Proposal for Nautilus help display

[Mary Dwyer <Mary Dwyer Sun COM>]

hi

I have been working on the Scrollkeeper project to provide index extraction for 
help documentation.  Following on from that I am now working on providing index 
display/search capabilities for the Nautilus Help Browser. 
Calum Benson, a Gnome HCI engineer here at Sun, has produced a design for an 
enhanced GUI for the display of help contents and index/search for Nautilus.
You can see the proposed design at:
http://www.gnome.org/~gman/nautilus-help/proto.html

The Help GUI we propose provides navigation through installed documents,
index display and search through index. 

The GUI is organized in two new tabs that will have their switch buttons
on top of the panes. 

The Contents tab is for navigation of installed docs and it is exactly
the same as the current content list pane in Nautilus.

The Index tab displays an index depending on the toggle setting of "Show
indexes for:". If "Selection on Contents tab" is selected then it
displays the index of the doc selected in the Contents tab. The natural
way of events should be that the user selects a doc in the Contents pane
and then switches to the Index pane. This will select the toggle
"Selection on Contents tab" and display the selected doc index.

If "All documents" is selected then indexes of all docs that Nautilus
knows about will be displayed. If "Specific documents" is selected then
the user will have to click on the button near the toggle, this will
replace the index view with a content list view (different from the
Contents tab) and the user will have to select docs or groups of docs
there (this is the third screenshot). When returning from that only
indexes of selected docs will be displayed.

The second set of toggles in the Index pane allows filtering the indexes
displayed. It is self-explanatory, and very simple, no boolean
combination of several keywords is allowed. Typing more than one word
and searching for them as they are should be ok though.

We don't think it is realistic to try to implement text body search for
Gnome 2.0, but when this will be done it will have to be done probably
in a separate pane.

We would appreciate if people could have a look at it and provide some feedback


thanks
Mary Dwyer





~ I speak for myself, not for my employer ~
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Mary Dwyer
Desktop Applications & Middleware Grp
Sun Microsystems Ireland
Tel: +353-1-8199222 (xt 19222)
Fax: +353-1-8199078
email: mary dwyer ireland sun com
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