Re: ANNOUNCE : HelpViewer 0.1

[Björn Giesler]

Hi,

On Monday 20 January 2003 17:57, you wrote:
> Well you could put explicit tags in the .xlp file (with label) and refers
> to them in the document ...
> If we choose to use helpviewer.app for doing that context-sensitive help
> (why not), we could use a similar mechanism as now (nsworkspace's
> openfile), but we need to provide additional argument (the reference that
> we want to display). Else we could end with some DO invocation.

I think using HelpViewer for this doesn't seem to be such a good idea after 
all. The NSHelpManager API has

- (NSAttributedString*) contextHelpForObject: (id)object;
- (void) removeContextHelpForObject: (id)object;
- (void) setContextHelp: (NSAttributedString*) help withObject: (id) object;
- (BOOL) showContextHelpForObject: (id)object locationHint: (NSPoint) point;

...so everything is done via object pointers, and the returned value is an 
attributed string. I see no way to make an object pointer into an ascii tag 
that could be read from a .xlp file (is there any?), and the returned 
attibuted string suggests that the application opens its own NSTextView. 
Which I don't like, because it raises issues such as scrolling, navigation, 
images etc., plus adds code bloat.

I think that this API is not one of the sparkling points of OPENSTEP. :-/ Any 
ideas?

Regards,
                --Björn
-- 
Dipl.-Inform. Björn Giesler, IAIM, University of Karlsruhe (TH)
See http://wwwiaim.ira.uka.de/users/giesler for information.

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