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

[Geert Janssens]

Op zaterdag 7 september 2019 17:56:46 CEST schreef John Ralls:
> > On Sep 7, 2019, at 7:14 AM, Geert Janssens <geert.gnucash at kobaltwit.be>
> > wrote:> 
> > 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.
> 
> I guess that's OK for Yelp, but as you pointed out to Frank we don't support
> KHelpCenter. Do we require KDE users to install Yelp so that we can display
> our docs?

Yes. GnuCash is a still geared towards the gnome facilities, so yelp is 
normally installed for help. There's currently no way to integrate our 
documentation in the kde help system.

I will add for completeness both yelp and khelpcenter can also display html 
based documentation. So these platforms are not forcing us to stick with 
docbook as base documentation format. But that's of course a totally different 
discussion.

Geert