Re: Proposal for GNOME-2.0 help system

[Mikael Hallendal <micke codefactory se>]

2001-09-01 klockan 00.37 skrev Jonathan Blandford:
> Hi guys,

Hi!

First of all, thanks! This is a great document.

I'm the maintainer of DevHelp (http://devhelp.codefactory.se/) and have
been talking some with Jonathan about using it as base for a help
browser in GNOME 2. I've started to rebuild the GUI using Gtk+ 2 (thanks
to the Gtk-team for this wonderful library) and Gtkhtml2 (for
rendering).

I'd love to be able to build this app to suite the needs for both user
and API document browser.

So, what's needed in both of them:

* TOC (Table of contents)

* Index (keywords that point to certain pages, like 
  GtkWidget -> http://developer.gnome.org/doc/API/gtk/gtkwidget.html

* (optionally) full text indexed database.
  Like: Show all pages containing 'gnome and nautilus'

Also, in DevHelp I wan't to be able to select sets of documents
(currently called Bookshelf in DevHelp). 

Example: 
Show the GNOME bookshelf to view all GNOME related books
Show the Python bookshelf...

Might this be something that we want in a Generic help browser?

This brings up a question about the possibilities with Scrollkeeper. Is
it possible to make a certain document part of more than one category.
For example.

Gtk+ API docs. would probably want to be part of: API, GNOME, C
categories. If this is possible, great!


* About the Index

For those of you that haven't tried out DevHelp or seen the Window help
browser (I've been told they have this functionality). What I mean by
this is that you have an entry, when typing in it a list of possible
words shows in a list below it.
http://devhelp.codefactory.se/screenshots/big2.png

This is helpfull if you are not sure what you are looking for. 

Currently in DevHelp this information is extracted from the
HTML-documents and edited by hand (_NOT_ a good solution). I'd like it
to be possible to extract this information from the Docbook file. I've
been told that Docbook format should have somekind of index-building
stuff. 


Ok, now, I'm going back to hack on the help browser now :)

Regards,
  Mikael Hallendal

-- 
Mikael Hallendal                micke codefactory se
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