Re: [lmi] LMI Help Proposal

[Vadim Zeitlin]

[I've received several, slightly different, copies of this message, I'm
 replying to the latest one chronologically, please let me know if it's
 not the right one]

On Wed, 17 May 2006 13:36:02 -0400 "Ericksberg, Richard" <address@hidden> wrote:

ER> Tooltip

 I think globally all tooltip-related aspects are already ok, please let me
know if anything still needs to be done. Some controls (e.g. disabled ones
under GTK, notebook pages, ...) don't show tooltips in wx yet but we're
working on this.


ER> "What's This?" Help

 Here it remains to implement the context menu with "What's this" item
which can be trivially done. I'm going to send a patch to Greg unless
instructed otherwise.


ER> F1 Help

 The problem here is how to map the current control to the help topic. We
have "tooltip" and "helptext" tags for each control in XRC but we don't
have any "helptopic" tag. We could add it but maybe there is a way to make
it work without it:

 Do you really want to show (different) help page on F1 key press for every
control? I think it's more common to have a single help page for the whole
panel or dialog describing all controls on it. If this were enough, we
could store either the "what's this" text or a help topic id in the
"helptext" field of each window. As we don't need "what's this" for the
panel/dialog anyhow, it wouldn't be a big loss. And then F1 would show the
help page for the closest parent panel/dialog which has a valid help topic.

 What do you think of this proposal? If it's not acceptable then I'm afraid
we do need to add "helptopic" to wx, as I don't see where is the help topic
going to come from... Oh, well, maybe I do: we could use some dirty hacks
like using help text of the form "Control description here#topicId", i.e.
sue some "rare" character such as hash sign to separate the help topic from
help text. But this looks rather ugly, so I think that if we really need
this, a separate "helptopic" tag is a better idea.


ER> HTML Help
ER> 
ER>   What is it ?
ER> 
ER>     The Main Help Dialog.
ER> 
ER>   How is it invoked ?
ER> 
ER>     1) By clicking the desired selection within the Help menu.
ER> 
ER>     2) By clicking the Help toolbar button which on the main window.
ER> 
ER>     3) As previously stated via F1 Help.

 What about showing the table of contents? Is it enough to just have a menu
item ("Help|Contents...") and/or the toolbar button or do we want to map
some keyboard combination (Ctrl-F1 is often used for this)?

 Thanks,
VZ