[PD] implementing tooltips WAS: Pd-extended 0.43 updates: lots of new editing features

[Hans-Christoph Steiner]

On Mon, 11 Jul 2011 19:57 -0700, "Jonathan Wilkes" <jancsika at yahoo.com>
wrote:
> 
> 
> --- On Tue, 7/12/11, Hans-Christoph Steiner <hans at at.or.at> wrote:
> 
> > From: Hans-Christoph Steiner <hans at at.or.at>
> > Subject: Re: implementing tooltips WAS: [PD] Pd-extended 0.43 updates: lots of new editing features
> > To: "Jonathan Wilkes" <jancsika at yahoo.com>
> > Cc: "Mathieu Bouchard" <matju at artengine.ca>, "Martin Peach" <martin.peach at sympatico.ca>, "pd-list" <pd-list at iem.at>
> > Date: Tuesday, July 12, 2011, 4:40 AM
> > 
> > On Jul 11, 2011, at 10:03 PM, Jonathan Wilkes wrote:
> > 
> > > 
> > > 
> > > --- On Tue, 7/12/11, Mathieu Bouchard <matju at artengine.ca>
> > wrote:
> > > 
> > >> From: Mathieu Bouchard <matju at artengine.ca>
> > >> Subject: Re: implementing tooltips WAS: [PD]
> > Pd-extended 0.43 updates: lots of new editing features
> > >> To: "Hans-Christoph Steiner" <hans at at.or.at>
> > >> Cc: "Jonathan Wilkes" <jancsika at yahoo.com>,
> > "Martin Peach" <martin.peach at sympatico.ca>,
> > "pd-list" <pd-list at iem.at>
> > >> Date: Tuesday, July 12, 2011, 3:28 AM
> > >> On Mon, 11 Jul 2011, Hans-Christoph
> > >> Steiner wrote:
> > >> 
> > >>> IMHO, I don't think we should support other
> > ways of
> > >> specifying the help file. There are very few
> > objects that
> > >> use it, those are fixed in Pd-extended, it'll add
> > a lot to
> > >> the work of doing this, etc. etc.  So I say
> > just take
> > >> the object name and add the '-help' to it. 
> > That covers
> > >> 99.5% of objects.  Then once its working, it
> > should be
> > >> possible to go back and add hacks to support hacks
> > ;)
> > >> 
> > >> c_helpname is not a hack, it doesn't need to be
> > «fixed»,
> > >> and it shouldn't be «fixed». It's there for a
> > reason.
> > > 
> > > One thing I'm running into is that c_helpname doesn't
> > help with abstractions-- it obviously just returns
> > "canvas".  I guess I could then compare to the first
> > atom in te_binbuf and if it's not "pd" then it's the name of
> > the abstraction.  But that still doesn't get me the
> > dir.
> > 
> > 
> > You could look for the standard help patch location first,
> > and if that fails, use c_helpname to solve the issue that
> > Matju brought up.
> 
> That still doesn't help with abstractions, because c_helpname is still
> "canvas".

It helps if it first finds the help patch right next to the
abstraction's file in the same folder.  Then it wouldn't even check
c_helpname.
 
> Additionally, internal objects don't have a c_externdir in 0.43 vanilla,
> but I guess even the vanilla objects are going to be in their own lib so
> that won't matter going forward, right?

This is the case where it would fall back to using c_helpname.  Like
this:

- build helpfile path using c_externdir, classname and '-help.pd'
- else if above file does not exist, try c_helpname
- else, use built-in defaults (or not).

That should cover all cases, including abstractions, internals, etc.

.hc