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Help browser

Albert Gräf requested to merge (removed):help_browser into master

2nd attempt... looking tidy now. :)

Here are my fixes to the latest help browser. I already tested these on my release branch, works like a charm. Since it's quite easy to browse the external documentation under extra now, I didn't bother backporting the code that I previously used to search the entire shebang. Works well as it is, and startup of the help browser is much faster that way. ;-)

I split this into separate changesets to make it easy for you to cherry-pick if you want. Here is a quick rundown of the changes I did:

  • some cosmetic text changes
  • null descriptions are shown as no description now, looks less scary :)
  • empty search term shows the toc again, so we don't need another "home" button for that
  • in addition to doc/, extra/ paths can be used to show a directory there
  • beefed up the main toc a little; it now has entries for all the standard (vanilla) doc sections that seasoned Pd users will expect to find there, and I also added Cyclone and Gem at the end (might want to add some other external directories there, but I think that these are probably the ones that average Pd users will use most)

This is new (latest commit):

  • add section titles to the toc (these are done by including an entry with just the title field), I think that this improves readability
  • added a few more entries to the toc, including some section titles (if you have any idea what other externals might be included by default, please let me know)

One question I'm still pondering is what to do with the entries which don't have a description (printed as no description now by virtue of rev. fc583ca1). This looks rather boring with big listings showing just help patches without descriptions. Maybe we should just get rid of empty descriptions altogether?

Also, it seems that when the description is empty then the filename (id) will be printed including the .pd suffix, whereas it is omitted otherwise. Is this intentional?

Anyway, I think that this should be ready to go in as is. But if you have any suggestions for further improvements then please let me know!

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