First of all congratulations on your effort. The online help certainly looks very nice. But I don't like this approach. It opens a new window, it further fragments pharo workflow. This is why I said I am a huge fan of emacs documentation system, its not just text display, doc context has links you can click or navigate through via shortcuts, you can even ask documentation to find specific content for you, browser doc for specific keyboard shortcuts that correspond to specific function and find doc for that functions, doc for functions etc. And they do all that with zero html ;) Some of it already your help tool can do , for example ask for help from Integer. I really love this kind of interactivity. But also want to keep things in a single window, right next to my code, if possible without losing focus of the code editor so i can type while I read docs. The problem I have with your approach is that it removes from pharo and send me to the browser to do all these things. Even worse it relies on hmtl , though using markdown certainly elevates the pain. I have to resize the window, and further more pharo loses focus so I cant continue coding until I click back to pharo window, then I will need to click back to doc window to move doc to next page, then pharo window again. A really tedious process. So for me the secondary window is a no go. I want my users to browse documentation while they code, I want it to make it easy for them to do both at the same time and not change windows to do so, so they can learn step by step. This is why I am very interested in the help tool which I will have to thank you for creating it, its simple yet gets the job done. I was just wondering if there are any extensions for it. I am certainly not against the idea of Pharo Online help, for blogs, videos and such. But since i had similar experience with python (which also heavily relies on online docs), I rather do it the way emacs does it which has made things a lot more bearable for me. Blog , videos and articles are of general nature, can contain personal opinions and optional ideas of optimised workflow and way of doing things. Documentation is specific, either tutorial based or reference based its mission is to show you how things work and nothing more. I like this separation. Also though I was able to use PharoOnlineHelp in Pharo 3.0 , it managed to mess up the world menu, pharo had to fall back to "backup" world menu. Torsten Bergmann wrote
Kilon wrote on "Pharo dev-list"
So my attention came to help tool, I think I get how it works, I started making the documentation with it, questions is if there is anything more to it than the functionality I am seeing in the Help docs. Maybe a third party lib that adds more features ?
Is there a plan to extend it ?
Some time ago I created the "old" in image help tool so one can easily access help directly from the image. It was accepted and integrated into the standard image. It is usable and some projects/packages use it.
But since media is (by default) not yet that rich within Pharo and mostly people also would like to see the documentation on the web I created a successor called "PharoOnlineHelp". This also allows you to be more independent with your docu from the help system itself.
The new help system: ==================== - is called "Pharo Online Help" - uses only a single "marker" pragma - supports markdown - can be viewed/served online - is not part of the standard image but can be easily loaded
How to use it: ============= - take a fresh Pharo 2.0 image from http://files.pharo.org/platform - open the config browser (Tools -> ConfigurationBrowser) - select "PharoOnlineHelp" from the list and easily install it - now in menu "Help" you will find "Help server", click on "Start server" on the control panel - if you are on Windows you can click on "Browse" to open a browser, in any other case go to http://localhost:8080 with your web browser
You can now click and browse the available docu that is in the image. It also has an API help and links to most Pharo resources.
If you want to extend the "Intro" tutorial section for instance with a "Native Boost" tutorial you can:
- create an own class as subclass of Object in your own package - implement a class side message with a pragma #onlineTutorial
nativeBoostTutorialOn: aBuilder
<onlineTutorial> (aBuilder tutorial: #'Introduction to NativeBoost') description: 'An overview and introduction to the Native boost interface'; addLesson: ...
- see class "PharoTutorial" for an example or this picture: http://lists.gforge.inria.fr/pipermail/pharo-project/attachments/20130224/90...
NOTE: the tutorials are written in Markdown, so you can:
- write a blog post or website with a tutorial and later aggregate it/link to it in Pharo online help - use and embed rich media like youtube videos, web pages, ... - use Markdown editors like http://dillinger.io/ to write the docu
Hope this will answer your questions. You can use the old help but I would rather like people to see jumping to the new online help.
Bye Torsten
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