[GNC-dev] CMake build system for gnucash-docs

[Geert Janssens]

Op zaterdag 7 september 2019 16:04:08 CEST schreef John Ralls:
> > On Sep 7, 2019, at 5:44 AM, Geert Janssens <geert.gnucash at kobaltwit.be>
> > wrote:
> > 
> > Again I'm not sure of the benefit of adding support for all that at this
> > point. I think more interesting areas of study could be whether we can
> > support a Macos native document format or whether the Windows help system
> > has a way of identifying application documentation system-wide (that is
> > outside of the application) and whether we need to add something to tap
> > into that. Those are two platforms we do try to integrate with next to
> > our gnome integration.
> MacOS Help's native format is HTML just like everyone else's, packed in a
> peculiar way just like everyone else's. It displays in an obnoxious window
> that stays on top of everything. Many third-party applications do what
> GnuCash already does, which is to use the user's default browser to display
> help. As for Windows I've noticed that very few Windows 10 applications
> still use the old Windows-3 help viewer. Most, including Microsoft's,
> either display help in their own window or use the default browser.
> 
Good point.

> Maybe we should follow that trend and get rid of *all* of the system/desktop
> environment specializations and just open docs in a GtkWebKitView like we
> do reports... alternatively given the troubles with WebKit maybe we should
> switch to using the default browser for both reports and docs.

A few remarks:
* For Windows and Macos publishing the documentation as html is probably a 
good way to go for the future, though I find our plain html output a bit 
bland. If we want to make that our main format, it could do with some well-
written css for a nicer visual presentation.
* While on Windows and Macos it may be common to just open a webbrowser with 
html pages, in the gnome and kde ecosystem the native help browser remains 
very popular (yelp and khelpcenter respectively). So I wouldn't drop support 
for ghelp just yet.
* Opening an external browser for reports will solve our WebKit troubles at 
the expense of backlinks into the rest of the gnucash data. Some reports have 
links that refer to a register page, an invoice, another report... All of 
those can only be handled because we integrate a webviewer inside the 
application.

Regards,

Geert