Anyone in need of a cross-platform StrongHelp viewer?

Shinto? ⛩️

Shinto?

It started as SHintoHTML, but I liked Shinto. And the icon for the resource app is something like that. ;-)

Are nested blockquotes supported in browsers?

I experimented with a more compact table view, and had some success with the Swing HTML view with non-breakable-spaces, which could also be used for the “indent”. Let’s see what the more common browsers do…

A bit of a progress update…it starts to look more like a 5-95 project instead of a 20-80 project.

There is now a “main manual page” which presents a directory of StrongHelp files just like StrongHelp does, cross-manual linking, full !Configure parsing for physical fonts as well as font styles (resulting in light CSS usage), tabs and tables support, link files…and I figured out a way to support the indent semantics with the CSS margin-left attribute that happens to be supported by Java’s incomplete HTML-3.2-and-a-bit-of-4.0-and-some-CSS implementation. Not implemented yet, needs a bit of a clean up on the generated HTML for proper CSS style usage.

The character escaping logic was also hard to reproduce exactly – Guttorm went to great lengths to make it easy for manual writers, but not so easy for StrongHelp itself. My last version now contains a heavily bugfixed version of what the initial version did.

The whole physical font and font style stuff leads down another rabbit hole – how to map the typical RISC OS fonts to Web fonts. At the moment, I am entirely happy to see Homerton as sans-serif and Trinity as serif :-)

New screenshots:
The new main manuals view:

SH-RefMan which shows correct fonts for headings and links and the relative size Line aka horizontal rule:

And as a special tribute to Steve Drain, the Basalt manual, which shows that I have nicked Steve’s idea on how to handle the “Parent” command in absence of an “Adjust Click on Window close icon opens the defined parent” logic:

The created HTML looks also mostly fine in Firefox, although the HTML is in no way optimized at the moment – no central style sheet, all defined styles are always dumped into every page. It will need quite a bit of thought to arrive at a batch-converter to produce a complete set of browsable HTML from any StrongHelp manual.

Drawfile converter still not started :-)

I have nicked Steve’s idea on how to handle the “Parent” command

You’re welcome!

I am so pleased to see the progress you have made and I am eagerly awaiting the finished program. ;-)

One thing that really confuses me is the Basalt.Contents (aka “Index”) page. The source looks like a giant table, but StrongHelp’s result looks like a hierarchically indented list?

The StrongHelp page is indented using multiples of TAB+space. This is generated by my own Shindy Contents/Index program.

The HTML translates this using table rows with multiple <td> tags. I am not sure how legal this is, but it works here on NetSurf and in Firefox on a PC. ;-)

If I can remember what I was thinking back then, that method follows from my ‘treat everything as a table’ technique.

One thing that really confuses me is the Basalt.Contents (aka “Index”) page. The source looks like a giant table, but StrongHelp’s result looks like a hierarchically indented list?

I finally figured out that one…the key to success is to understand that StrongHelp always does a regular table, and treats every last table cell in a row as having a cell span to fill up the rest of the columns.

So Basalt Index as well as eg. OS SCSI SCSI_Op now look a lot better. Not great because of the Swing HTML viewer, but I’m working on it.

Only a few things left to fix before a first sensible release (e.g. old-style links to other manuals like the BASIC one in the Assembly manual, not doing ul autodetection when in a table context…), keep an eye on https://github.com/hubersn/StrongHelpViewer

For a test drive of what the converter currently (or better: a version that did not support the background command and a few other things like the above mentioned table logic – see Misc and FAQ for examples) does, point your browser at https://www.huber-net.de/riscos/sh-refman/index.html

Subpages are currently done “all on one page” with internal linking, not sure if that is a good idea. I also ponder whether to adopt Rick’s StrawHelp solution of putting the title actually as a h1 on the page instead of relying on the much-too-small-text inside nowadays browser tabs.

First source code drop now on GitHub: https://github.com/hubersn/StrongHelpViewer

Binary coming soon.