Talk:Thunderbird:Help Documentation:Base

Just wondering why we don't use the "Using Mail" section of the Mozilla programs help as the basis for Thunderbird's documentation? --Roan

Why not Mozilla docs? Well...

Basically, the docs are overly large, make things more complicated than they should be, and don't fit well with the idea of "keep it simple" that Firefox and (to a lesser degree) Thunderbird have.--Waldo 06:28, 20 Jan 2005 (PST)

Using Mozilla docs as base for Thunderbird docs

I like the "keep it simple" philosophy, and I should have said base Thunderbird's help files on the Mozilla Suites help files. I think having something for people to use and work from may incourage more help. To that end, I have created a help extention for Thunderbird (This is the only place I've announced this extension).

If announced to the general Thunderbird user base, would this extension hurt or help this documentation project?--Roan 10:35, 20 Jan 2005 (PST)

Possibly, it's worth a try - I've mentioned it places, so they may have heard about it elsewhere. Still, more help can't hurt.--Waldo 22:28, 5 Mar 2005 (PST)

(and I just had a chance to try it on a Windows machine--not working, installs but there is something in the Windows version that is preventing it from parsing the xhtml files correctly.--Roan 16:07, 20 Jan 2005 (PST))

The extension may or may not come in handy; there's an extension posted on bug 253334 which I've been using to try and get Help working in Thunderbird. With what I have now, everything theoretically looks okay on the surface. The only problem is the Help menu isn't properly overlaid, which is a rather huge problem. Unfortunately, facilities to debug this are mostly non-existent, so I don't actually know what's wrong. However, I'll keep this in mind as I work on the bug.--Waldo 21:46, 27 Jan 2005 (PST)

Help extension working on Windows

I finally figured out the problem. On Windows the help system doesn't have the latin1 and HTMLspecial (i.e. mdash) character entities available. Don't know why Windows doesn't and Mac and Linux versions do. I downloaded the dtd files and referenced them in the xhtml files and help content is now visible. --Roan 17:34, 31 Jan 2005 (PST)

Getting the Help Viewer (mostly without content) in Thunderbird nightly builds

At this point, Help Viewer in Thunderbird is stuck because we're waiting for one fix that will make things quite a bit easier: Thunderbird needs to use toolkit's typeaheadfind. This bug's big because currently Help in Firefox uses the Find Bar, which is not available in Thunderbird. Editing the code so that Help in Thunderbird doesn't use the Find Bar is more or less trivial from a code standpoint (in fact, I've done this in bug 279227), but from a political standpoint it's not going to happen. (Basically, doing so would require the insertion of a few app-specific ifdefs in toolkit code, which is a no-go -- see the comments in the previously-mentioned bug.) I've appealed to mscott for him to add typeaheadfind to Thunderbird, so we'll see how that goes. (If you have the expertise to do this, feel free to create a patch -- I don't care who makes it so long as it gets done and done correctly.)--Waldo 22:25, 5 Mar 2005 (PST)