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The Help Window looks very ugly. 1. The Folder and bullet icons in contents tree can be replaced by Book and Page icon. 2. the icons for the three tabs are meaningless. name these tabss "Contents", "Index", "Search" Don't use any icons. 3. replace the icons in tool bar with some beautiful icons. 4. the buttons in toolbar have no rollover effect. these buttons looks very ugly in windows LAF 5. the splitpane in helpwindow is one-touch expandable. but in windows LAF, these arrows don't fit in default divider size. Either increase the divider size, or remove one-touch expandability 6. add home, refresh actions to toolbar. 7. remove unnecessay borders. if all these thing are done then the help window, looks very beautiful, as shown in attachment.
Created attachment 14172 [details] HelpWindow looks like this after this bug fix
I agree it's ugly; JavaHelp uses pluggable look and feels (its own UI classes for the help window), so it *should* be possible to customize it, by creating alternate UI classes for it. A word of warning: I don't expect I'll have time to even look at what could be done until this fall at the earliest - lots of work in the queue. This would be a *great* place for some collaboration - it doesn't even require knowledge of NetBeans APIs (just javahelp's javadoc and probably some looking at its sources to figure out what the L&F classes do - all available from java.sun.com). I would happily review/look at/etc. patches for this, but I am truly swamped with other things (window system enhancements, tree table view rewrite, output window rewrite, GTK support, HTML renderer). Would you consider contributing some work on this?
Some points are already solved (current NB dev build 21 Oct) 1.Done 2.I do not see any icons in tabs. 3.There are now nicer icons in toolbar. 4.Rollover effect should be OK. At least on Linux Metal L&F a Win XP L&F both JDK 1.5.0. 5.Not solved yet but there is separate issue #39541. 6.TBD 7.TBD So new TODO list: 1. Add Home, Refresh actions to toolbar. 2. Remove unnecessay borders (It probably requires subclassing of UI classes as in #39541.) Patrick is it possible to add 2 new actions to current toolbar?
I disagree with the Home and Refresh requirements. Home - this would add more clutter to the toolbar (detracting from the effectiveness of the other items) without adding much value. Refresh - Same as the above, but in fact I don't see *any* value as the pages do not change in any way, so there's nothing to refresh to.
It is possible to add new buttons to toolbar: add the following tag to helpset.xml: <presentation default=true displayviewimages="false"> <name>main window</name> <size width=400 height=400 /> <location x=200 y=200 /> <title>Project X Help</title> <toolbar> <helpaction image="previous">javax.help.BackAction</helpaction> <helpaction image="next">javax.help.ForwardAction</helpaction> <helpaction image="homefolder">javax.help.HomeAction</helpaction> <helpaction image="refresh">javax.help.ReloadAction</helpaction> <helpaction image="print">javax.help.PrintAction</helpaction> </toolbar> </presentation>
Yes, we know that it is possible. The question is whether it is desirable. In general, adding new UI elements needs strong justification, because each new UI element detracts from the overall usability. If you can provide a specific use case of why these buttons should be here (give an example of how you use help and show how these buttons would improve your process), we could consider adding them.
Refresh:- this is not reqd, as the html pages will not change at runtime. (I just suggested this so that help window looks like native help for windows users). The windows help allows to view help online from website. If netbeans Help window is supposed to browse help online, then this is necessary. Home :- this might be useful to jump directly to home page. Some help documents contains some useful links in home page such as troubleshooting, faq, changelog etc. Adding home buttons makes navigation easier instead of searching such links in the tree.
Reassigning to the new "core/help system" owner obarbashov.
Moving JH issues to Victor.