Re: wxT/Qt framework help book (was Fwd: Re: Last call ...)

[Daniel J S. <dan...@ie...>]

On 01/02/2015 05:07 AM, Mojca Miklavec wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 1, 2015 at 6:21 AM, Daniel J Sebald wrote:
>> [Sorry, that should have been patch #707 in the last post, i.e.,]
>>
>> I've placed a patch for wxT HelpBook and Qt-Assistant on SourceForge:
>>
>> https://sourceforge.net/p/gnuplot/patches/707
>>
>> which should give anyone interested something to do on New Year's Day.
>>
>> There are also a couple screenshots of the two help book windows after
>> the gnuplot.htb file and the gnuplot.qch and gnuplot.qhc files are made
>> and installed.
>
> Thank you very much. This is an excellent addition (that I have been
> waiting for for a long time already and also tried to implement
> myself, but gave up too soon) and I would be extremely happy if it
> could end up in 5.0.
>
> (I would suggest releasing RC4 with this addition though since
> packagers are expected to modify their build flows slightly and some
> totally unexpected problems might arise there.)
>
> The "next level" would be to allow users to configure "help foo" to
> automatically open the help book, but that doesn't need to be done
> now.

I knew that would eventually be a request.  :-)  The concept doesn't 
appear to violate any gnuplot terminal philosophy, I guess.  It would 
just be issuing a "help xyz" to the terminal.

I think this is possible to do in Qt's case (wxT I don't know about). 
The commands that could be sent to Qt-Assistant are here:

http://doc.qt.io/qt-5/assistant-custom-help-viewer.html#using-qt-assistant-remotely

So, that part is easy.

The tricky part is that there needs to be some type of lookup file, of 
sorts, that translates "xyz" to whatever its reference is in the 
documentation, e.g., "loc432.html".  Where that should be done, I'm not 
sure (inside gnuplot core or inside qt terminal).


> I have problems with an out-of-source build of help files for Qt, but
> wxt help works very nicely.

I sent a separate note on your Qt problem.  SQL library file missing 
would be my guess, but we'll wait to see if anyone else has the same 
issue and knows an easy solution.


> One tiny problem: when I ran help in wxt for the first time, the
> dialogue window appeared. During that time the console was completely
> unresponsive. But maybe that's the expected behaviour anyway.

No, that's not expected.  I'm wondering if there is some type of strange 
bug in the wxT terminal that manifests in different ways on different 
systems.  I've noted some strange behavior (wxT terminals are always 
persistent, once in a while crashes on exit), which still exists in the 
5.1 development version.

Dan