I support you in your effort.

I wrote some help pages for NB help (in NativeBoost-Help package),

and using own subclasses of HelpTopic,

which allow me to render the markdown..

(the problem is that markdown parser is now broken, and i needs to be fixed)..
another thing is that it depends on petit-parser,

but also , somehow on xml stuff..

it would be cool being able to write help using markdown syntax, without
too much dependencies, so we can (hopefully) integrate it in base image.

Also, what i don't like in current implementation is that it quite static:

��- a set of subtopics and topic contents are accessed only once

from UI, and to see changes i had to close and reopen help window each time,
which doesn't makes things faster.

I tried to circumvent that in my subclasses, and had some little success.

On 18 September 2013 12:23, kilon <thekilon@yahoo.co.uk> wrote:

Ok I started coding the project , I call it "Prometheas" here is the repo

http://www.smalltalkhub.com/#!/~kilon/Prometheas
<http://www.smalltalkhub.com/#!/~kilon/Prometheas>

I managed to add new buttons with icons, back, forth , right and left. Also
the title of the help tool now changes to the helpTopic selected.

I want to use the up button to move to parent help topic , left and right to
move previous and next page/topic. Probably i wont need down but I added it
just in case. I will tie all those buttons to shortcut keys so that you can
now navigate help using nothing but shortcuts.

The problem I have is that the way Help tool is made it gives me the very
top topic , and the current topic. But I would also like to have a parent
for each topic. So when HelpTopic subtopic: is sent , it does not just add
HelpTopics to the HelpTopic but each subtopic is assigne the HelpTopic as
parent.

This is crucial feature so that I can make those new buttons work.

The tricky part here is that there is also the wiki style pragma that
generate topics.

The help tool uses a treeMorph to display all topics in a tree like fashing,
and since each submorph in the tree is tied to a HelpTopic I could fetch the
hierarchical structure of HelpTopic from there, but the question is , is
this a good idea ?

Or should ��hack the HelpTopic class to allow it to have a owner instance
variable ?

I dont want to create messy code. I was thinking even creating my own
helpTopic classes etc, but I want old help to work with Prometheas too.

I welcome any advice :)

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Best regards,
Igor Stasenko.