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Rewrite the help, shown inside ECCE

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Assessment

Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Newbie friendliness
35/100
Issue type
Feature
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Active
Tech stack
c, markdown, python
Domain
desktop, documentation

Research direction

Start with the existing help-key entries in data/client/config, the client packaging, and the screenshot workflow at tools/screenshots/look.py; the issue also points to the first-calculation tutorial (#12) and window-layout work (#210). The viewer and context links are estimated at about a day, but content is planned chapter by chapter after the layout settles. Done means current, task-oriented help is available in the built-in offline viewer, with context links and tooltips, and the old pages can eventually be retired.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

Summary

ECCE's help is the PNNL-era HTML manual: about 8.6 MB of pages, opened in an external web browser and, in server mode, served by the data server. It describes the 2010 application rather than the current one. This issue replaces it with new help that is written for the current program and shown inside ECCE.

Until the new help is ready, the old pages ship with the client package (7bc69ed0), so Help works on client-only installs and in local mode (#216).

Design

  • Viewer: wxHtmlHelpController. wx's built-in help window has a contents tree, an index and search, and works offline. It behaves the same on Linux, macOS and Windows (#133). No browser or web server is involved.
  • Context help. F1 or a dialog's Help button opens the help at that dialog's topic. The existing help-key entries (about 274 in data/client/config) are remapped to the new topics or removed.
  • Tooltips on fields carry one-line explanations, so most questions are answered without opening the help window.
  • Source. Markdown in the repository, converted at build time with python3-markdown (a build dependency only; nothing is added at run time) into one help book that ships in the client package.
  • Content. Short and task-oriented: setting up a geometry optimisation, running on a cluster, reading the MO diagram, and so on. The "first calculation" tutorial (#12) is the first chapter.
  • Screenshots come from tools/screenshots/look.py (#210), so they can be regenerated whenever the windows change.

Order

The viewer and the context links take about one day. The content is written chapter by chapter after the window chrome and layout work (#210) has settled, so that the text and screenshots stay current. The old pages are removed in 9.x once the new help covers the same tasks.

Dominant language
C
Stars
10
Forks
8
Avg merge
21m
Merged PRs (30d)
1

Getting set up

This project ships no dev container, Dockerfile or contributing guide, so setting up is up to you: start from its README, and see our first-contribution guide for the general steps.

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

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