RE: [lmi] LMI Help Proposal

[Ericksberg, Richard]

On 2006-5-17 22:17 UTC, Vadim Zeitlin wrote: 

> [I've received several, slightly different, copies of this message,
> I'm replying to the latest one chronologically, please let me know
> if it's  not the right one]

The latest one was the right one.

> Tooltip
>
> I think globally all tooltip-related aspects are already ok, please
> let me know if anything still needs to be done. Some controls (e.g.
> disabled ones under GTK, notebook pages, ...) don't show tooltips in
> wx yet but we're working on this.

Tooltips are already working correctly. Nothing else to do.

> F1 Help
>
> The problem here is how to map the current control to the help topic.
> We have "tooltip" and "helptext" tags for each control in XRC but we
> don't have any "helptopic" tag. We could add it but maybe there is a
> way to make it work without it:
>
> Do you really want to show (different) help page on F1 key press for
> every control? I think it's more common to have a single help page
> for the whole panel or dialog describing all controls on it. If this
> were enough, we could store either the "what's this" text or a help
> topic id in the "helptext" field of each window. As we don't need
> "what's this" for the panel/dialog anyhow, it wouldn't be a big loss.
> And then F1 would show the help page for the closest parent
> panel/dialog which has a valid help topic.
>
> What do you think of this proposal? If it's not acceptable then I'm
> afraid we do need to add "helptopic" to wx, as I don't see where is
> the help topic going to come from... Oh, well, maybe I do: we could
> use some dirty hacks like using help text of the form "Control
> description here#topicId", i.e. sue some "rare" character such as hash
> sign to separate the help topic from help text. But this looks rather
> ugly, so I think that if we really need this, a separate "helptopic"
> tag is a better idea.

The goal here is to give the user the most specific Help possible for
any particular need. If Help is not helpful or is too cumbersome to use,
they won't use it. They are "targeting" useful information. The closer
we can put them to the bullseye, the better [credit Kara with that
analogy.] If it takes creating the "helptopic" tag to accomplish this,
we should.

> What about showing the table of contents? Is it enough to just have
> a menu item ("Help|Contents...") and/or the toolbar button or do we
> want to map some keyboard combination (Ctrl-F1 is often used for
> this)?

In addition to "Help|Contents..." and the toolbar button, F1 itself
should be the way to get to HTML Help Contents [if not otherwise focused
on a control that would locate Help more specifically.] To introduce yet
another different key combination is unnecessary and possibly confusing.
 

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