Re: GUI tasks

[John Darrington]

On Sat, Jul 22, 2006 at 10:06:37AM -0700, Ben Pfaff wrote:

     > I am not a lawyer, but my understanding of the Berne Convention is
     > that concepts and ideas (which is what icons are meant to portray)
     > cannot be copyrighted.  If you're concerned about this we can ask for
     > advice from the FSF staff.
     
     I think it'd be better if we asked.  Do you happen to know the
     proper email address to ask?

You could try address@hidden

     
     > It's strange that no existing info viewer manages this properly.
     > There's no reason why a viewer couldn't fold each paragraph into a
     > single line, and apply it's own formatting.  This would seem almost
     > trivial to do.   I suppose it's a historical thing; at one time, that
     > might have been too much overhead for the the viewer.
     
     I doubt that's the real reason: it's pretty easy and, as you say,
     low-overhead.  In my humble opinion, the likely real reason is
     that there is not enough information in an Info document to
     decide which paragraphs may be reflowed and which are meant to be
     fixed-width (e.g. examples).  Also, there's a lot of information
     about fonts, etc., that gets lost in the Texinfo->Info
     translation.  To display a Texinfo documentation in a pretty
     fashion on a bitmapped display, it makes more sense to use an
     intermediate format that does a better job of preserving
     semantics, such as HTML, XML, DocBook, whatever.


That's true.  There's a lot of information lost in the conversion from
Texinfo to Info.  I think there are some Texinfo -- DocBook converters
around which might be worth looking at.
     
     >      I'd suggest using "makeinfo --html" to convert the manual to HTML
     >      and then displaying the HTML in a control instead.
     >
     > That would also be a possibility.  However, whilst there are some
     > libaries for displaying HTML in a widget, they all tend to be *huge*,
     > and rather cumbersome.
     
     GNOME has the Yelp help browser that seems it might be worth a
     look:
             http://www.gnome.org/learn/users-guide/latest/yelp.html 

Last time I looked at Yelp, I simply couldn't work out how to use it,
or find any documentation about it.  Maybe it has improved.  I'll have
another look at it.

J'

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