Allan Rae wrote: > On 8 Feb 2002, Jean-Marc Lasgouttes wrote: > > I took a look at the new tooltip scheme, and I find it misleading > > for several reasons: > > > > - if there is no short tooltips, then it should not be possible to > > select the corresponding option in the dialog's 'help' popup. > > > > - the help 'popup' is not very intuitive IMO > > Remove both the help popup and the short tooltips. Display the long > text in tooltip if we must as I said earlier I prefer the text in the > bottom of the dialog.
The help popup is already dead. The short tooltips can be removed easily. Reading the short tooltips I already wrote in CVS and my local tree, I agree that they are not really important, unless we claim the user to be stupid. We have decided to use "tooltips" for long texts (actually I wouldn't call them tooltips, but "Hints" or "What's This?" or "Context Sensitive Help"), because the text_info field at the bottom blows up the dialog, and Dialogs like Citation and Doument are already blown up enough. Besides, for experienced users who don't need the Hints, this additional room is really wasted. > Really long help found in the "help" dialog should be in the > documentation and maybe (a very big maybe) we should bookmark the > documentation and allow the user to access the relevent section at a > button click (by reintroducing the help button) once such a facility > exists. In the meantime a label either at the very top or bottom > should tell the user which document and section they can find dialog > specific help in. There is no really (too) long help text in the dialog Herbert has already made. I think 3-4 lines for the Hints should be the limit. BTW: I try to give references to the approbriate sections in the Documentation. Of course bookmarks would be great, but how can we acces them from within "tooltips" or from another place? Is this (technically) possible? > > - the short tooltips are not useful (for ex 'do a case sensitive > > search' for the 'case sensitive' checkbox of search in citation > > insert is not very helpful). > > > > - having those short tooltips means extra work for translators and > > extra maintenance work. They do not come for free... > > Who gets to translate the long help text found in the dialog-specific > help dialog? How? It isn't included in the po files (doesn't seem > to be anyway). Put it in the documentation. This is a great time > for fixing up the reference manual. IMHO this is no problem. It is implemented in the *.C-Files at the moment, and so it will be translated the same way than the Alert-Messages (or the already existing Hints in Preferences). But we have to take care that the translators will have enough time to do this job. I am currently adding hints to all dialogs in my local tree. If you think the time has come (Help has been tested and decided to go in), please cry "Go!" at me. I know that Lars doesn't want this to happen before pre1. Jürgen. > > Allan. (ARRae)
