[docbook-apps] Field-level context-sensitive help

[Pirjo Tinat <ptinat at yahoo dot com>]

Hi all!

I have been thinking about setting up a context sensitive help for a
Windows application that would be called for each field in a dialog
and displayed as a small pop-up window or a tooltip text. The
contents would be just plain text (for a tooltip) or html (to allow
use of graphics and formatting in a pop-up). (An other possibility
would be to embed the help to the application itself - for instance,
a help pane that would show appropriate help text depending on user's
focus, but I'm not sure how that is technically achived. I guess only
plain text would be allowed.)

I have written for the user manual already the descriptions for each
field, now I would like to extract those descriptions each to a
separate file.

Is the following possible?

1. Use <variablelist> for each dialog, in which each <varlistentry>
represents a field, <term> is the name of the field (as visible in
GUI) and <listitem><para> elements include the description.

2. Extract the content of each <listitem><para> element into
.txt/.html files, using the ids of the <term>s as filenames.

How is step 2 performed?

Or is there some other way? I do not want to write twice each
description, so both the manual and the context-sensitive help must
use the same source. We are talking about hundreds of fields.

I'm not implementing this yet, as the software developers are too
busy, but I'm interested to know if this is possible, so I can
suggest it for future releases or different projects.


Thank you in advance,

Pirjo :-)

Pirjo Tinat
Documentation specialist
Done Information Oy
Tukholmankatu 2
FIN-00250 Helsinki, Finland



	
	
		
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