[Gambas-devel] Integrated Help

[Robert Rowe]

Your cache idea worked beautifully. I have the help message at the 
bottom of the Property Window working. No noticeable performance loss. 
Gambas is much more efficient than VB is. I need to break my VB habits 
but I spend all day in VB6 & VB.net. Coming home to work in Gambas is a joy.

I still need to test it some more then I'll work on the help that will 
appear in conjunction with the completion window. Lastly I'll add 
options to turn it off. I think that it should default on because it is 
intended to help newbies who won't initially know how to turn it on/off. 
I'm designing it to be very un-intrusive also so it shouldn't affect 
anyone negatively.

You mentioned that the Help Wiki has features that help with 
translation. I checked the Spanish translation (I know just enough 
Spanish to get myself in trouble) and it seemed to be lacking. Do we 
have any translated versions of the help? The reason why I'm asking is 
that I thought about adding an option to download a translated version 
of the help. Maybe triggered when you change the language of the IDE. 
The MHelp module could then look for this alternate copy of the help and 
use it if found.

Robert Rowe

Benoit Minisini wrote:
> On mardi 18 mars 2008, you wrote:
>   
>> In light of the translation issue I believe that my help integration
>> idea is doomed. The help appears to be in English. 
>>     
>
> You should really look at the wiki. The help files comes from all the english 
> pages of the wiki. But this wiki is fully translatable, and if some 
> volunteers fully translate them, we could have help in any language.
>
>   
>> I had hoped to 
>> display short segments of the help in a textlabel at the bottom of the
>> property window and possible in another ontop window when the completion
>> window appears. If I pre-parse the help files (for runtime efficiency)
>> then these messages will be in English. If I pre-parse at startup I'm
>> afraid that it would slow down loading the IDE. I could grab the message
>> directly from the help file every time that I need it but that would be
>> a lot of disk access (especially during the completion routine). 
>> I have 
>> a rather fast machine so I can't assume good performance for other users
>> just because it is fast for me. :(
>>
>> I think that this feature would be really great for helping people to
>> learn Gambas so I'd like to find a way to make it work. Any ideas?
>>     
>
> You should only parse *one* file, for the property you are looking for. Or 
> maybe do you want to display the help for each property in the completion 
> list? 
>
> Then, you don't have to "pre-parse". Just put the help as you read it in a 
> collection used as a cache.
>
> Regards,
>
>