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

[Gerard Milmeister <gemi bluewin ch>]

On Fri, 2003-12-05 at 00:45, Malcolm Tredinnick wrote:
> 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?
It is far from ready to release. In fact I would not invest further time
in it, if I knew that something was being done with scrollkeeper, as I
think this should be sufficient.
> 
> 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.
I understand that. For testing purposes I made two .omf files, one for
SWI-Prolog (html) and one for Ciao Prolog (pdf). I could view the SWI
documentation in yelp but not (of course) the Ciao doc.
> 

> 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.
I did mean to make yelp into a general document VIEWER, but a 
general documentation PORTAL or access point. A first, very simple, step
would be to detect documentation types that are not viewable with yelp
and start an external viewer. Yelp+Scrollkeeper do a good job in
integrating GNOME doc, info and man, so it should it do with other
documentation. You can't force people to write DocBook especially if
their software is not limited to platforms like Linux/GNOME. The two
Prolog examples above should show what I mean. Also this concerns only
user documentation, not the plethora of README's, ChangeLog's etc...

> 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.
As I said, the idea is mainly to make user documentation, that is not
a priori integrated, available for the user via one privileged interface.


> Malcolm
> 
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Gérard Milmeister
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8038 Zürich
gemi bluewin ch