On Thu, Jan 19, 2012 at 9:46 AM, Richard Crozier
<address@hidden> wrote:
my two cents.
I worked on QtOctave, and think I made some worthwhile contributions
before it was superseded by the official GUI. I agree with everything
John says, except one thing which is regarding the documentation. It
should be possible to highlight a function in the GUI editor, hit F1 or
some equivalent and have the relevant documentation display in a help
browser of some kind, and certainly without requiring a network
connection. The help browser should also have a searchable index, with
the capability to add further functionality like this with time.
Another major improvement to the Matlab help browser would be the
ability to add your own notes to this documentation somehow. Can this
kind of thing be achieved with an external browser?
The help should also be able to display proper math symbols, ideally
described using latex markup or similar, something lacking in the online
docs at the moment incidentally.
You might want to take a look at the Qt Help Framework. It might be useful for building a searchable help system.
http://developer.qt.nokia.com/doc/qt-4.8/qthelp-framework.html
It says you typically display the help in a QTextBrowser, which can display some HTML:
For the equations and math symbols, perhaps one of those (online?) tex-to-image converters can be run in a batch mode when generating the documentation.
Apologies if you were already aware of all of this.
Pat