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Bug 141808

Summary:	[Help] Help documents shown in dialog tray are not usable
Product:	[Eclipse Project] Platform	Reporter:	Markus Keller <markus.kell.r>
Component:	User Assistance	Assignee:	platform-ua-inbox <platform-ua-inbox>
Status:	RESOLVED WONTFIX	QA Contact:
Severity:	major
Priority:	P3
Version:	3.2
Target Milestone:	---
Hardware:	PC
OS:	Windows XP
Whiteboard:	stalebug

Description Markus Keller

2006-05-15 13:10:54 EDT

I20060512-1600 (RC4)

While the help in dialog trays looks and feels nice to show the short context help message and a few links, it just does not work well with most of the linked doc pages.

Eclipse documentation often contains tables and screenshots and it assumes that help is shown in a normal browser window with a width of at least 600 pixels (my guess).

To make the dialog wider to see the whole document, the user has to
1.) resize the dialog
2.) move the tray's sash, since the content area became larger, not the tray

Possible solutions:

- Open links from the dialog tray (and maybe also from the Help view) in a new window by default.

- Enlarge the tray when a help document is shown.

- Store separate tray sizes for initial "Related Topics" and to show help documents (should show help documents larger than "Related Topics" by default).

- resize help tray (not dialog area) when dialog is made wider

Comment 1 Curtis d'Entremont

2006-05-15 13:28:04 EDT

I agree some documents are problematic in the help view or tray. This is why we provide two actions to open in a separate help window; in the context menu when right clicking on the link, and in the toolbar after the document is shown. The fonts are also made smaller for the help view/tray, however this doesn't fix tables and screenshots.

I can see there is more room for improvement here; will keep this open for post-3.2.

Comment 2 Dejan Glozic

2006-05-15 14:11:09 EDT

Note also that a large number of Eclipse SDK documents have neither tables nor screenshots and reformat nicely to fit the available space. I am not saying your problem is not real, just implying that users can easily open the page with tables/images using the tool bar button to view it full size. The initial display 'in place' is very handy to quickly find something without opening another window.

Comment 3 Eclipse Genie

2019-03-19 18:50:40 EDT

This bug hasn't had any activity in quite some time. Maybe the problem got resolved, was a duplicate of something else, or became less pressing for some reason - or maybe it's still relevant but just hasn't been looked at yet.

If you have further information on the current state of the bug, please add it. The information can be, for example, that the problem still occurs, that you still want the feature, that more information is needed, or that the bug is (for whatever reason) no longer relevant.

--
The automated Eclipse Genie.

Comment 4 Lars Vogel

2019-10-08 10:49:15 EDT

This bug was marked as stalebug a while ago. Marking as wontfix.

If this report is still relevant for the current release, please
reopen and remove the stalebug whiteboard tag.