<ahelp></ahelp> - Extended tips in Helpcontent & VCL + Glade

[Caolán McNamara]

On Sun, 2015-08-23 at 08:37 -0300, Olivier Hallot wrote:
> Hi all
> 
> Just playing with a new linux master build today and I found that the
>  
> <property name="tooltip_markup" translatable="yes"> bla bla 
> bla</property>
> 
> of a widget in a UI dialog, edited by Glade, indeed acts like an
> extended tip (<ahelp></ahelp>) for help content for the widget, 
> provided
> the "extented tips" in Tools - Options - General - Extended tips" is
> unmarked.
> 
> In other words, it is possible to have extended tips moved into these
> dialogs.


What is probably a better fit is to leave the tooltip .ui field for the
short "normal" tooltips. And use the "accessibility description" for
the big long extended tips that are current in help.

> 
> The benefits I see are
> 
> * Have the text of the e.t. in the UI and facilitate translation job
> (context)

agreed, and it also has the advantage that the "extended tips" are
always available even if help is not installed.

Another advantage is that the current ahelp tags have a "this refers to
the last defined helpid" i.e. "." markup and this is horribly broken in
a huge number of cases :-(

> * a quite large work of moving e.t. from helpcontent to UI.

Another disadvantage might be increased size of the default download
and install.

> * An impact in the translations of the UI (not sure it can be 
> automated).

This, "impact in the translations" is the problem really from my side.
It's the dev<->translator bridging. Ideally on the dev-side we'd be
able to e.g. make all the changes ourselves and update the .po files
with the moved strings and push them to translation website and there
would then be no additional translator work.


> * when unmarking Extended tips in the Options, we loose e.t. of 
> toolbars and other non-Glade UI objects.
> 
> * by filling the tooltip_markup property, e.t. are always enabled in 
> a dialog.

I think these problems can be solved by moving extended tips into the
a11y description and considering them both the same thing.


Markus has an extended-tip extraction tool as ./bin/extract-tooltip.py
FWIW

C.