Re-assigning all Gimp bugs to default component owner (Gimp bugs list)

What help-browser are you using, the builtin or netscape?

?? What help-browser I'am using ??
I don't have Netscape, and the builtin is ?

Hans

Hans, 

From what I understand, "Netscape" is the term GIMP uses to indicate
"any other browser than the built-in one". If you go to the
Preferences dialog (<Toolbox>/File/Preferences...), then to the tab
Interface/Help System, you will be able to switch the help browser
from built-in to Netscape. Try that and report back.

Raphael, does the built-in browser get shipped with WinGIMP? I do not
think it does.

I can confirm Hans' report with setting "Netscape" for WinGIMP 1.2.0
under Windows 98SE.

If I switch to Built-in in WinGIMP 1.2.3-pre2, I get an error dialog
saying that GIMP cannot find the built-in browser, probably because I
did not install GtkXmHTML before compile time.

Using "Netscape" in WinGIMP 1.2.3-pre2 seems to work fine and starts
MSIE 5.0 (my default browser under Windows) with "Chapter 1.
Introduction" of the GIMP User Manual (this is also the name of a book
about GIMP -- confusing).

Under all UNIX systems (Linux, Solaris, *BSD, ...) there is a choice
between the built-in web browser and Netscape.  This must be Netscape
(or some browser based on the Netscape code) because the Gimp uses a
Netscape-specific way of opening URLs.  This is necessary because
the Gimp cannot assume that the user is running some kind of file
manager that knows how to open local URLs, so the only safe and
relatively standard way to do that is to use a method that is specific
to the standard browser for most UNIX systems.

However, things are different under Windows.  A browser can register
itself as the default handler for HTML files or URLs, so the
invocation method is browser-independent (but specific to Windows).
Apparently, this is what WinGIMP uses.  So the Windows version should
probably not mention Netscape but should say "default browser"
instead.

So it looks like there are two problems here:
- The dialog boxes mention Netscape although most WinGIMP users will
  probably be using MSIE (or Opera or anything else).  This should
  be changed to "default browser".
- The built-in help browser is not included in WinGIMP.  Maybe there
  are some problems compiling GtkXmHTML under Windows, or maybe Tor
  decided that it was not worth including it in the Windows version.

The actual bugs I assume this report originally referred to have been 
fixed in gimp-1-2 (see bug# 65789). But I am retargeting this bug to 
Current CVS and all OSes.

Firstly, as GIMP easily can check if the "internal" help browser is 
available or not, it shouldn't even offer it as an alternative if it 
isn't going to work. (I assume the internal help browser isn't 
necessarily available on all Unix systems, either?)

Secondly, the strings with Netscape need to be changed to 
say "default HTML viewer" or somesuch, at least on Windows.

To answer your two questions:
- You are right: the internal web browser is not necessarily available
  on all Unix systems.  It depends on GtkXmHTML which is usually not
  installed on non-GNOME or non-Linux systems.
- On the other hand, "default HTML viewer" is not appropriate for Unix
  systems, because the protocol used will only work with Netscape (and
  Netscape derivatives).  Even if the user has a desktop environment
  that has a notion of "default HTML viewer", Netscape will always be
  started.

Attached you'll find the source for an 'internal'
helpviewer for Gimp/win32. Instead of simply using
ShellExecute it is trying to connect to the default
browser via DDE. I had this code laying around for
quite some while but needed to resurrect it because
my default browser now is Mozilla, which insists on
opening a new Window for each ShellExecute call.
The plug-in is tested to work with Netscape 4.7,
IE 4.72 and Mozilla 1.0.

BTW: the Gimp Help System uses soft links to resolve 
the hard-coded references to some help file, e.g.:
"open/dialogs/file_open.html" which isn't portable
that well for poor platforms not providing proper
links. As a work-around I see these options:

- change the hard-coded values to be unique and let
  them point to the original file
- write/generate 'redirecting' html files to be used
  on win32
- add some magic to helpwin.c which tries to resolve 
  to existing files involving some directory juggling

I'd much prefer the first option, what do you ?

Created attachment 12795 [details]
plug-ins/helpbrowser/helpwin.c

*** Bug 96916 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

See my comments at the end of bug #101435. IMHO the webbroswer plug-in
should be ditched and external applications should be used to talk to
Mozilla or whatever browser the user prefers. The choice of these
helper applications can take place in the prefs dialog.

I'm not sure if I understand. You are suggesting to use an 
external application to talk to the webbrowser and remove 
the webrowser plug-in ?
But what kind of external application, maybe a plug-in ?

The file attached above does implement the same interface
as the "internal helpbrowser (plug-in)" which isn't build
on win32 cause of missing gtk(x)html.
It does so by delegating to the default browser on win32,
tested against Netscape, Mozilla, IE. What's wrong with 
this approach ?

BTW: gnome-moz-remote or something like this is - to my 
knowledge - not available for win32.

There is not much wrong with this approach. However since the
webbrowser plug-in is giving us headaches because of licensing issues
and because it is inflexible with regard to other browsers, I suggest
to replace it with a choice of existing gnome-moz-remote-alike
applications that can simply be spawned from the gimp core.

I have no idea what that means for Win32, but basically your helper
app looks as if it could this need.

Changing milestone on a bunch of bugs to 2.0 - none of these could be considered
a blocker for a pre-release, IMHO. Many of these have patches or someone working
on them, but they're not urgent.

Dave.

Created attachment 18646 [details]
updated helwin.c for Gimp 1.3.x

It looks as if a win32 version of the help-browser will need some of
the functionality we added lately. It would make sense to add a
win32-specific file to plug-ins/helpbrowser so we can share most of
the code. This file should probably be based on the patch Hans
attached here.

I fixed bug #119120 in CVS HEAD - but I'm sure if I should mark this
bug as RESOLVED FIXED as well? Comments are most welcome...

Does the new helpbrowser and webbrowser stuff work on Win32? If so,
this report should probably be closed as FIXED.

The new webbrowser plug-in works on Win32. (Although it uses the 
simple ShellExecute() API, not the DDE stuff Hans Breuer suggests 
above. (I hadn't noticed this bug, and his suggestion, when I added 
the ShellExecute() call to it.)

I get
Mensagem helpbrowser
Failed to open help domain:

Could not open gimp-help.xml mapping file
from "file:///usr/share/gimp/1.3/help"

with netscape or  the internal web browser.
The help files are installed in
/usr/share/gtk-doc/html/libgimp* 
and indexes in
usr/share/gimp/1.3/C/index.html@ contents.html@ and introtuction.html

That's unrelated. The installed docs you see are the libgimp
API docs, not the help system.

To have help pages, you need to install the gimp-help-2
module from CVS. However installing it won't help much
currently since the help is far from finished and does
not even install itself correctly.

Can we close this report as FIXED, then?

No, just the last comment is unrelated. The help-on-Win32
issue is still open.

Ok.

Well, the rewritten webbrowser plug-in works on win32 (opens the given
url in the system web browser, if I understand correctly) - can't we
'just' force the help-browser to use the webbrowser plug-in instead of
the internal help browser on win32?

From what I remember, this is already the case. The default for the
help-browser on win32 should be web-browser.

I think this bug should be closed. It has such a long and mixed 
history of comments, that it's hard to say what it's about any 
longer... And yes, the default GIMP help browser on Win32 is now the 
web browser.

Closing this bug as FIXED since gimp help works on both *nix and win32
now.