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<html><head><meta content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1" http-equiv="Content-Type"><title>Writing Context Sensitive Help (coming in GNOME-2.0)</title><meta name="generator" content="DocBook XSL Stylesheets V1.40"><link rel="home" href="index.html" title="The GNOME Handbook of Writing Software Documentation"><link rel="up" href="index.html" title="The GNOME Handbook of Writing Software Documentation"><link rel="previous" href="indexs09.html" title="Packaging Applet Documentation"><link rel="next" href="indexs11.html" title="Referring to Other GNOME Documentation (coming in
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Context sensitive help, also known as "pop-up" help, will allow
a user to obtain help information about specific buttons or
parts of an application.
</p><p>
Context sensitive help is still under development and not all
the details are available at this time. However, the basics can
be shown here so that you can understand how the system will
work.
</p><p>
The Context Sensitive Help system is designed to allow the
developer to give an id to a particular portion of the User
Interface, for example, a button. Once the interface is complete
a Perl script can then be run against the interface code to
create a "map" file. This map file allows the developer or
writer to associate particular paragraph sections from an XML
document to the interface items.
</p><p>
The XML used for the document is a small XML DTD that is being
developed to use the same tags (albeit, much fewer) as DocBook
so that writers do not have to re-learn a new DTD.
</p><p>
Once the document is written and map file is complete, when the
user launches context sensitive help on the interface (either by
pressing a button and then clicking on the interface item they
want information on, or by right mouse clicking on the interface
item and selecting a pop-up menu item like "What's This") a
small transient window will appear with brief but detailed
information on the interface item.
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