[Pan-users] Pan Manual (again) (was: New User Question)

[Petr Kovar]

Hi!

Duncan, Sun, 30 Jan 2011 18:47:11 +0000 (UTC):

(...)

> Scratch the last bit.  I just checked and the bookmark's still valid.  
> It's a tarball.  Dates on the included files appear to be Dec 2006 and
> Jan 
> 2007.  I've not actually looked at the content itself (it appears to be 
> HTML based files and images), but if anyone's interested in running with 
> it, here's the link to the tarball:
> 
> http://doug.freeshell.org/files/pan_docs070107.tar.gz
> 
> Thanks, Doug (B?).  I think Darren A was involved, too.  As I said I 
> haven't actually looked at it.

Well, it was contributed by Douglas Bollinger and I've had this work in mind
for a long time. So I started working on help integration into Pan recently,
and I'm almost done. Almost, since my preliminary work introduce dependency
on gnome-doc-utils and this should definitely be made optional, either for
those who don't want to install additional software/don't mind help
support, or for those who compile Pan on Windows or OS X (as I don't
believe these platforms actually support bundled help viewing).

Similar to gtkspell support, by using ifdefs we can either show a standard
help viewer with (localizable) content, or open a web browser (per pan's
preferences) to show online help (on Pan's website, preferably).

Now, if anyone is interested in updating the content of Douglas' work,
please go ahead. The XML source file is there, on my branch 'help' (I've
only changed some entitities before integrating that file into the build
system):

https://github.com/pmkovar/pan2/blob/help/help/C/pan.xml

Also, you can just compile pan from the 'help' branch and show the help
file in help viewer (it's the first item in Help menu, or F1 key, as usual).

In fact, you don't need to know XML syntax, as this can be easily added
later.

Cheers,
Petr Kovar