[Bf-committers] Blender doc intergration proposal

Stephen Swaney sswaney at centurytel.net
Sat Apr 15 17:39:51 CEST 2006


On Mon, Apr 10, 2006 at 08:04:24AM +1000, Campbell Barton wrote:
> Hey all,
> 
> For a while is bothered me that tooltips dont realy explain enough 
> (because there only single line to work with)


The purpose of tooltips is NOT to explain something but to simply act
as a reminder for what a button or cryptic icon does.
 

> 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 a help system built into blender is an interesting idea.  The
two big issues are finding someone to maintain it and the actual
implemtation.  The 'who' is important because a help system that
returns "no help available" too often quickly turns into an annoyance
rather than a feature.

The F1 button is already used for the File Open dialog.  An alternate
implementation might be a click on a Help button followed by a click
on the UI widget of interest.

 
> 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.


Having a another set of docs for the help system is both a major
project and a duplication of existing work.  This suggests that
linking into the existing wiki docs is the easist solution.  Most
browsers have a remote command that allows an application to open a
browser page.

This idea is big enough that it needs an actual design proposal rather
than just a patch.

-- 
Stephen Swaney			
sswaney at centurytel.net



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