Documentation Distribution

[Geert Janssens]

On Sunday 28 February 2016 09:40:49 John Ralls wrote:
> For the guide I don't think it's unreasonable to remove it from the
> Help menu and simply direct people to www.gnucash.org to download it
> or read it online.

That is of course an argument to keep help and guide two separate documents, so opposite to 
what we have just been discussing of merging all together...

And I think if the online version is to become the primary version we'll have to fix the current 
iframe issue on the website.

As a reminder, the current online docs are displayed in an iframe to keep them integrated in 
the website (have the main menu and language buttons available). The cleanest solution would 
be to tweak the html generation (for use on our website at least) to include the header and left 
hand side menu in every generated page. And it would even be better still if the document's 
own menu/hierarchy appeared somewhere on the page as well to users could more easily 
navigate it all.

> The guide is about 10-12MB to help's 1-2 so
> removing all 5 (de, en, it, ja, and pt) would be the biggest part of
> the weight reduction. Help is needed for context help. For Mac
> bundles we could instruct users to get it from www.gnucash.org and
> install it in ~/Library/Application Support/GnuCash or perhaps
> provide a little Applet to do that for them. Windows needs help in
> .chm format which in turn requires a tool called Windows Help
> Workshop which runs only on Win32. The logical thing to do there
> would be to modify the installer to ask the user what documentation
> version is wanted and to download it and install it in the right
> place, but that assumes that the installer is able to do downloads.
> 

Alternatively we could provide localized installers with only one language per installer, next to a 
generic all-language installer. Or langpack-only installers which would only run if they discover 
an installed gnucash of the correct version. This is feasible with the windows installer we 
currently use.

An installed that's able to do downloads would be better still though.

Geert