The JHelpPlus plugin is a replacement for the normal JEdit HelpViewer (Help/JEdit Help). It provides a number of extra features, allowing you to change the CSS or font size, and to navigate more quickly around the help system.
JHelpPlus Features
The plugin extends the normal "help" functionality to:
It's recommended that you leave JHelpPlus as floating, and not dock it.
When opened, JHelpPlus looks pretty much like the standard help window. You will notice additional toolbar controls. These have tooltip text, but from left to right:
All of the above are listed as actions for the plugin (except for navigate), which means you can map shortcut keys to them (yeah!). Suggested mappings (on Windows) are (following, roughly, Netscape/Mozilla/Firefox mappings):
Currently, you can select the CSS file to use. By default, the plugin will use the CSS file that ships
with the plugin (an entirely unremarkable CSS). If you use your own CSS, you should be able to change
the CSS, save it, and hit refresh on the help to see the changes. Currently, you can only supply
one CSS file, not multiple. Note that the JDK CSS implementation supplies a default CSS file which
defines the most standard display characteristics, e.g. that should be displayed
in a bold font. Any CSS of yours will be added to this default CSS.
Note that the JDK HTMLEditorPane this is based on currently only supports a portion of the CSS1
spec. If you write your own CSS, please keep this in mind. If you have the JDK documentation installed
on your system, check out the documentation for javax.swing.text.html.CSS to see
which CSS attributes are covered. It actually is possible to add in support for other attributes,
but this requires Java programming. If you feel it is really important, there are some discussion
on internet Java Swing newsgroups about how to do this.
In options you can also apply shortcut keys to the toolbar actions in JHelpPlus. There are also actions, available from the plugin help menu, that you can map to shortcuts. However, some shortcuts that are common for a browser-style interface may already be used in JEdit. If you map using the shortcuts in the Options pane, and use JHP as a floating window, you can use F5 to mean refresh in JHP and something else in JEdit.
Checkbox for whether the left-hand navigation pane should show by default.
Options for default font size percent, max, min and step values if incrementing or decrementing the font.
Back to topMany JEdit help-related pages are written using DocBook, and of course there are JavaDoc pages for the JEdit API. If you have patience, you could look into the classes and ids associated with those two page formats and put together some nice-looking CSS markup and submit it back to me. If so, I will upgrade the plugin to ship with more than one "default" CSS people can work with.
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