Re: Two questions about HelpViewer

Hi Riccardo,

On 2025-10-22 19:56:34 +0200 Riccardo Mottola 
<[email protected]> wrote:

> 
> 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.
> &agrave; &ouml; etc etc..
> The same goes (important!) for the XML mandatory ones: escaping " and 
> < > of 
> course.

The tip of Yavor is quite efficient: just adding this line before 
every section like:
  '<meta charset="utf-8" />'

This allowed me to use UTF-8 and to maintain readable text. It would 
not be the case with HTML entities, not very readable for a long User 
Guide.

(...)

>> 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.

Maybe we could implement something like open a FileViewer. And there a 
place to put all the related .help files? Maybe in 
'~/GNUstep/Library/Applications Support/Help' or shorter at 
'~/GNUstep/Library/Help' folder?

In the meanwhile, I installed help files in the '~/Books' folder, but 
not so a good idea as the user could remove them and also those are 
not accessible immediately from HelpViewer: we need to use 'Open' 
Panel and to know where the '.help' files are.

> If past releases worked and the current one is broken, please 
> specify. I 
> imported a version, maybe some code got "lost" or broke.

Well, the release used within gs-desktop by Ondrej Florian (See: 
https://github.com/onflapp/gs-desktop then in: 
Applications/HelpViewer), which is older, has the 'Search' feature 
still working while the most recent SVN seems to get lost.

But I would prefer the last SVN one because it is implementing cleanly 
icons theming, while the GSDE one is not.

Patrick

-- 
Patrick Cardona - Pi400 - GNU/Linux aarch64 (Debian 13.1)
Xorg (1:7.7+24) - libcairo2 (1.18.4-1+rpt1 arm64)
Window Maker (0.96.0) - GWorkspace (1.1.0 - 02 2025) - Theme: AGNOSTEP 
- MUA: GNUMail (1.4.0)