After an app is built, then user documentation has to be built around it. Are there any tools to aid writing end-user documentation?
Some of the problems with documenting GUIs are identifying a searchable term for a graphical elements, fully covering contextual dynamic interface elements, and compensating for themed elements.
I was wondering if there are any tools that let someone dynamically build a GTK help for the active window? Such as a dynamic (and themed) diagram of the GUI identifying the widgets by name? Or the hotspots? While the interaction difference between standard GUI elements (like the exclusive selection of a radio button versus the extended selection of check button) are fairly universal, they sometimes need to be visually identified if the theme is particularly unusual. And while there is a Widget Gallery for programmer documentation, is there a tool that dynamically generates an ‘active window’ widget gallery for end-user documentation? Something that points to end-user documentation that is community curated? So that the generic functionality will be pre-documented even though I still need to write the contextual documentation of what selecting a particular group of checkboxes allows.
I’m certain that a thousand different documenters have written end-user explanations of the GtkFileChooserWidget and GtkFileChooserDialog. (Describing use of the breadcrumb switch and bookmarking options is necessary.) It would be nice to not have to re-create that work. But since the selection of widgets is customizable, having a diagram of the themed dialog autogenerated with labeled callouts aids using the correct terms for manually searching documentation. Having the labels hyperlinked to detailed documentation would be even better.