GSoC/2013/MallardHelp

''' It was found that the objectives of the project can be achieved through the current help mechanism. Therefore Mallard was abandoned and more info on the current project is at http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/GSoC/2013/ActivityHelp '''

Introduction
This page presents the status of the project "Implement help mechanism for activities using Mallard". This project is being implemented as a GSoC 2013 project.

Following is a representation of the desired process.



In the current help system, the source docs are only of rst. This projects expands it to be either rst, markdown or html. Ultimately the doc will be converted to html using pandoc before converting to Mallard. Mallard is a topic oriented help documentation system. The help for each activity will be displayed in a pop up window (similar to view source) once the shortcut key is pressed.

The help maintainer is to take care of the process upto generating the final html file. The final html file will only be shipped with sugar so as to avoid any additional dependencies and to avoid any slowness. To display the help, a new Gtk Window will be implemented and shipped with sugar core. The help maintainer will be using pandoc, html to mallard script and yelp's xslt conversion before he commit the final html file.

Work so far

 * Help content of the Help activity which is in rst has been converted to Markdown. The conversion was done using pandoc . The Markdown files are push at a fork of the help-activity-content. (This is not relevant anymore since we are using html as the final file format before Mallard conversion)


 * A python script to convert from html to mallard is being developed.


 * A Gtk Window is implemented with WebKit to display the help for each activity. The shortcut key is [Alt][Shift]h

To-do

 * Develop a script to convert html source files to Mallard
 * This is being developed already. I'll be adding more tags as I come across them
 * Display the relevant help file in the activity (map help file with their relevant activity)
 * Lokalization of help content
 * Write help for activities for which help is not there yet