GSoC/2013/Activity Help

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.

Although the initial proposal was to use Mallard for the help mechanism, the research done and the progress of the project proved that simply using the current help content would serve the purpose. Therefore with the approval of the mentors, the implementation with Mallard is dropped.

Objectives

Implement a help mechanism to view Help in the Activity
Support l10n for help content
Write help for more activities
Improve current help activity

Progress

View help for the Activity in the help itself

Help content for the current Activity can be viewed in the Activity itself. It will pop up in a window when the user enters the key combination ctrl+shift+h. If there is no help content for the Activity, an error message will be written to the log. I have used the bundle_id of the Activity to match it with the corresponding help content file (in html).

GitHub repo

ActivityHelp in Browse
ActivityHelp in Pippy

Support help content localization

For the help content I have generated the POT files using sphinx internationalization tools. The POT files are submitted to help_content project in Pootle with the emmense support of Chris. The help content is being translated.

Read Activity help in Sinhala

Update Help activity

Help activity was improved to so as to support localized help content. Before localization content is supported, Help activity was released with the help content in the form of html files, static content including images, css, javascript etc. With localized help content, there will be one set of static content and different html files for each and every language that help content is localized into. I have done mainly two modifications.

helplink file

helplink is a json file. It includes the bundle_id of the Activity and the name of the corresponding help content (html) file. This file will be used when viewing help content in the Activity. Following is the current version of helplink.json.

 {
   "org.laptop.sugar.ReadActivity": "read.html",
   "org.laptop.WebActivity": "browse.html",
   "org.laptop.Chat": "chat.html",
   "org.laptop.Calculate": "calculate.html",
   "org.eq.FotoToon": "fototoon.html",
   "org.laptop.RecordActivity": "record.html",
   "org.laptop.MeasureActivity": "measure.html",
   "org.laptop.Oficina": "paint.html",
   "org.sugarlabs.PortfolioActivity": "portfolio.html",
   "org.laptop.Memorize": "memorize.html",
   "org.laptop.Terminal": "terminal.html",
   "org.laptop.AbiWordActivity": "write.html",
   "org.laptop.TurtleArtActivity": "turtleart.html",
   "org.laptop.Pippy": "pippy.html",
   "org.laptop.TamTamMini": "tamtammini.html"
 }

directory structure modification

Update current help content

Implemented a Gtk window to view help in the activity
Help file matching with the respective activity is done
Studied the internationalization process with sphinx (http://sphinx-doc.org/intl.html)
Was successful in i18n with sphinx
Update current help content (Work in progress: https://git.sugarlabs.org/~callkalpa/help-activity-content/callkalpas-mainline/commits/content_update)

To-do

Implement a mechanism to show help content based on the current language
Send current help content to Pootle be translated
Write help for activities