Re: Two questions about HelpViewer

Hi,

Patrick Cardona wrote:
>
>
> 1) About Encoding
>
> While working on a localized release of the User Guides I made first 
> in English to be read  within HelpViewer (i.e.: 'AGNoStep User Guide', 
> 'GWorkspace User Guide') I noted this issue: despite .xlp files are 
> known as xml format, UTF-8 characters are badly rendered.

xlp are not really "xml", since it is not formalized. It is 
HTML-XML-like essentially. As such, it is expected to be plain ASCII.
To render special characters you need to use to escape them and most 
HTML ones are supported.
à ö etc etc..
The same goes (important!) for the XML mandatory ones: escaping " and < 
 > of course.

Then looking at the code the parser will not reject characters it 
doesn't like.. so I suppose if you use classic Latin1 characters like 
àèé they may pass through.

>
> I tried also to add some rule at the begining of 'main.xlp', before 
> the '<document>' tag, but without success, like:
>> <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

That is ignored. It is not a formal XML document. To show, it uses 
either the GSHTML parser or the internal portable Parser, which I am 
trying to fix and use again. They should behave currently very similar.

But HelpViewer is proving a hard nut to crack, tinkering on it since 
months... it is full of itchy details and not trivial at all.
>
> 2) What the Bookshelf button is expected to do? Opening a FileViewer 
> window in some place? How to set the path, while the 'preferences' 
> menu item is grayed? Is there a canonical place I should use to put 
> into .help files?

I don't think it is implemented. I suppose it should point/open to a 
Documentation Library or show recent ones. The interface is quite 
inspired from NeXTStep but I don't know how much translatable to the 
HelpViewer is.
If past releases worked and the current one is broken, please specify. I 
imported a version, maybe some code got "lost" or broke.

Riccardo