Replace help with pages from the manual

[qgib]

Author Name: Paolo Cavallini (@pcav)
Original Redmine Issue: 9483

Redmine category:documentation_and_help
Assignee: Richard Duivenvoorde

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Translating help files in GUI is always the most painful part, and I am convinced it
is not the most useful one, as the content is often obsolete and not aligned with the
manual.
My suggestion is to:

• remove the help
• replace it with the relevant manpage, either including it or adding a link to the
  manual
• ship the manual together with the package (problem: shipping all the languages will
  be very heavy).

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Related issue(s): #17312 (duplicates)
Redmine related issue(s): 8564

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[qgib]

Author Name: Paolo Cavallini (@pcav)

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Duplicated in #17312

[qgib]

Author Name: Giovanni Manghi (@gioman)

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• easy_fix was configured as 0

[qgib]

Author Name: Alexander Bruy (@alexbruy)

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IMHO now addressed in master: Help buttons open corresponding web-pages.

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• status_id was changed from Open to Feedback
• description was changed from Translating help files in GUI is always the most painful part, and I am convinced it
  is not the most useful one, as the content is often obsolete and not aligned with the
  manual.
  My suggestion is to:

• remove the help

• replace it with the relevant manpage, either including it or adding a link to the
  manual

• ship the manual together with the package (problem: shipping all the languages will
  be very heavy). to Translating help files in GUI is always the most painful part, and I am convinced it
  is not the most useful one, as the content is often obsolete and not aligned with the
  manual.
  My suggestion is to:

• remove the help

• replace it with the relevant manpage, either including it or adding a link to the
  manual

• ship the manual together with the package (problem: shipping all the languages will
  be very heavy).

[qgib]

Author Name: Paolo Cavallini (@pcav)

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Huge improvement, thanks.
One crucial point is not fully addressed, however: when offline the user has to add the path to the manual by hand; probably it would be good to prefill the path and install the manual as an installation option.

[qgib]

Author Name: Richard Duivenvoorde (@rduivenvoorde)

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The offline help mode is some more work:

• we need to have a download service (per language a zip of around 170Mb) and build/upload these every day fresh on something like: https://docs.qgis.org/download/3.0/en etc?
• we could create a button near the input of the settings dialog where you can add url's?
• we need to think about where to save/unpack this zip, as installs can be very diverse. A normal user for example cannot save such zip in the install dir. OR we could/should make it part of the install scripts? Packaging for Linux?

Some other issue is that a fresh profile does not link to the right url (the setting is not picked up if you do not save your settings at least once): #25567

[qgib]

Author Name: Paolo Cavallini (@pcav)

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Well understood, thanks Richard for the analysis.
I suggest to leave this ticket open for future reference.

[qgib]

Author Name: Paolo Cavallini (@pcav)

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It seems to me that this is fixed. Please Richard decide whether to close it.

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• assigned_to_id was configured as Richard Duivenvoorde

[alexbruy]

Closing as now help points to the documentation. Please reopen if necessary.