The all window buttons

A­bout this Tu­to­ri­al and the Con­text Help
While this Tu­to­ri­al gives an ab­stract of our pro­ject, in­tro­duc­ing the gen­er­al out­line of the ap­pli­ca­tion in or­der to get the user ready a­bout its prac­tice (and will be up­grad­ed in time with all the re­quired doc­u­men­ta­tion to be con­sulted on line), the in­ter­nal Con­text Help will deep­en de­tails as much as pos­si­ble re­lat­ed to the par­tic­u­lar needs or cir­cum­stanc­es that the user can meet in his job, not last his pro­gram's ver­sion. In ad­di­tion, the FAQ sec­tion will be up­dat­ed with the an­swers to ques­tions and feed­back.
The con­text help op­er­a­tion was con­ceived as a dou­ble so­phis­ti­cat­ed sam­ple of how the hy­phen­a­tion can be ap­plied both to a plain text, out­side any ed­i­tor fa­cil­i­ty and pag­i­nation, and to the same HTML doc­u­ment, but pro­cessed like any ad­vanced ed­i­tor textcode, since it was used the hy­phen stan­dard sym­bol in­stead of the soft hy­phen HTML en­ti­ty. The user can switch read­ing eve­ry page from­/to ei­ther modes.

The Help win­dow set­tings

Help window

The help Tree and his­to­ry

Help's own windows

Im­ag­es help sup­port

Help screenshots

The User's re­marks

The User's remarks

The Help brows­er
The Help cur­sor and the win­dow po­si­tion­ing.
The spe­cial Help cur­sor, an ar­row with the ques­tion mark to the right, in the im­age a­bove has noth­ing to do with the hint that fol­lows what­ev­er cur­sor shape, and may ap­pear wherewer the mouse moves over. This point­er shows that the Help is ready to dis­play in­for­ma­tion a­bout the first clicked area or con­trol.
Not eve­ry­thing is in­clud­ed, i.e. the help cur­sor may not ap­pear over some el­e­ments, like the big i­cons a­bove, whose an­i­ma­tion prob­a­bly o­ver­rides it; how­ev­er the help win­dow is opened by any click on a helped item and the most com­mands are di­rect­ly ac­ces­si­ble, or are in­di­rect­ly de­scribed into the ap­pro­pri­ate sec­tions.
Once the cur­sor changed to Help, this func­tion made ac­tive must be in­voked a­bout some­thing, be­fore re­gaining its nor­mal shape. If closed when fin­ished, the con­text-help win­dow may be ac­ti­vat­ed eve­ry time is need­ed. As long as it is opened, eve­ry new sub­ject will re­place the last into the same win­dow, which can be kept al­ways to front or let be­hind oth­er win­dows, by a com­mand from the sys­tem menu of the help icon on the Task-bar.
The win­dow's prop­er­ties.
The Help win­dow con­sists in two main ar­e­as: a white up­per and left bor­der, with 2D i­cons as com­mands .(1) and a main area dis­play­ing text.
It is char­ac­ter­ized from some spe­cial func­tion­al­ities that should make it easy to dis­place and use:
  • start­ing from a 400 x 304 pix­el de­fault size, it can be moved by sim­ply hold­ing the mouse but­ton when the cur­sor is over all its area; right-click to close.
  • To re­size put the cur­sor over a bor­der where it chang­es to dou­ble ar­row, and drag; the fi­nal size will be al­ways be vis­i­ble to the up­per right space.(2), mak­ing the win­dow us­a­ble as a han­dy rul­er from 240x240 pix­els to 640x640; it has prompt­ly helped to e­val­u­ate the size of im­ag­es. Three lit­tle i­cons to the left .(3) al­low the quick re­siz­ing of the win­dow in hor­i­zon­tal (572x354), square (435x435) and ver­ti­cal (354x572) shapes.
  • All the de­fault fonts can be re­sized by one pix­el strok­ing the "+" or "-" keys.
  • A big­ger Home sym­bol to the up­per left cor­ner .(4) o­pens the Help in­dex as a Tree that can be ex­pand­ed and col­lapsed in var­i­ous modes: eve­ry item can be book­marked to be di­rect­ly searched and reached, chang­ing its icon to a big­ger note­book. Typ­ing into the text box you can search the In­dex for i­tems too, in full or par­tial match.
  • A down ar­row sym­bol .(5) o­pens the His­to­ry in­dex, up­dat­ed to the last 12 vis­it­ed i­tems; the left and right ar­rows .(6) al­low to di­rect­ly browse those his­to­ry pag­es.
  • The print­er i­cons let you print all the book­marked pag­es (up­per) or just the cur­rent page (low­er).
  • The low­er ar­row i­cons let you scroll the text, by one line (small­er brown ar­rows) or by page ex­tent (green ar­rows). The home icon re­turns to the first line; the Home, End and Ar­rows keys are us­a­ble as well: the ar­rows ac­tion may get con­tin­u­ous scroll­ing.
  • Since this help text is in­ten­tion­al­ly paint­ed on a graph­ic back­ground, to give the idea of a com­plete­ly cus­tom­ized hy­phen­a­tion rou­tine, and the page width can be changed at any time, wait arrow this ar­row sym­bol may ap­pear for a while to show that the load­ed text is beeing parsed.
  • The eye sym­bol gen­er­al­ly switch­es to a pro­gram screen­shot of the sub­ject; rare­ly to a graph­ic im­age or an ex­ter­nal ref­er­enced file.
  • To­geth­er with the page Ti­tle - cen­tered in­side a white bor­der - two more ti­tles a­bove are click­a­ble to link de­scrip­tions from the in­ter­me­di­ate and up­per (or con­nect­ed) lev­el into the chap­ters tree.
    custom excerpts
  • A val­ue-add­ed fea­ture is giv­en by the User Re­marks func­tion­al­i­ty, a spe­cial in­ter­ac­tive bi­par­tite page in re­siz­a­ble frames, where the user can drop his own notes com­bined with copy­/past­ed ex­cerpts from the cur­rent help page, re­pro­duced be­low.
  • Fi­nal­ly, a true val­ue add­ed fea­ture: the in­te­gra­tion into the help ap­pli­ca­tion of the ver­sa­tile sys­tem brows­er func­tion­al­i­ty. While the hy­phen­at­ed plain text a­bove is­sues a some­how prim­i­tive lay­out, scroll­ing over an in­de­pend­ent back­ground, the brows­er mode han­dles a doc­u­ment with the fea­tures of the sys­tem brows­er, pref­er­a­bly vers. 5 or lat­er of In­ternet Ex­plor­er™ (old­er ver­sions were not test­ed). To switch mode sim­ply click the Ex­plor­er icon, that will turn into the hy­phen­ator-Pro icon to get back.
    The help page will be cre­at­ed on your disk and dis­played a­gain into its best for­mat. Here a com­bo box brows­er-style will show its ad­dress, as any oth­er page opened in the cur­rent ses­sion, plus oth­er tu­to­ri­al se­lec­ta­ble web pag­es; any ad­dress can be en­tered to browse doc­uments eve­ry­where. With this set­ting, the sin­gle print­er icon will trans­fer the print jobs to the sys­tem con­trol; the book­marked pag­es op­tion can­not be ac­tive then.
    The sam­ple to the left is work­ing like a demo with all the spe­cial fea­tures (you can still load this page from the in­ter­nal menu ;).

 the Tutorial Menu

 the Main Menu



The Context Help

[resize 800x600] Dec. 23, 2006