[Ohrrpgce] Help page markup

Ralph Versteegen teeemcee at gmail.com
Sun Jun 18 08:09:18 PDT 2017


Currently we have some problems with F1 help pages which use indentation
not being resolution-independent. (Example attachment)
There actually already is a text markup code, ${LM#} (which I will rename
at some point), to add a left margin (ie left indentation) to the current
paragraph of text. But it's awkward to use. And besides, I want other
things, like headings and web links and cross-links.

A moment's thought indicates that we should write help pages in a separate
markup language (which goes beyond the markup codes to change font colour
and so forth). Preferably an existing one. And there's an obvious choice:
mediawiki markup. That will allow moving content between the wiki and the
engine in both directions easily, make it easy for anyone who's learnt to
edit the wiki to edit the help pages, and makes it easy to link back and
forth between the wiki and the help pages.

We would be implementing a subset of mediawiki markup in FB, translating to
"native" markup codes understood by render_text plus metadata needed to
search for clickable links. (As you can see in the Spam menu, translating
pixel posiiton to character number is currently broken)

-* bullet points
-: indentation
-==Multiple heading levels==
-[[internal links]]
-[external links]
-{{plot|script command links}}
-bold, italic, and pre
- horizontal lines ----
-Newlines are ignored, so that existing help pages largely automatically
become resolution independent

Also, adding support to render_text for drawing inline images (without
using slices) would be really easy. Even floating images could be
straigthforward, since it's similar to the existing ${LM#} and ${RM#} codes.

We could translate help pages to static HTML, host them online, and link to
them from the wiki. (From previous experience, having two editable copies
would be a nuisance.) I wonder, is it possible to have a special namespace
on the wiki which auto-redirects links link [[F1:attack bitsets]] to some
external html pages? (Or we could write a plugin for the wiki which fetches
the content of page from a file so that it's rendered like a normal wiki
page; that looks quite feasible.) Alternatively, we can just use a
template, like {{help|attack bitsets}}. And the engine can use the same
syntax for links to other help pages, and use links styled like [[Attacks]]
to link to the wiki, so that the syntax is identical everywhere!
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