Xfce Documentation viewer, idea...

[Jim Campbell]

Hi Ali,

On Wed, Dec 9, 2009 at 6:30 AM, Ali Abdallah <aliov at xfce.org> wrote:

> Hey All,
>
> I wanna discuss in this mail having a simple viewer for our documentation.
>
> Why using a simple viewer instead of just asking a browser to show the doc:
> 1) It is much faster.
> 2) It will automatically load a localized documentations with respect to
> the system locale, if not found, C fallback,
> 2') If there is links inside a document, and it is not found in the current
> locale of the document itself,
>   then also the link is loaded from the C dir, this is done by catching
> "navigation-policy-decision-requested" webkit signal.
> 3) We can add whatever we like to the viewer.
>
> I wrote a simple viewer just for demonstration, the code can be found
> http://foo-projects.org/~nick/packages/xfce4-help-0.0.0.tar.bz2
> it depends on libxfce4ui and webkit, and the other standards.
>
> You can try it without installing it, just compile it with the correct
> prefix (prefix=/usr if your docs are in /usr/share/xfce4/doc).
>
> Let me guys know your opinions, and if you like the idea.
>
> Best Regards,
> Ali.
>

Thanks so much for taking the initiative on this.  I tried compiling the
help viewer this morning, but it wouldn't launch after compiling (I'll have
to get the exact error when I get back home.)

Also, the GNOME documentation team has shown great willingness to build out
tools and libraries that will assist documentation contributors who use
different desktop environments.  One of their initiatives right now is to
split the yelp application into several different libraries that can be used
to build documentation and even (if someone wants) to build a different help
viewer.   They recently announced some of their specific ideas for this
initiative [1], and I've copied the leader of the GNOME doc team on this
message.

Because we're using Mallard for our docs, basing any help viewer that we put
together on these tools and libraries would be very, very beneficial to us.
 I don't think that all of the libraries have been split out yet, but they
will be split out in the relatively near future.  Jannis Pohlmann of the
Xfce team has discussed the dependencies, and he didn't have any problems
with them.  Shaun ( shaunm at gnome.org ) could give you more information the
dependencies, and you should feel free to contact him with any questions.

If you have any questions for me for now, feel free to let me know.  Also,
please "reply to all," with any replies to this message, as Shaun isn't on
the Xfce mailing list.  Thanks!

Jim

[1]
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-doc-list/2009-November/msg00053.html
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