[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
More information about the Bf-committers
mailing list