Hi Eliot.



I am currently working on autogenerating CustomHelp from markup.





If you care to get your content to me or available in an email here, I will use that to develop with.



If you go here: http://menmachinesmaterials.com/SeasideDoc



and the "dimly colored" hamburger icon at the top left, a menu expands.

Under Custom Help are the CustomHelp currently in the image running that SeasideApp.  (I have two named TerseGuide because I thought I would get a TerseGuideToFonts going, but haven't got to it yet)



The HTML is generated on-the-fly. pretty nifty, imho.



With the ability to display CustomHelp on-the-fly, I now want to export it and import it to various markups.





My first markup will be what I use daily, Emacs Org-mode markup. (there will be others like MarkDown and Pillar )



It looks like this:



* top level topic

  some content

** sub topic

      sub content 

*** sub sub topic

      sub sub content

* another top level top



so...taking your previous email and winging it....



I will commit to writing this for you as the tool I am starting next will generate CustomHelp f

* Pragmas



To sum up, many see pragmas as labels.  But they are executable.  With pragmas, to label is human, to execute is devine.



** Things to avoid

      and, which is sadly what lots of designers miss, with perform:wothArguments: and/or sentTo:/sendMessage: etc. ..



** A pattern that works

      create a builder object that understands the pragma(s) in question

      visit the method(s) implementing the pragma

      send the pragma to the builder






** Pragmas for menus

- give the base menu to a menu decorator builder, which is parameterized with the name of the menu and the class(es) involved in the menu

- have the menu decorator builder visit the relevant pragma methods in the class(es)

- use the resulting decorated menu












I will commit to writing this for you as the tool I am starting next will generate CustomHelp from that markup.





let me know.



cheers,



tty


p.s. what I will be doing is writing a PEG Grammar for org-mode and at the actor callbacks, dynamically create the class and its methods. Should be a lot of fun.

















---- On Fri, 27 Aug 2021 13:59:41 -0400 Eliot Miranda <eliot.miranda at gmail.com> wrote ----



Hi Tim,

> On Aug 25, 2021, at 10:18 AM, tim Rowledge <mailto:tim at rowledge.org> wrote:
> 
>> On 2021-08-25, at 5:16 AM, Marcel Taeumel <mailto:marcel.taeumel at hpi.de> wrote:
>> 
>> Hi Tim --
>> 
>> Please update your image and see if it got fixed. :-)
> 
> [snip] ... Pragmas do something similar; an interesting idea for annotating code and then no tool(s) that make it easy to work out what is going on.

I think the issue here is a lack of documentation, not a lack of tools.  Pragmas are essentially complete.  There may be a need to provide a visitor that is parameterized by classes & pragma selector set, but this is easily synthesized given standard code.  But having a good set of documented patterns would help.  I commit to writing a page for the HelpBrowser on pragmas if you think such a page would address your concerns adequately.

> 
> tim
> --
> tim Rowledge; mailto:tim at rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
> Esc key to reboot Universe, or any other key to continue...
> 
> 
>
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