RFC: generate docbook help files from whatsThis

[Felix Berger]

Hi,

I attached a rudimentary patch for kspy that provides a context menu on the 
object listview for objects which inherit QMenuBar or KJanusWidget.

When the item in the context menu is clicked the widget tree is traversed 
starting from these objects and docbook chapters are created using the 
whatsThis information for the widgets respectively menu items.

I had almost complete whatsThis documentation for an application of mine and I 
didn't want to duplicate efforts when creating the docbook help files, that's 
why I came up with the idea.

This approach could have several implications:

* It could help to get a documentation writer started, he could generate the 
documents for the most common widgets (main menubar, toolbars, and the 
settings dialog) and refine the generated docs.

* If it works out well and the whatsThis information is very accurate one 
could even consider using the generated documents without any further 
refinements. This would also alleviate translations, since the generation 
could be language agnostic using i18n() calls in the right places.

* I could create an extra application that also stores the widget's names for 
which files should be generated, so the documentation could be easily updated 
with new program versions.

The attached patch is very rudimentary and it was the first time I worked with 
QDom ;-)

Issues:

* Rich text in whatsThis text should be correctly transformed to docbook.
* Pictures used in whatsThis text should be correctly resolved for the docbook 
files.
* One could also think about generating a leaner xml document from the 
whatsThis texts and provide xsl stylesheets for transforming it to docbook.

Is this something remotely interesting or is this considered to be detrimental 
to the documentation's quality? Comments are welcome.

Sincerely,
Felix Berger

-- 
Try Debian GNU/Linux!
http://www.felix.beldesign.de/
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