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List:       gtk-app-devel
Subject:    Re: Acorn !Help clone - application-supplied widget help text
From:       Havoc Pennington <hp () redhat ! com>
Date:       1999-07-16 5:09:21
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On Fri, 16 Jul 1999, Andrew Wood wrote:
> 
> Does a protocol for this sort of thing exist, and if not, is there any
> interest in creating and using one (and is it even possible under X)?
> Obviously for it to be successful, writers of applications would have to
> bother to add support for it...
> 

We'd be interested in having such a thing for Gnome. We have the necessary
technology (CORBA, help browser) to implement it.

There's a thing called GtkTipsQuery in Gtk that's sort of like this, but
there's no standard way to display the results of the query (no standard
action to take once it's decided what widget the user is querying), and
that might be a task for Gnome. Look at testgtk for a sample use.

For Gnome I'd like to see a simple API like:

gnome_add_help(GtkWidget* widget, 
               const gchar* tooltip, 
               const gchar* extended_help_url)

where either tooltip or extended_help_url could be NULL for none. 
Then the GtkTipsQuery thing would invoke the help browser to show extended
information. 

Gnome would automatically have a "What is it?" menu item in all help
menus, that's easy to implement.

Gnome also has a "popup help" thing that puts a help menu on right-click
on widgets (I think); this is in libgnomeui/gnome-popup-help.h. However
it's not used much right now and I think the above approach might be
nicer. We'd have to talk about it.

Havoc




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