Hi,

Sven Neumann wrote:

We can of course add a gimprc option for the Help button but my question is if it is a good idea to add such a button per default.

I think it's a good idea having a help button by default.

Cheers, Dave.

On 03.10.2004, at 17:51, Sven Neumann wrote:

We can of course add a gimprc option for the Help button but my question is if it is a good idea to add such a button per default.

I like your idea very much.

It might make sense to get an opinion from the usability guys though. Maybe have any suggestions how to address the potential issues you've raised.

Servus,
Daniel

On 04.10.2004, at 10:28, Sven Neumann wrote:

It might make sense to get an opinion from the usability guys though. Maybe have any suggestions how to address the potential issues you've raised.

Who are the usability guys?

Ellen Reitmayr would be a good start. Maybe the Ximian usability guys or the Sun HIG people.

Servus, Daniel

Hi,

first of all: it is a great idea to add help buttons to all dialogs. Not only that it makes it more obvious that GIMP has a help system, but it also offers the opportunity of providing *real* context sensitive help. That's exactly what we once-in-a-while users need 8-)

I checked the gnome hig to see if there are rules when to apply a help button to dialogs, but unfortunately, that section is missing. However, the general rule should be: 'If a dialog requires further action and a specific help is available, provide a help button.' That means - a simple confirmation dialog where no further settings/actions can be performed does not need to have a help button. - if no help is available for a dialog, do not provide the help button as it will confuse and annoy the user (it will keep the user from calling help in the future. Does help_func check that?) - if possible, provide context sensitive help (open the corresponding chapter in the help pages).

Please also make sure that the help button appears at the same location in each dialog. Best place it at the lower left edge, possibly leaving some space to the action buttons (I know, this will make the dialog even broader, but it will also aid to unclutter the layout).

Hope that was of help,

greetings /ellen

On Mon, 2004-10-04 at 16:33, Sven Neumann wrote:

Hi,

the responses have been very positive so far, so I've given this a little more testing. There are a couple of dialogs where the help button is not appropriate and just looks odd. These are mainly confirmation dialogs like for example the one you get when you close an image. I suggest that we don't set a help-id on such dialogs. We can set the help_func so that pressing F1 opens the help-browser with the default page but there would not be a help button. In particular this means removing the following help-ids:

#define GIMP_HELP_FILE_NEW_CONFIRM "gimp-file-new-confirm" #define GIMP_HELP_FILE_SAVE_OVERWRITE "gimp-file-save-overwrite" #define GIMP_HELP_FILE_CLOSE_CONFIRM "gimp-file-close-confirm" #define GIMP_HELP_FILE_QUIT_CONFIRM "gimp-file-quit-confirm" #define GIMP_HELP_EXPORT_CONFIRM_DIALOG "gimp-export-confirm-dialog"

Would that make sense?

There are a couple of other dialogs where the help button disturbs the dialog layout and I am sure there are some dialogs that I didn't look at yet. So if you agree with the above change I will investigate what needs to be done to make the help button configurable. If it turns out that this is feasible, I would commit this change so that it can see some more testing with the 2.1.6 release.

Sven _______________________________________________ Gimp-developer mailing list
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On Tue, 2004-10-05 at 13:20, Sven Neumann wrote:

No, there is no way for GIMP to find out whether a particular help page exists. Actually there is always a help page available but for some topics it will simply say something along the lines of: "No help has been written on this topic yet. If you want to help, join the help authors...". IMO this is acceptable.

Yes, that's very acceptable (-> What annoys the user is when she isn't told that there are no corresponding help pages, starts to search the contents but does not find appropriate help...)

/ellen

On 05.10.2004, at 13:20, Sven Neumann wrote:

authors...". IMO this is acceptable. It would however be interesting to know how many of the help-ids are already covered in gimp-help-2. Do such figures exist?

In the gimp-help-2 module there is a docs/makeStatistics.py written by Roman which is supposed to deliver that information. Since one of my machines just borked, I cannot provide the results ATM.

Servus, Daniel

On Tue, Oct 05, 2004 at 03:25:09PM +0200, Daniel Egger wrote:

On 05.10.2004, at 13:20, Sven Neumann wrote:

authors...". IMO this is acceptable. It would however be interesting to know how many of the help-ids are already covered in gimp-help-2. Do such figures exist?

In the gimp-help-2 module there is a docs/makeStatistics.py written by Roman which is supposed to deliver that information. Since one of my machines just borked, I cannot provide the results ATM.

General statistics:
===================

Language: fr Found titles for: 359 ids - Todo: 12 ids Percent done: |######### | 96%

Language: de Found titles for: 249 ids - Todo: 122 ids Percent done: |###### | 67%

Language: en Found titles for: 588 ids - Todo: -217 ids Percent done: |###############| 158%

Language: sv Found titles for: 45 ids - Todo: 326 ids Percent done: |# | 12%

Language: zh_CN Found titles for: 288 ids - Todo: 83 ids Percent done: |####### | 77%

Note, that this result don't cover any additional written documents.

Greetings,