Re: [patch #7692] Gui Documentation / Online Help

[John Darrington]

Regarding recent discussions about Online Help.  This patch
shows one way we can achieve it without radical changes.

It uses the existing user manual to document the dialog boxes
- screenshots included. It then hooks onto the Help button on
the dialog to start the Yelp browswer at the respective change.
Yelp 2.30 is rather slow, and starts a new instance for each
click instead of moving any existing instance to the wanted page.
But I'm told these problems are fixed in version 3.0

At the same time, the manual, complete with screenshots are
still available in the Postscript, PDF and DVI formats.

There are however some new external dependencies - Imagemagick
to convert the screenshots to all the required formats. And
there are some GNU specific Makefile constructs. 

I have an idea, which if it works, will allow the screenshots
to be automatically generated from the .ui files.  That will
avoid the problem I see with a lot of GUI manuals where the
GUI changes too rapidly for the documentation to keep up.

I'm not claiming the actuall text that I've written here to be 
good example of how to write documentation. But it shows the 
principle.

Comments?
 
On Sun, Dec 18, 2011 at 07:29:26PM +0000, John Darrington wrote:
     URL:
       <http://savannah.gnu.org/patch/?7692>
     
                      Summary: Gui Documentation / Online Help
                      Project: PSPP
                 Submitted by: jmd
                 Submitted on: Sun 18 Dec 2011 08:29:25 PM CET
                     Category: None
                   Item Group: None
                       Status: None
                  Assigned to: None
             Originator Email: 
                  Open/Closed: Open
              Discussion Lock: Any
     
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     Date: Sun 18 Dec 2011 08:29:25 PM CET  Name:
     0001-Added-rudimentary-examples-documenting-the-GUI-and-m.patch  Size: 
222kB  
     By: jmd
     
     <http://savannah.gnu.org/patch/download.php?file_id=24625>
     
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