[Qgis-developer] Context help is evil and old

[Jonathan Moules]

Hi Richard,
For reference, I opened a ticket on this a couple of months ago -
http://hub.qgis.org/issues/8699 - and had similar findings to yourself
Cheers,
Jonathan


On 27 November 2013 08:31, Richard Duivenvoorde <rdmailings at duif.net> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> while the idea of context help buttons in dialogs is great...
>
> In practice that help is either not available, or outdated or not
> translated or (differently) duplicated into the Documentation
> (and as a tranlator it is pretty boring to translate all the context
> help texts....).
>
> What about unifying all help in the Manual (website). With Sphinx (our
> docs are generated with it) it is pretty easy to point to a specific
> paragraph in the manual ( right click on the paragraph sign next to the
> heading ). Eg the section about loading shapfiles:
>
>
> http://www.qgis.org/en/docs/user_manual/working_with_vector/supported_data.html#loading-a-shapefile
>
> We could:
>
> 1) either just put a link into the context help so a connected user can
> jump to the docs website
>
> 2) or we could load that page in the QGIS help dialog (in a webkit widget)
>
> 3) or (??) we could try to package the docs into the QGIS install and
> load the local file inot the QGIS help dialog.
>
> Only 'problem' I see is that we maybe have to write some more
> specialized or more general paragraphs in the manual which are suited
> for the context help. I'm thinking about for example the description of
> all the functions in the field calculator etc. Or in case of the 'Open
> Vector Layer Dialog' about a more general paragraph about the loading of
> vector data via OGR.
>
> Another example of very different results for the same topic:
>
> The context help for delimited text context help is VERY verbose and
> helpfull:
>
>
> https://github.com/qgis/QGIS/blob/master/resources/context_help/QgsDelimitedTextSourceSelect
>
> While compared with the docs, these are rather thin:
>
>
> http://www.qgis.org/en/docs/user_manual/introduction/general_tools.html?highlight=delimited#add-delimited-text-layer
>
> So my proposal: let's get rid of help TEXT in the context help. Put all
> text (and energy) in DOCS and link to them or show them.
>
> Regards,
>
> Richard Duivenvoorde
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
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