GSoC/2013/MallardHelp

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 (just as view source) once the shortcut key is pressed.

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.

• 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 Markdown source files to Mallard
  • Up to now the current plan is to use html as an intermediate format. It will be easy to convert markdown or rst to html, it is straight forward with pandoc. Next a xml parser will be used and the mallard file will be written. At the moment I am reading about xml parsing in python.
• Implement a mechanism to show help in each activity
• Extract strings from the help docs and feed them to pootle for l10n
• Write help for activities for which help is not there yet