Hi,
"William Skaggs" <weskaggs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
> 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.
They are being used by the DB Browser which provides developer
documentation for the registered procedures. That's what these strings
are made for. The fact that there isn't much help available clearly
outlines the problem. Experience has shown that developers suck at
providing help. And people that are able and willing to contribute
help don't want to touch the source. We solved this dilemma by
introducing a way to contribute help that is decoupled from the
source. It handles translation and is IMO quite easy to use. All we
need to do is to fill that system with info. It would be shame to
weaken this effort by introducing yet another way to provide user
documentation.
> As for the second problem, you simply use the string that is
> relevant to the dialog that you're displaying.
How do you know what string that is?
> 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.
I am sure that if someone from the gimp-help-2 team could provide
templates it would be simpler and even less work than to edit the
source code.
> 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.)
I am sure we can convert whatever format you prefer to what's needed
for gimp-help-2.
See, my point is that I like the idea of improving the plug-in user
interface. It is important to give the user more help what she can do
with all those filters. But I don't think we need a new API for it. We
can use the existing infrastructure. It is only missing content.
If you also want to do some hacking on the plug-in source code, rest
assured, there's something for you to work on. We could have a look at
bugzilla together, what do you think?
Sven
