Re: launch help in pdf or on web

[Ethan M. <merritt@u.washington.edu>]

On Friday 04 September 2009 00:27:22 Petr Mikulik wrote:

> Nowadays, there are GUIs for gnuplot running under other systems, i.e. wxt 
> and qt. That would be nice if their menus can launch the interactive help 
> files,  i.e. help in PDF (using default pdf reader) or help on web (using  
> default html browser). 

I think you have pointed to the heart of the problem.
How is an application program like gnuplot supposed to know what the "default"
application launcher is?  The match-up of mimetype to preferred application
is a desktop- or system-level function.  I have no clue about Windows,
but on many linux desktop configurations you can select with the mouse
any text string that is a well-formed URL and it will give you the option
to launch a browser. From this perspective it would be sufficient to do:
gnuplot> help foo
         Please see http://gnuplot.sourceforge.net/docs/gnuplot.pdf