Todo

While being already in heavy production usage, HelpSetMaker still is optimizable in many ways. Certain features are missing and can be added somewhen in the future. As HelpSetMaker is an Open Source project, feel free to grab an item, solve it, and return your results into the code base...

• Index creation: This will require additional markup in the source document, most notably a tag (e.g. “!!”). Nice to have would also be a “parameter” slang to index a word hierarchical or below another word (“...gives you a description for !![document/LaTeX]LaTeX documents!!.”).

• Tables. This is a big one. Tables should be created intuitively. Wiki-like slang is using “|” as row separator. We'll do this also, having a “[]”-notation for additional markup information:

  |[head]Person|Kilometers
  |Miller|15
  |Smith|20

  This will render a table with the first line being someway the head and the other lines being data.

  HTML export will put a table where it is, LaTeX export most certainly will use a tabular(x) environment.

• Linking through drag'n'drop: Creating links should be supported by drag'n'dropping from the document tree.

• Anchors in the document tree view: If a document has anchors, they should be presented as children of the document. However, presentation must make a clear distinction between such anchors and real documents being children of the document in question.

• Better image management: This includes HelpSetMaker-internal mechanisms to add pictures to a library and means to rename or move pictures.

• Image groups: So far, there are only single images which can be exported. Sometimes, it would be nice to have a group of (more or less similiary sized) images stuck together. A new command :imagegroup <x> <y> allows this, after that, the images are given line by line. The output puts them into a table of the size x*y.

• Complete XML storage: Currently, STML is the main storage format for the content. In the long run, the documents should be stored as XML files. STML would only be used in the editor. Most important enhancement is a way to convert an XML file into STML.

• Better export means: The current export system allows one export per project and type (Helpset, HTML, etc.). An extension should allow the definition of arbitrary exports. Each one would have one of the current types but different parameters. So it would be possible to have multiple exports per type, e.g. single-sided PDF and double-sided PDF or HTML with different image sizes.

• Scanner and parser rework: Currently, it is impossible to have a “:code” command or similar which makes spaces or line breaks always being output literally. To archieve this, the scanner must become “less intelligent”, as it currently constructs complete paragraphs before the parser even sees the original spaces and line breaks.

• Other output formats: LaTeX is extremly bad in formatting sophisticated tables. Other preprocessors should be evaluated for printed output of documents, perhaps lout or even troff could be an alternative.