GIMP help in 2.6

Hi,

I'd like to point out some changes and new features in GIMP 2.5.1
affecting the GIMP help system. I'd love if some of you guys could give
it some testing and give feedback.

?The help browser has been ported from gtkhtml2 to WebKit. It now does a
much better job at rendering the user manual. While doing the port, I
have also streamlined the user interface further and the help browser is
now even more compact and hopefully easier to use.

The user manual can now be used online. There's an option in the
Preferences dialog for this. When selected, the user does not need to
install the gimp-help package and the context help will access the
online user manual directly. The plan for GIMP 2.6 is to make this even
easier and to ask the user if the online version should be used when she
tries to access the help for the first time and no local copy of the
user manual is installed.

I hope you will like these changes.


Sven

Sven Neumann (Dienstag, 1. Juli 2008, 23:25):
> ?The help browser has been ported from gtkhtml2 to WebKit. It now
> does a much better job at rendering the user manual. While doing the
> port, I have also streamlined the user interface further and the help
> browser is now even more compact and hopefully easier to use.

Is this WebKit from http://webkit.org/?

It looks like they don't provide stable packages, and I don't have the
time (and probably knowledge) to fix their bugs.

Is there any other source? If not, is it possible to compile gimp
without WebKit (or without gimp-help-browser if necessary)?

Ulf

Hi,

On Wed, 2008-07-02 at 21:25 +0200, Ulf-D. Ehlert wrote:

> Is this WebKit from http://webkit.org/?

Yes, the GTK+ port of this browser engine.

> It looks like they don't provide stable packages, and I don't have the
> time (and probably knowledge) to fix their bugs.

A stable webkit release (1.0) is supposed to be available very soon now.

> Is there any other source? If not, is it possible to compile gimp
> without WebKit (or without gimp-help-browser if necessary)?

That's what happens automatically if webkit is not installed.


Sven

Hi,

On Fri, 2008-07-04 at 08:59 +0200, Sven Neumann wrote:

> A stable webkit release (1.0) is supposed to be available very soon now.

It even has been released while I was on vacation. The 1.0.1 release is
available from
http://people.freedesktop.org/~alp/webkit/gtk/webkit-1.0.1.tar.gz


Sven

Hi Sven,

On Sat, Jul 05, 2008 at 01:18:12PM +0200, Sven Neumann wrote:
> On Fri, 2008-07-04 at 08:59 +0200, Sven Neumann wrote:
>
> > A stable webkit release (1.0) is supposed to be available very soon now.
>
> It even has been released while I was on vacation. The 1.0.1 release is
> available from
> http://people.freedesktop.org/~alp/webkit/gtk/webkit-1.0.1.tar.gz
I couldn't resist trying it out. Installed webkit and now my help
browser works again - yay!

I tried the preferences switch so the help browser loads the manual from
the internet and run into a problem. When pressing F1 I get an error
message:

There is a problem with the GIMP user manual.

Could not open 'http://docs.gimp.org/en/gimp-help.xml' for reading:
Operation not supported

Please check your installation

I checked with mozilla and the path is correct. Do I need to setup a
GIMP2_HELP_URI again or something? I run GIMP with --verbose and got the
following information:

HELP: request for help-id '(null)' from help-domain '(null)'

If it's a bug I file a report.

Cheers,

Hi,

On Sat, 2008-07-05 at 18:11 +0200, Roman Joost wrote:

> I tried the preferences switch so the help browser loads the manual from
> the internet and run into a problem. When pressing F1 I get an error
> message:
>
> There is a problem with the GIMP user manual.
>
> Could not open 'http://docs.gimp.org/en/gimp-help.xml' for reading:
> Operation not supported

Looks like you don't have gvfs installed. Unfortunately there's no way
to check that at compile time. It should be considered a dependency for
gio.


Sven

Hi,

On Sat, 2008-07-05 at 18:11 +0200, Roman Joost wrote:

> I tried the preferences switch so the help browser loads the manual from
> the internet and run into a problem. When pressing F1 I get an error
> message:
>
> There is a problem with the GIMP user manual.
>
> Could not open 'http://docs.gimp.org/en/gimp-help.xml' for reading:
> Operation not supported

You should get a slightly more useful error message now. But I am still
puzzled why your installation of GIO/GVFS doesn't handle http: requests.
I will get a new computer at work this week and it will run Ubuntu
Hardy. I will check if I can reproduce the problem there.

In the meantime I have also added a check for the local user manual
installation. So if a user requests help and the manual is not
installed, she will see a dialog asking if she wants to use the online
version instead.


Sven

Hi Sven,

On Tue, Jul 01, 2008 at 11:25:31PM +0200, Sven Neumann wrote:
> I'd like to point out some changes and new features in GIMP 2.5.1
> affecting the GIMP help system. I'd love if some of you guys could give
> it some testing and give feedback.
> [...]
>
> I hope you will like these changes.
I very much like this feature and I think it will help users as well
skipping the part of installing the manual and fetch it over the net as
well (if they have a permanent connection).

Thanks for your work!