[lmi] help and context help

[Vadim Zeitlin]

 Hello again,

 I've realized that maybe the current help "demo" patch is indeed too
confusing just because it tries to do so much (basically everything): it
uses tooltips, context help, normal help and as a result it's impossible to
understand what it does without reading the source code and might be
difficult even when reading it.

 So I'd like to return to the basics and decide just what exactly do we
want. If we can answer the questions below, there would be no need for the
multitude of the possibilities currently shown and we could make the patch
much more understandable and closer to the real program. The questions are:

1. Should we have both [normal] tooltips and context help?
 
   For the record, normal tooltips are shown any time the mouse hovers over
   a control. The context help tooltips appear only when F1 or "?" button
   in the title bar is pressed. IMHO it can be confusing to have both but
   beyond this I don't really have any strong arguments in or against
   either of them. As I said before, the context help tooltips are easier
   to read for messages longer than 1-2 lines so I guess it's probably
   preferable to use them -- but please let me know what do *you* think.


2. What should pressing F1 when a control is active do?

   Currently it does the same as clicking the mouse in "? cursor" mode on
   the control and this seems to be confusing because they both show the
   context help if it's present or open the help window otherwise and so
   what they do depends on whether the control has the context help string
   or not. There are 2 alternatives:

   a) Show context help if any and do nothing (or show generic "Sorry, no
      context help available for this control") otherwise
   b) Show the help topic associated with the control directly and only
      show the context help when the "? cursor" is used

   There doesn't seem to be any standard here. Windows standard dialogs in
   general seem to follow (a) while Microsoft Excel does (b). I think (a)
   is slightly preferable but, again, it doesn't really matter to me much
   what we choose as long as we choose something. The problem with (a) is
   that there is no way to show the topic corresponding to this window in
   the help then. Maybe another help combination (Ctrl-F1?) could be used
   for this but we'd need to make sure that the users know about it or can
   discover it easily.


3. Related to the above, what should the "? cursor" do?

   As mentioned above, currently it can either show the context help or the
   help window depending on whether the control has the help text or not. I
   think this is confusing and so would like to propose to always show the
   context help only (or "Sorry..." if none) and not the help topic when
   this method is used.


 Thanks in advance for your thoughts,
VZ