Hi,
first of all: it is a great idea to add help buttons to all dialogs. Not
only that it makes it more obvious that GIMP has a help system, but it
also offers the opportunity of providing *real* context sensitive help.
That's exactly what we once-in-a-while users need 8-)
I checked the gnome hig to see if there are rules when to apply a help
button to dialogs, but unfortunately, that section is missing. However,
the general rule should be: 'If a dialog requires further action and a
specific help is available, provide a help button.' That means
- a simple confirmation dialog where no further settings/actions can be
performed does not need to have a help button.
- if no help is available for a dialog, do not provide the help button
as it will confuse and annoy the user (it will keep the user from
calling help in the future. Does help_func check that?)
- if possible, provide context sensitive help (open the corresponding
chapter in the help pages).
Please also make sure that the help button appears at the same location
in each dialog. Best place it at the lower left edge, possibly leaving
some space to the action buttons (I know, this will make the dialog even
broader, but it will also aid to unclutter the layout).
Hope that was of help,
greetings
/ellen
On Mon, 2004-10-04 at 16:33, Sven Neumann wrote:
Hi,
the responses have been very positive so far, so I've given this a
little more testing. There are a couple of dialogs where the help
button is not appropriate and just looks odd. These are mainly
confirmation dialogs like for example the one you get when you close
an image. I suggest that we don't set a help-id on such dialogs. We
can set the help_func so that pressing F1 opens the help-browser with
the default page but there would not be a help button. In particular
this means removing the following help-ids:
#define GIMP_HELP_FILE_NEW_CONFIRM gimp-file-new-confirm
#define GIMP_HELP_FILE_SAVE_OVERWRITEgimp-file-save-overwrite
#define GIMP_HELP_FILE_CLOSE_CONFIRM gimp-file-close-confirm
#define GIMP_HELP_FILE_QUIT_CONFIRM gimp-file-quit-confirm
#define GIMP_HELP_EXPORT_CONFIRM_DIALOG gimp-export-confirm-dialog
Would that make sense?
There are a couple of other dialogs where the help button disturbs the
dialog layout and I am sure there are some dialogs that I didn't look
at yet. So if you agree with the above change I will investigate what
needs to be done to make the help button configurable. If it turns out
that this is feasible, I would commit this change so that it can see
some more testing with the 2.1.6 release.
Sven
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