[Gambas-user] Gambas help files

[Rob]

On Wednesday 04 June 2003 18:36, Ken Schrock wrote:
> My favorite is docbook, but not everybody has it or can get it easily
> Benoit has the manual at the site in pdf for like .35 and SO for .5x
> I find the PDF one MUCH easier to use

I don't know if PDF is the way to go presently because there's no way to bring 
it up inside the Gambas IDE and there's no navigation around all those 
documents.  I mean, yeah, you can paste all kinds of documentation on the end 
of that SXW document and then save as PDF, and I think that's a great way to 
start getting all the documentation together, but I don't know if that'll be 
enough for the help system.

Your ideas regarding "New in *** version..." are right on, though I don't 
think we can do that retroactively very easily.  The "difference from VB" 
stuff on each page is a great idea and one I hadn't thought of.  That makes 
much more sense than an intro, though a "Help!  I'm a VB user!  What do I 
do?" page linked off the front page of the manual might be good too ;)

I'm actually leaning towards the wiki idea, and tonight I started working on a 
Gambas help viewer that will parse simple HTML files (like those that should 
be created when you export from a wiki) and navigate between different HTML 
files via links (which you can't do with the regular TextLabel control 
because the underlying Qt component QTextBrowser's link following event isn't 
supported in Gambas yet).  I'm also thinking I should do a full text index 
when I do the export from the wiki (whichever one we end up using.... mein 
Deutsch ist leider sehr schlecht...) and include that with the HTML and 
pixmap files.

I can't figure out how to subclass TextLabel and add my own events, not that I 
think it'd be possible in the first place to find out what word you just 
clicked on, so I'm rolling my own using a Scrollview and lots of individual 
TextLabel objects, meticulously spaced and tagged ;)  So far it's MUCH 
snappier than you might imagine, but I've done similar things successfully in 
Tcl which is a nasty and slow language so I'm not too surprised.  And, well, 
I actually have only gotten as far as parsing <B> and <IMG... tags.

But just now my awesome MDI hack of the Gambas IDE just exited without error 
on me as I was messing with the properties dialog, and I hadn't saved in 
about an hour, and so instead I'm going to bed ;)

Rob