Re: Including PDF et al. documentation in scrollkeeper/yelp

[Malcolm Tredinnick <malcolm commsecure com au>]

On Fri, 2003-12-05 at 10:19, Gerard Milmeister wrote:
> For the past few days I have been developing an Nautilus view that shows
> a hierarchy of documentation (pdf, ps, html) that have been registered,

This sounds interesting. Is there code available somewhere?

> i.e. using a special URL docdb:, new references to documentation can be
> added with 'docdb-install', similar to 'install-info' for texinfo
> documentation. This already quite well, however I had the idea add those
> types of doc to scrollkeeper (yelp). This works well with simple HTML
> documentation by creating an .omf file.

Yelp and scrollkeeper are different applications and the difference is
important in this case. Scrollkeeper is the document meta-data storage
system. Yelp is just one of many possible applications that uses that
data. You can already register any document types with scrollkeeper; one
of the fields in the OMF file is the document MIME type.

My immediate thought when reading your description is that if something
is already registered with scrollkeeper, then the installer should not
also have to run your docdb-install program -- hopefully your hierarchy
can automatically look in the scrollkeeper data.

> However Yelp will not be able to show complex HTML doc (with javascript
> etc...) and pdf resp. ps files. Maybe one could adapt yelp to use the
> default application for mime types 'application/pdf' and
> 'application/ps' or, better yet, use the bonobo components of gpdf and
> ggv, and for general HTML, epiphany.

For HTML there has been discussion about improving some the gtkhtml
rendering in Yelp and/or using the Gecko engine, but this is because we
need good CSS support, not because we need Javascript in our help
documents.

For the other stuff, I am not sure that trying to make Yelp into a
general document viewer is necessarily the right thing (others may
disagree). It works well as a lightweight viewer of program help
documentation that can be quickly fired up when you select the "Help"
menu item or press the <F1> key. For more general document viewing, we
have, as you say, other applications.

On the other hand, one argument in favour of more seamless integration
is when some of the in-program help wants to refer to other files that
are on the machine and have it work seamlessly. That would seem to be a
case for using the bonobo components if you want it to appear inside
Yelp. I am not sure if that is the right approach or not at the moment.

Malcolm