利用者:Gaia.clary/online manual

Some remarks and ideas about Online Manual

Currently all clickable User interface elements show up a submenu when right clicked. This submenu contains 2 entries "Online Manual" and "Online Python Reference" (See left part of follwing image.

So the basic idea is to provide online documentation for each interface element in Blender. I believe there is an issue here regarding usability: There is no guarantee about whether the link to the Online Manual always points to a meaningful information.

That is in more detail: if the user interface element is not mapped to a specific Online document, the user might end up at a general page which actualy doesn't help anything. So my first idea was to mark those entries with a visual clue which have been mapped to a valid document. I thought about adding an icon as shown on the right side of the image above.

Another idea could be to just suppress the entry if it has not been mapped to anything. This could be very handy for (external) addon modules: No entry -> No documentation, and the user can not get misguided (frustrated) by expecting help but getting nowhere. On the other hand, if an Online Manual button is shown, the user can be sure to find something of interest (provided the link is not broken of course).

Alternatives to the current exposition to the user

It could be handy to not use a right click menu but the tool tips to add hyperlinks to online documentation (see image bvelow). The problem with that is that you never can reach into the tooltip. Its because it disappears before the mouse gets into the tooltip. So we can not click on the link. That might be technically doable though.

Another idea could be to add visual markers right into the user interface. The following image shows 3 alternatives ("i", stylized earth icon, "?"):

These icons could show up whenever a user interface element HAS a mapping to an online document.

Finally in the User preferences we could add a checkmark to control if the Online Documentation visuals should show up at all.