pre-converting them to HTML, but many
> details seem out of whack.
> 
> * Speed of rendering.  Yelp is SLOOOW.  Much slower than the old
> browser, which is hardly surprising since it's having to do a lot more
> work.  Slower still than MS's compiled html help, which I have to say
> appears very fast to the user.
> 
> * How is one supposed to deal with features such as "admon graphics"?
> I have these in my xml, and the graphics are not found.
> 
> * How are you supposed to get an app's help files to appear in yelp's
> main menus (content lists)?  This "just worked" in gnome 1.4 if you
> put the help files in the right place, but I can't find how to add my
> app in 2.0.
> 
> * How do you (or can you?) control the structure or appearance of an
> app's help files?  (E.g., does it all appear in one gulp or is it
> broken into separately displayed sections?  Is there a distinct
> left-hand pane with a navigable table of contents?)  I would think of
> these things as being controlled by a stylesheet, but I'm quite hazy
> on how stylesheets enter into the yelp process.  Can an app specify
> and supply its own xsl, or what?
> 
> * None of the images in my helpfiles are found unless I hard-code a
> ".png" extension onto the end of the filerefs.  This seems broken.
> What is the correct procedure?
> 
> Well, that's probably enough to be going on with ;-)
> 
> -- 
> Allin Cottrell
> Department of Economics
> Wake Forest University, NC
> 
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