Document browsers

[Aaron Sloman]

James House:
>Does anyone out there know of document browsing systems for Sun Unix?  I
>am interested in supporting a large set of documentation on-line....

Have you ever seen the Sussex University Poplog online documentation
system, based on the Poplog editor, VED? It works either with a window
manager, or an ordinary VDU.

You can define several different categories of documentation (we have
TEACH, HELP, REF, DOC for a start). A file in any category can include
cross references to any of the others, e.g.

    see TEACH * MAIL, REF * SYSTEM

The general format for a cross reference is

    <type> * <name>

There are commands to move the cursor on to the next cross reference, and
back to the last one. Once there, a key sequence (e.g. <ESC> h) will get
the referred to document. A user-tailorable list of directories is
associated with each documentation type, and they are searched in order
for a file with the given name. Different categories can share directories
(e.g. all the TEACH directories can be attached to the end of the HELP
search list).

The cross-reference can be followed by a search string to identify a
location within the file, if found

    See REF * SYSIO/syscreate

All of this uses the editor, VED. When you follow up a cross reference the
old file remains in the editor, so that you an easily get back to your
previous context.

There are also tools for building sub-headings and tables of contents
within a file, and for going from the table of contents to a particular
portion of the file.

This mechanism makes it very easy to build hierarchical menu systems.  But
you can also build tangled networks, or a collection of interlocking
sub-networks.

Users can tailor this in many ways, including
    (a) adding new cross-reference categories
    (b) adding new directories to the search list associated
        with each category.
    (c) adding new commands - the editor is programmable.
    (d) defining or re-defining key sequences,
etc.

Poplog, with its editor, runs on sun-2, sun-3, sun-4, sun386i, and other
machines.

The above mechanism is used for organising the many hundreds of online
documentation files and can also be used for accessing the program
libraries (Prolog, Lisp, Pop-11, ML).

I hope this helps.

Aaron Sloman,
School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences,
Univ of Sussex, Brighton, BN1 9QN, England
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