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

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Thu, 2003-12-04 at 18:09, Gerard Milmeister wrote:
> > 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...

Yelp *should* load up the default GNOME hanlder for any link it doesn't
know how to handle, though I believe that bit of code is broken in the
current development version.  The issue here, I suppose, is how to make
other pieces of documentation appear in the global contents.

As for what file formats should be supported in Yelp, I am more than
happy to make Yelp able to display plenty of formats, provided they fit
well into its interface.  Presentational formats like PDF, PS, and DVI
should probably be viewed in applications suited to that task.  Formats
such as DocBook, HTML, man, and info are more suitable.  If there are
other suitable formats people are using for documentation, then we can
make Yelp able to view them.

Note that I prefer people use formats from which it's easy to extract
semantic information.

--
Shaun