From: Sven Neumann <sven@xxxxxxxx>
>You didn't address point (a). Really, these strings are meant as a
>description for developers, not for users. They don't explain what the
>plug-in does when being called interactively, they explain what the
>particular PDB function does. There are plug-ins that register a
>number of PDB functions. What string would you use to display in the
>user interface? The interactive call might actually do something
>completely different.
Well, as you pointed out, the strings are not in fact currently used for
anything, because they mainly don't exist. My thought was just that it
is a convenient place to put a brief description, where there are already
tools to access it easily. As for the second problem, you simply use the
string that is relevant to the dialog that you're displaying.
>
>> I've actually already written meaningful pdb-help for about 1/3 of
>> the relevant plug-ins -- it takes about 5 minutes once you
>> understand what the plug-in does -- and am ready to do it for the
>> rest if I have some reasonable confidence that I'm not wasting my
>> time.
>
>Given the problems I outlined above, I wonder if this time would be
>better spent on writing help for the plug-ins. If we had at least a
>little bit of help for each plug-in, we could continue to use the PDB
>strings for what they've been designed for and we have added the help
>system for exactly this purpose. What do you think about putting your
>descriptions into gimp-help-2? You wouldn't need to do a full page for
>each plug-in. A page for each filters menu would be completely
>sufficient to begin with.
Well, two points: First, the plan I am suggesting is one that I can execute
by spending 5-10 minutes per plug-in, not counting the time it takes to
figure out how the plug-in works. Second, after spending a couple of hours looking
at gimp-help-2, I don't have a clue how to do anything with it. If I have
to write XML, it takes me about an hour to do a paragraph, and then my
eyes are blurred from all the angle brackets. I would love to write a bunch
of plug-in help pages, but only if I can write them as plain text or something
Latex-like. (In fact, I invented a little "help-language" with a few commands
like "\help-id{plug-in-foo-scale}" and have written a couple of things that
way, with the thought for writing an xml-spewer that will put all the
stereotyped angle-bracket stuff around it, but I don't want to go too far
in that direction until I know if it makes sense.)
>
>If we did this using the help system, you wouldn't even have to call
>the plug-in dialog to get to the help about it. Pressing F1 with the
>plug-in menu entry focused already calls the respective help ID. And
>the navigation that's possible with the help or web browser allows you
>to discover the GIMP plug-ins a lot faster as if you would have to
>bring up the dialog for each plug-in first.
Aha, now here you're telling me something I didn't know, since I've never
had a system set up with functioning help, and it actually solves a lot
of the issues.
Best,
-- Bill
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