Re: [ROOT] THtml and Contet menu

From: Rene Brun (Rene.Brun@cern.ch)
Date: Thu Nov 11 2004 - 13:34:57 MET


Matt,

Matt Palmer wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> This announcement worries me.  Firstly you mention the creation of yet
> another web browser.  I already have several perfectly good web browsers
> on my computer and I suspect all of them are somewhat better (faster,
> more secure etc etc) than TGHtml will be.

TGHtml is not a web browser. It is a portable widget in the ROOT GUI classes
to browse documents with hyperlinks (about 8 K lines of code).
Fons may want to add more comments on this point.

> 
> More worryingly though is the announcement about this help.root file.
> Does this mean that the ROOT documentation will no longer be available
> as good decent, normal, portable HTML?  Will I be locked in to using
> TGHtml to read the ROOT documentation?  Or will I still be able to use
> Mozilla or Firefox or whatever?

We are not proposing to suppress the html reference manual. I never said that!!
We want to improve the speed to get help on a particular object/class.
There is no regression here, only improvements.
If you want to use the slow procedure via the current web browsers, you can
do it.


Rene Brun

> 
> Perhaps a simpler way of achieving this would be to provide links to
> HTML documentation that open in an external browser (the mechanisms for
> doing this are admittedly platform dependent).
> 
> Thanks,
> Matt
> 
> Rene Brun wrote:
> > Hi Thomas,
> >
> > Good that you ask this question!
> >
> > We are just about to introduce a new class TGHtml.
> > We intend to use this class to browse any html document and in particular
> > the ROOT documentation itself that will be available in super compressed
> > form in $ROOTSYS/etc/help.root.
> > Axel Naumann is working on a modification of THtml that will generate help.root
> > file automatically (or any user classes).
> > The idea that you should be able to get quickly the help from the browser,
> > the command line, the pad, etc.
> >
> > The TGHtml class could be used to browse any kind of document. One could even
> > imagine that stdout from ROOT could be automatically hyperlinked with this
> > class.
> >
> > TGHtml will be introduced in CVS before the production release in December.
> > The adaptation to the ROOT help system is scheduled for the first quarter of
> > next year.
> >
> > Rene Brun
> >
> > Thomas Bretz wrote:
> >
> >>Dear all,
> >>
> >>I have a suggestion:
> >>It would be nice if there would be an option in the context menu of a
> >>class drawn to a pad (eg TH1F in a canvas) to show the class description
> >>as plain text on the console. I don't know how a implementation could
> >>look like without storing the whole class description in the executable
> >>and without starting a browser. Maybe it is possible to compile the
> >>class description text into a root file which can be opened by the user.
> >>If such a 'docu' file is open the corresponding help-entry appears in
> >>the context menus. Through the TBrowser now all class descriptions would
> >>be acessible. This gives an easy interface to an online-help in programs.
> >>
> >>What do you think?
> >>
> >>Best regards,
> >>Thomas.
> >
> >



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