On Jul 11, 2011, at 5:35 PM, Jonathan Wilkes wrote:

--- On Mon, 7/11/11, Hans-Christoph Steiner <hans@at.or.at> wrote:

From: Hans-Christoph Steiner <hans@at.or.at>
Subject: implementing tooltips WAS: [PD] Pd-extended 0.43 updates: lots of new editing features
To: "Jonathan Wilkes" <jancsika@yahoo.com>
Cc: "Martin Peach" <martin.peach@sympatico.ca>, "Mathieu Bouchard" <matju@artengine.ca>, "pd-list" <pd-list@iem.at>
Date: Monday, July 11, 2011, 11:18 PM

On Jul 11, 2011, at 3:58 PM, Jonathan Wilkes wrote:

--- On Mon, 7/11/11, Mathieu Bouchard <matju@artengine.ca>

wrote:

From: Mathieu Bouchard <matju@artengine.ca>
Subject: Re: [PD] Pd-extended 0.43 updates: lots

of new editing features

To: "Martin Peach" <martin.peach@sympatico.ca>
Cc: "pd-list" <pd-list@iem.at>
Date: Monday, July 11, 2011, 7:45 PM
On Mon, 11 Jul 2011, Martin Peach
wrote:

On 2011-07-11 12:06, Jonathan Wilkes wrote:

But I'm not sure where to store the

tooltip

string...

Not sure if that's what you mean, but in max

the

assist method receives a number corresponding to

the inlet

or outlet and returns a pointer to the appropriate

string,

so the string is already stored somewhere in the

memory

allocated to the object.

Not necessarily : the assist-method could be

storing the

data anywhere, or generating it on-the-fly from

whatever.

Hm...

1 when creating an xlet for the first time, bind its

tag on <Enter> and <Leave> to call
pdtk_tooltips, and send $canvas, $inletno and $object_name
as arguments

2 in tcl, search helppath for $object_name-help.pd,

then parse it for $inletno (which I added as a pd META tag
for every internal help patch-- plus lots of externals,
too)

3 filter the matching line in tcl to display

everything after $inletno minus the semicolon. (I.e., "text
20 20 INLET_0 float symbol bang;" becomes "float symbol
bang")

4 create that text on a little tooltip rectangle on

$canvas; delete it on <Leave>

All you add on the pd side is a sys_gui call to create

the binding, then handle everything else on the tcl side.

Does that make sense?  If so, then once someone

gets it working (maybe me), you'd not only have tooltips,
but you'd have tooltip content for over 1000 object classes
(minus exceptions like "list split", and variable/rightmost
inlets which I'm not sure how to handle...)

Also doesn't address tooltips for abstractions.

-Jonathan

I like this idea quite a bit.  If the tooltip info is
stored in a help patch, then we have a single way of
specifying the tooltip info regardless if the object was
written in C, Pd, Lua, etc.  The downside will be a lot
more file parsing on load.  Perhaps we can do some kind
of low priority thread kind of thing in Tcl to do that
loading.

One detail, instead of searching the path for the help
patch, really we should try to get the full path of the
object in question, then use that to get the help patch...

Ok.
Is c_helpname guaranteed to be inside c_externdir?

I can't remember ever using c_helpname, so I can't really say.

IMHO, I don't think we should support other ways of specifying the help file.  There are very few objects that use it, those are fixed in Pd-extended, it'll add a lot to the work of doing this, etc. etc.  So I say just take the object name and add the '-help' to it.  That covers 99.5% of objects.  Then once its working, it should be possible to go back and add hacks to support hacks ;)

.hc