[GNC-dev] Help documentation

[John Ralls]

> On Feb 16, 2021, at 4:16 PM, Frank H. Ellenberger <frank.h.ellenberger at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Most of the static part of the GUI is in the glade files, which are XML.
> It should not be very hard to XSLT the nodes for the structure, and
> finally labels and tooltips.

Dunno about most. There's a surprising amount of hand-coded UI. There's certainly enough that we do need to consider the GtkBuilder files.

Labels and tooltips aren't this problem: xgettext knows how to extract them into gnucash.pot. That's not to say it's perfect, there are surely issues with keeping tooltips up to date and translated. It's just not the online help manual issue.

I don't think that integrating the help into the GtkBuilder files is an option for two reasons: First, I think I'm the only one who edits them in a regular editor. Everyone else uses Glade and AFAIK it won't write elements it doesn't know about and it wouldn't know about our customer help nodes. Second, even without Glade they're still XML and that has exactly the same problem that Docbook does: It's scary to non-programmers.

Regards,
John Ralls