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Subject: Field-level context-sensitive help
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 ___________________________________________________________ALL-NEW Yahoo! Messenger - all new features - even more fun! http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com
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