RE: Designing Help System for 2.0

[Gregory Leblanc <GLeblanc cu-portland edu>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Telsa Gwynne [mailto:hobbit@aloss.ukuu.org.uk]
> Sent: Tuesday, May 30, 2000 1:57 AM
> To: gnome-doc-list@gnome.org
> Subject: Re: Designing Help System for 2.0
> 
> On Mon, May 29, 2000 at 10:14:43PM -0700 or thereabouts, 
> Matthew Guenther wrote:
> > I'm just a developer, but one thing that needs to be done (IMHO) is:
> > a) A nice Gnomeified standard set of stylesheet-images.
> > b) Some way to have them centrally stored in 
> /usr/share/gnome so that every
> > manual doesn't have to include them manually.
> > c) Change the sylesheet images from gif to png.
> > Not big things, but they'd be nice from my perspective.
> 
> Agreed. (a) and (c) are things we've talked about before. (a) needs
> someone who can draw icons, so either we pester tigert or we pester
> Mawa and the GNOME icon project (is that its name?). I think (c)
> needed someone who groks either DocBook or, more probably DSSSL,
> to change the things.

The change for (c) is pretty trivial, it doesn't even take much DS3L
knowledge to fix.  

> 
> I hadn't thought of (b). Would that work? If so, it would be rather
> nice.

I think this will be sort of a non-issue.  My understanding (and please
correct me if I'm wrong) was that the new help system would not be using
Jade/OpenJade for anything, but would be rendering direct from the SGML/XML
source into the help browser, much the way that it's done with info/man
pages now.  With DocBook 4 being XML, and Norm having some XSL stylesheets,
I think this will be easier than while DocBook 3.1 was it.  And if we can
convince Mozilla to do our XML/XSL work, then we'll really have it made. 8^)
	Greg