[texworks] Update on Some help Information

[Jonathan Kew]

On 8 Oct 2009, at 12:32, Paul A Norman wrote:

> Dear TexWorks developers - Users,
>
> I have been able to intergrate the processes on the help files I  
> have been working on so that there is a combined interface.  This  
> gives intergrated access and searching to Nasa LaTeX Caoomand and  
> Environments help, Uk Faq, Ctan package information, and Alain's  
> TeXWorks html help.
>
> I am debugging and working at speeding things up as much as possible
>
> On the Nasa help, I am starting to work through with Helmut Kopka  
> and Patrick W. Daly's Guide to LateX 4th edition verifying things  
> against the points you raised about the documentations age Jonathan.
>
> I would like to next focus on some packages that could do with  
> integrated help.  I am considering looking at graphicx, hyperref,  
> color issues, and flowfram.
>
> Johnathan, I would like to ask please, could there be a dedicated  
> directory name under the TeXWorks binary that I could safely use  
> please for any one who wants to add what I am doing to their  
> TeXWorks work flow?

Hi Paul,

This looks like becoming a really great collection of resources!

What I'd like to do in a while, once things are reasonably stable, is  
to bundle at least some of this with the package that's distributed,  
and have it available via the Help menu. I'm not sure how your  
"combined interface" will fit with this -- it's certainly nice to have  
an integrated lookup across all the documents, but at the same time, I  
think it's probably nice to have browsable starting-points for each of  
the resources.

If you create a new folder within the texworks-help directory, and  
(optionally) language-coded subdirectories within that, texworks will  
look for a file "index.html" in there. If it finds one, a menu item  
will automatically be added to the Help menu to launch this with your  
default browser. The menu item will be the subdirectory name, or you  
can provide a one-line text file "tw-help-title.txt" to override it.  
So this already lets you experiment with new Help resources.

The next step will be to (a) add support for a similar texworks-help  
subdirectory within the TW library folder (along with the config  
files, dictionaries, etc) so that you can add "personal" resources  
separately from those distributed with the package; and (b) make it  
easy to do a direct lookup of a selected word/command/etc from within  
texworks, by passing it via the URL that is sent to the browser. I  
think this should be easy to do if I provide access to the texworks  
"openUrl" handler from QtScript.

If I have time at the weekend, perhaps I can look into this and get an  
experimental build posted for you to try....

JK