From: Alex Fenton <alex@...>
Date: 2009-03-10T02:18:16+09:00
Subject: Re: Help files

Stuart Clarke wrote:
> Hi forum,
> 
> I am looking to have some form of help file/technical documentation to
> go alongside a GUI application. Basically on the click of a button (help
> button) a file will be opened in its native viewer eg adobe reader for a
> PDF file.
> 
> What is the best way to perform such a task in ruby, I am quite flexible
> as to the format of the help file either a PDF or compiled html.

It depends how sophisticated you want to get. If you simply want to 
display a PDF with help on a button being clicked, then pretty much any 
GUI should be able to do that. Call Ruby's system with 'start' [Windows] 
'open' [OS X] or 'xdg-open' [Linux] and the name of the file, eg

system "open myhelp.pdf"

If you want a more sophisticated help browser - eg context-specific 
links to sections from the GUI, searching, using the native Windows CHM 
help browser, see something like:

http://wxruby.rubyforge.org/doc/#online_help

Esp HelpController / HtmlHelpController. As Eric says, I'd expect the 
other heavyweight GUI toolkits (GNOME2, Qt) to offer something similar, 
though I couldn't find a reference to this for GNOME2.

alex