Dear Elaine and Eric,
Thanks a lot! I will probably get an example html page
as Elaine suggests, edit it and then use Eric's option
3) to bundle the help with the extension!
Jan
On 07/25/2014 07:29 PM, Eric Pettersen wrote:
Hi Jan,
You probably also
want to know how to get your extension to display the
help you write. Unfortunately the "Help" example in
the Programmer's Guide hasn't been written. Here's
what you need to know:
To enable the Help
button on a dialog (assuming you are using standard
Chimera dialogs from chimera.baseDialog [i.e. ModelessDialog
or ModalDialog], you set a class variable named "help"
to some value (analogous to the class variable
"buttons" for specifying what buttons to show). The
possible values are:
1) A path. This
is used for extensions whose documentation is bundled
with Chimera and therefore probably isn't relevant to
you.
3) A 2-tuple
consisting of a path and a module. The module can
either be your actual extension module object or a
string that can be combined with "import" to import
your extension. Your extension should have a
"helpdir" folder in it, and the path will be
interpreted relative to that folder. So as an
example, ("help.html", "myext") will use "import
myext" to import your extension, determine where that
is on the file system (using the module's __path__
variable) and then look in its "helpdir" folder to
find help.html and show that in a browser.
Let me know if you
need more info.
--Eric
Hi Jan,
We do strive for a reasonable amount of
consistency in the documentation that we ship, but
there is no official guideline at this point. We
only have something like that for the extension’s
GUI text:
<http://www.rbvi.ucsf.edu/chimera/docs/ProgrammersGuide/frameguidelines.html>
One reason is that the tools themselves vary
considerably in complexity and organization,
calling for variations on the basic documentation
format.
My advice would be to start with the HTML manpage
from the most similar existing tool (click Help
button, use browser to save HTML, then modify, at
least if you are comfortable directly text-editing
HTML). If you are not comfortable working with
HTML directly there are probably other routes to
ultimately generating HTML with a similar
organization and style.
We don’t mandate anything specific, however, and
the mere fact that you are actually thinking about
documentation is a positive! Of the various
extensions distributed by others, some have little
documentation, some are documented on websites,
and some have non-HTML documentation (PDF, etc.).
My general impression is that most don’t include
documentation in their download.
<http://www.rbvi.ucsf.edu/chimera/plugins/plugins.html>
Thanks for asking!
Elaine
-----
Elaine C. Meng, Ph.D.
UCSF Computer Graphics Lab (Chimera team) and
Babbitt Lab
Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry
University of California, San Francisco
On Jul 25, 2014, at 6:16 AM, Jan Kosinski <kosinski@embl.de>
wrote:
Hi,
I wrote a custom extension and now I want to
create a documentation page that upon clicking a
Help button opens a web page similarly to some
other Chimera tools.
Is there any html template, style guide or any
important instructions I should follow for
implementing it?
Thanks in advance,
Jan
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--
Jan Kosinski, PhD
Structural and Computational Biology Unit
European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL)
Meyerhofstrasse 1
69117 Heidelberg
Germany
_______________________________________________