Re: ANNOUNCE : HelpViewer 0.1

[Andreas Heppel]

I suggest we stop to discuss on what context sensitive help is, how it 
should look like and things like that. I get the impression that we are just 
discussing names for different levels of help. To me it looks like we all 
know what we want, but only name it differently. Let me resume a couple of 
points I think we all more or less agree on:

- There is something we call tooltips, which is a very short description of 
a control. This pops up automatically some time after the mouse cursor 
starts to hover over an UI element and goes away automatically, too.

- We need an application help being displayed when the user chooses the 
'Help' menu. This text is an overall description of the app and how it works 
and is displayed in a more sophisticated viewer being able to index, search, 
follow links etc. This currently is supplied by Nicolas' HelpViewer. I think 
the only question here is which file format to use and whether to integrate 
this viewer into GNUstep instead of being a separate app. IMHO, HelpViwer is 
good the way it is, thus remaining only the question about help file 
formats.

- We want some 'context help' being a relatively short description of what 
the user can do in an exact situation, e.g. what is a certain panel used 
for. To me it makes no sense to have some kind of enhanced tooltips being 
displayed in a separate panel (like in Windoze, I don't know KDE). I want 
this help to be displayed in viewer with exact the same functions as 
described above: follow links to topics, search for keywords etc (which is 
what the Windoze context help does not provide). Thus, I vote for using 
HelpViewer for the context help because it provides (or at least will do so) 
all this.
The question left is how to make HelpViewer  display only a certain, context 
sensitive portion of the help file. IMO, we must clarify two points here:
1. the API by which HelpViewer is triggered and
2. how to make context help available to the user, i.e. what will the user 
have to press, click, point to to get context help?
This 2nd point is very important because the user needs a consistent way in 
all (GNUstep) apps to get the desired help.

Before I get into probably rather logish discussions on any of those points 
I would like to know your opinion on the above. Do we agree on those points 
as a base for further discussion? Any comments?

Cheers,
Andreas


--
Andreas Heppel

Mail: aheppel at web dot de
Home: http://www.andreasheppel.de

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