I am trying to access the new GTK4 developer documentation via devhelp app. I am seeing the following which is quite different to what I’ve seen in GTK2 / GTK3 dev docs in devhelp
It took me a while to figure out that I am indeed seeing the GTK4 documentation in devhelp, since the title of devhelp app always shows whether the given doc page is from GTK2 or GTK3 documentation, as shown below:
Since, devhelp was showing some class style documentation for GTK4, and the page title didn’t mention GTK4 Reference Manual or something like that, I thought the page was some gtkmm / C++ bindings, and kept looking for GTK4 docs.
I am not sure why we use the class style documentation for GTK4. The original styling used for GTK2 / GTK3 was just fine. Though this is not a big issue.
The current GTK4 documentation is less helpful, as I have to click on each function to know the arguments / return values, and again click back to know the arguments / return values of the next function. Am I missing something here ?
No, you’re not missing anything; there’s nothing particularly “less” intuitive about the new API reference: instead of having a single, large page with:
the class description
all the symbols, each with
its own description
the list of arguments, each with its own description
etc, the new API reference layout is broken into indices, with each class having a list of symbols (including the ones inherited from ancestors and implemented interfaces) with a short description, and each symbol pointing to a page with its full description.
The new layout is more oriented towards search, and less towards scanning the whole thing and using “find in page”. Sadly, DevHelp’s search isn’t that great, compared to the equivalent search function on the web version of the API reference, which does a full text fuzzy search across the whole corpus.
Is this something that was done intentionally with some good reason, or is this what we ended up with in the new doc generation process. So, we can do nothing about it now.
I am not sure about this either. I used symbol search extensively in devhelp in GTK3 reference manual, and it worked great. So, I am not sure what we’re fixing here.
