[Canorus-devel] Canorus User's guide

[Matevž J. <mat...@gm...>]

Hi guys & Andrew.

I added support for showing user's guide in R916 when clicking
Help->User's guide. I currently run external application assistant to
show you the User's guide. It tries to open the User's guide in user
language (searches for your_language.qhc QtHelp file).

Currently the process to compile the User's guide is a bit complex
(Makefile exists for this):
1. Lyx source is the editable User's guide source located in
doc/usersguide/your_language.lyx
2. Export from Lyx to plain Latex (generates .tex file and converts
images to .eps formats) - this step must be done by user. I uploaded
current .tex file to SVN so you don't need to do it yourself, but .tex
file should be removed from SVN in the future.
3. Latex, ps2pdf and friends are run to produce printable PDF version of
our User's guide
4. htlatex and friends are used to produce HTML version of our User's
guide which are used by Canorus
5. qcollectiongenerator is run to produce QtHelp files from HTML files,
.qhp and qhcp descriptors

Issues:
1. In the future I'd like to show the help inside Canorus in a docked
widget at the right maybe. Currently we have to ship Assistant
application along Canorus executable.
2. htlatex produce poor HTML quality, especially when doing
png->eps->back to png.
3. Lyx/Latex doesn't support SVG images. We have to export our media to PNG.
4. I'd like to automate the Lyx -> Plain Latex step.
5. .qhcp files contain structure of Qt help files. There is a tree
structure for chapters by saying Chapter name -> HTML file and its
reference (eg. en.html#chapter1). This structure is then seen at the
left side when reading through the Guide. Currently, if you add a
chapter in Lyx, you also have to add a chapter in .qhcp file. I'd like
to automate this somehow.

I would like your opinions about this. Maybe Latex is not the right tool
for our job (docbook, doxygen?).


Regards.
-Matevž