Docs for 1.8

[Chris Lyttle]

Hi all,
With the release of 1.7.2, as you all know, I dropped the docs out of
the tarball in preparation for when I get the new ones to the stage they
can be in place. This resulted in the tarball going from 14MB for 1.7.1
to 4.9MB for 1.7.2.

This rather substantial difference got me thinking that it might be
better for me to split the docs off into a separate package that could
be built and added separately to the main gnucash package. The main
difficulty I see with this approach is that the help would bring up an
error 'Not found The specified URL could not be loaded'. We could;
1) Leave the error message as is if the docs aren't installed, this
would indicate to people that they dont have docs but could also
generate bug reports that the docs dont work when its just they are not
installed.
2) Figure out some way of 'greying' the help menu items if the docs
aren't found. Basically this would just mean getting the help menu items
to look for the help html pages and if they aren't there greying out.

Any feedback on this idea is appreciated.

I also wanted to let you know that I am planning to make all the new
docs xml. This to me has several advantages.
1) I can use the GNOME documentation project's templates to edit the
files and setup the build system, I only need to add an additional step
to convert the docs to html and build the search db.
2) I can setup the docs to register with scrollkeeper, which in a GNOME2
system would allow the docs to be viewed with Yelp (the GNOME2 help
browser) without starting GnuCash. The html docs would still be used by
the internal GnuCash help browser.
3) Being in xml already means the docs are less work for me in the
future when GnuCash moves to GNOME2.
4) I can also use the docbook xml capabilities that are being added to
programs like OpenOffice and Abiword for editing the docs. These have
problems right now, but I expect them to improve as time goes on. 
5) This will make it easier for future authors and translators to edit
the docs.

ok back to working on the docs...

Chris
-- 
RedHat Certified Engineer #807302549405490.
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