Re: Help on adding help
Re: Help on adding help
- Subject: Re: Help on adding help
- From: Jessica Kahn <email@hidden>
- Date: Thu, 23 Aug 2001 15:40:55 -0700
Although I'm not one of the folks responsible for HI decisions for the
Help system, I do know that a conscious decision was made in X to drive
the user to ask questions of the Help Viewer, rather than to have big
tables of contents or indices. These sorts of things can always change,
though, based on user feedback and other factors.
Your idea about having a way to display the idx files to the user is an
interesting one.
Would you mind filing a bug (using the bugreporter.apple.com)
encapsulating this feature-request information? We don't currently have
one like it. I only ask that you do it so that you can track the bugs
progress in the future, otherwise I'd do it myself.
Thanks!
--Jess
On Thursday, August 23, 2001, at 12:55 PM, Gary C Martin wrote:
On Thursday, August 23, 2001, at 07:35 pm, Jessica Kahn wrote:
Would you please clarify exactly what the last two items mean, though?
We do generate system-wide and book-wide tables of contents already,
but not indices. If you're requesting something that we don't already
have a feature request in our database for, I'd like to get it in
there.
Ok, it went something like this:
UI: Single additional round push button icon in the Help Viewer for
indices.
Function: The feature would auto generate an alphabetical, linked index
of the currently viewed book text (or when at the top level contents
the union of all registered books) so that information can be more
easily browsed. Currently there seems no system integrated way for a
user to get a 'feel for what information may or may not be in there'.
At each level it relies on the document developers providing accurate,
hard coded index pages.
The top level help contents (and usually title pages) are often too
vague, leaving the user only the option of typing search strings to
explore. The Mac X help item is a good example, there are actually lots
of OS X topics covered (be it a little briefly in most cases) but the
only way a user will discover that information is by playing guess the
keyword.
I haven't delved too deeply in to the help indexing system, but I was
hoping that the above may be solved by finding a way of displaying the
help index files in a human readable form - directly with the Help
Viewer.
Regards,
Gary
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