Re: Two questions about HelpViewer

Hi Riccardo,

My tests results:


On 2025-11-11 00:23:05 +0100 Riccardo Mottola 
<[email protected]> wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> since I am working extensively on HelpViewer, it is not easy as that, 
> but 
> thank you for stimulating me looking at the issue more.
> 
> I added character encoding recognition support in HadlerStructureXLP. 
> It will 
> try to parse a like in the form:
> 
> <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
> 
> and assume UTF-8 by default, in XML style. This will need to be 
> documented 
> well.
> 
> Patrick Cardona wrote:
>> It seems finally that writing the meta: <meta charset="utf-8" /> 
>> once at 
>> the very begining of each xlp file is enough to avoid the issue. 
>> Doing 
>> that, the workaround is l
> 
> I have brought the internal Parser up to spec enough that it can 
> display the 
> example files without major errors and with no crashes.
> 
> For testing purposes, you can switch different parsers.
> 
> defaults write org.gnustep.HelpViewer Parser Internal
> defaults write org.gnustep.HelpViewer Parser GSHTML
> defaults write org.gnustep.HelpViewer Parser Sloppy
> 
> built-in parser resuscitated vs. libxml2 based GSHTML parser and 
> GSXML in 
> Sloppy mode.
> 
> Since we are not pure XML nor HTML the results are interesting, 
> however the 
> Internal parser seems now quite usable with some care in writing the 
> xlp.
> 
> 
> The issue is that the whole chain may not be UTF-8 clean and that the 
> XML 
> parser is called twice, first from HandlerStructureXLP then from 
> TextFormatterXLP.
> GSHTML assumes Latin 1 if not specified.
> 
> I changed the pipeline to go through UTF-8 if not specified and if 
> specified, 
> to convert to UTF-8. However GSHTML might choke because it either 
> respect the 
> existing character encoding.
> I probably need to remove or even rewrite the encoding line.
> 
> However, in the long run I want to retain the internal Parser which 
> gives us 
> freedom and also allow the use of the mixed XML-HTML style the format 
> is 
> based on.
> 
> You can play around with SVN.
> 
> Riccardo
> 

I confirm the best choice is the internal Parser.

tests:
Removing previously all the <meta charset="utf-8" /> in all the .xlp 
files.

1) without changing defaults

Defaults read org.gnustep.HelpViewer returned:

org.gnustep.HelpViewer 'NSWindow Frame help_window' '341 148 704 858 0 
0  1920 1080 '
org.gnustep.HelpViewer NSDefaultOpenDirectory 
/home/patrick/SOURCES/agnostep/install/RESOURCES/HELP

So No Parser set?

All seems correct (accented characters in titles and texts, in legends)

-------------

2) Parser Internal set

defaults write org.gnustep.HelpViewer Parser Internal

All seems correct

3) Parser GSHTML set

defaults write org.gnustep.HelpViewer Parser GSHTML

Accented characters were badly rendered.

4) Parser Sloppy

defaults write org.gnustep.HelpViewer Parser Sloppy

Accented characters well interpreted.
Some unexpected double quotes after some titles.

5) Back again to internal parser

Again, all seems correct, without the double quotes issue of Sloppy.

Cheers,
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)