Re: ANNOUNCE : HelpViewer 0.1

[Andreas Heppel]

On 2003-01-21 17:10:00 +0100 Nicolas Roard <nicolas@roard.com> wrote:

> On 2003-01-21 14:33:02 +0100 Andreas Heppel <aheppel@web.de> wrote:
>
> > Basically I agree, since this would make it unnecessary to install an 
> > additional package just to make an app's help system available.
>
> Well having the help viewer separated from gnustep libraries isn't 
> necessarly bad,
Well, I didn't say it was ;-) I only claimed that the help system was there 
when GNUstep is installed.

> as it doesn't interfere with the libs (who says bugs ? :) and we could 
> easily
> change of help viewer if needed... I don't know. It could be interessting 
> to put a
> default in order to choose the help file extension (from rtf to xlp to html 
> for example,
> without recompiling/patching gnustep)
Good point. I also like the point you made in the other mail
<quote from other msg>
> Not exactly ... well, currently, yes, but I think helpviewer.app should be 
> able to
> index help files, present you the index, search, access to a bookshelf of 
> help files, etc.
</quote from other msg>
Those features are nevertheless useful in the "standardhelp system" 
(whatever that will be), but may bloat GNUstep to some extent .
From the API point of view it wouldn't make a difference anyway as long as 
some help panel pops up showing the app's help text.

> > It would also make this discussion obsolete since NSHelpManager could then 
> > also use this (more advanced) NSHelpPanel to display context help. I still 
> > don't know whether this concept of context help will really be used by any 
> > application.
>
> I'm not very convainced of the interesst either of context help, but... :)
If it was working, why not. But, otho it doesn't seem to be very common on 
OSX either. As I've said before, let's get the tooltips working and you 
won't need this.

Cheers,
Andreas
--
Andreas Heppel

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

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