[Ohrrpgce] Help page markup

[James Paige]

This is a great idea! I love it :)

On Sunday, June 18, 2017, Ralph Versteegen <teeemcee at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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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