Sorry to come in here wildly late, but ... On Oct 8, 2007, at 8:34 AM, Shaun McCance wrote: > > On Sun, 2007-10-07 at 17:10 -0400, Havoc Pennington wrote: >> ... >> - in current GNOME, what are the right "parameters" to open a help >> file? (i.e. what values does gtk_help_show() need to open a gnome help >> file, such as document ID or anchor or whatever) > > http://library.gnome.org/devel/libgnome/stable/libgnome-gnome- > help.html#gnome-help-display > ... > Some questions: > - What sort of information does the Windows help system need?
<http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms644704.aspx> <http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms728718.aspx> > - What sort of information does the Mac help system need? > ... <http://urlx.org/apple.com/d50c3> Help buttons in Mac OS X (in bundled software, at least) usually don't open exact pages. Instead they open search results, in which the actual page the developer was thinking of is the first or second result. This is, I assume, because Apple are afraid of the software and the help getting out of sync. If a Help button linked directly to a page that had been renamed, or merged into another page, the help viewer would have to return a nasty error "The help topic does not exist, contact your application vendor for an updated Help file" à la Windows, and people would be put off trying to using the help ever again. I think that's a valid concern, but an annoying solution. I would rather that any updated API for opening a help page in Gnome had two compulsory parameters -- one for the page ID, and one for a fallback search string if Yelp can't find the page. That way the page-not-found error would only ever appear when debugging. Cheers -- Matthew Paul Thomas http://mpt.net.nz/ _______________________________________________ gtk-devel-list mailing list gtk-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gtk-devel-list
