[Bf-committers] Blender doc intergration proposal

[Campbell Barton]

Hey all,

For a while is bothered me that tooltips dont realy explain enough 
(because there only single line to work with)

Anyhow, possibly a better solution is to have a documentation system 
built into Blender,
It could work by the user holding F1 and clicking a button. - This would 
open up a webpage with documentation on that function.

Having docs that are quickly accessed are important because it gives 
users fast access to docs that they might otherwise not know where to 
look for. or waist time searching about for documentation on a button 
that may not even be written yet.

This could be done in a way that makes docs readable - each button group 
could be 1 page, with an introduction. each windows header would be 1 
page also. with anchors for each button.
And we could start by taking some existing documentation and modifying 
it, and also document things that are not likely to change on the 
Tool/UI refactor.


On Implimentation, each button would have a  URL relative URL to  
"http://mediawiki.blender.org" in its tooltip.
The "Render" tooltip might be "Start The 
Rendering|/index.php/blendocs/scene_buttons/render#render_button"

Its no big deal to modify the tooltip function not to render anything 
after '|' (can be any char realy) and make a modifier key launch a web 
browser when accessing the button/slider/text input etc.
This also wont break with buttons that dont have URL's, they just wont 
open a help page-

it will be easy to add documentation to python scripts too because they 
just need the URL in there tooltip too.

Elubie suggested but we could have a downloadable version so people 
could use locally instead of http://mediawiki.blender.org
The userprefs could have an entry for docroot so the right page opens up.

If for whatever reason it dosnt work as well as expected, and we dont 
want to include in a release, we can just disable the browser loading 
functionality for that release. (while still writing more docs)

What do ya think? - worth writing a patch?

- Cam