| Re: Cool Help! [message #31545 is a reply to message #31403] |
Tue, 16 July 2002 13:38  |
JD Smith
Messages: 850
Registered: December 1999
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Senior Member |
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On Mon, 08 Jul 2002 07:53:47 -0700, Ben Tupper wrote:
> Hello,
>
> You may recall a while back that I had a thorn under my saddle regarding
> the IDL online help (in particular for IDL 5.5 which was padded on as a
> PDF.) Some folk passed along ideas about what might be nice for future
> online help system, and I faithfully sent those ideas along to RSI. I
> hope I sent them to the right place but I have no idea since I received
> no response.
> In the meantime, Andrew Cool had been cooking up a method for extracting
> the online help text (including that for IDL 5.5) via that neato IDL 5.5
> HTML help files that David is hosting at his website. I still don't
> know who crafted that
The help text came from IDLWAVE, the Emacs IDL programming/shell mode
(idlwave.org), which uses it for it's own internal fast text-help system.
The massive perl script get_rinfo does the heavy lifting, but relies on
the excellent pdftotext program by Derek Noonburg to extract raw text from
RSI's PDF help files. It also flags and corrects typoes, inserts updated
documentation that RSI was too lazy to integrate themselves ;), normalizes
calling sequences, etc. It employs all manner of crufty techniques to
digest this inconsistent data pile, to pare it down to something useful.
However, since get_rinfo creates lisp-indexed files for use by IDLWAVE,
converting the idlw-help.txt file it creates to HTML is somewhat
roundabout. It would be easy enough to take get_rinfo as a base, and, in
perl, create a full HTML-izer for RSI's PDF help texts which is rather
more optimal than the by-hand-from-ascii method Andrew employed. You
could create full indices, nicely-layed-out tables, cross-references
within help documents, etc.
If anyone is interested, get_rinfo is available as part of the IDLWAVE
package at idlwave.org.
JD
P.S. The other option is to bug RSI to include full HTML versions of
their help system... this may not be as hopeless as you'd guess.
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