Re: Help & Manuals

Havoc Pennington (rhp@zirx.pair.com)
Tue, 8 Jun 1999 18:58:09 -0400 (EDT)


On Tue, 8 Jun 1999, Jeff Hostetler wrote:
> yes. the idea was simple HTML all contained within a single
> directory (.../EnUS/*.html) with local hrefs so that we can
> translate them by cloning the file/link layout (ie .../FrFR/*.html)
> and inserting new prose.
>
> this way help lookup becomes something like:
> OpenUrl("$AbiLibDir/$AppName/help/$Language/foo.html")
>

This is ever-so-slightly gratuitously different from the GNOME help file
layout. I think it would be good to copy Gnome; basically this means, use
the name of the locale (en_US, en_GB, not EnUS), and install a topic.dat
as an index of help topics. topic.dat is just URL/topic pairs, like this:

gnumeric.html Gnumeric manual
function-reference.html Gnumeric function reference

Then with the Gnome port you can just symlink $(datadir)/gnome/help over
to $AbiLibDir/$AppName/help, and you can also use the Gnome help browser
(which will be nice once we have Mozilla componentized).

Help should probably go in $(datadir) anyway, because it's
architecture-independent.

We're still regretting making our .desktop files randomly different from
.kdelnk while changing nothing of consequence, so I thought I'd warn you
guys in advance. :-)

If there are good non-gratuitous reasons for the difference, please
disregard...

Havoc



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