Explaining text for menu entries

[fml2]

Hello.

What do you think about the following: we could add a new optional field (i.e. it can be NULL) of type "LANG_ID" to the "menu entry" structure. Then, if the user is in the menu and presses a special key (e.g. "long select"), then a popup text would be displayed explaining what the menu item does.

I know that in the root menu that key brings up the item's context menu and that in the lists of values the long select sets the cursor to the default value. In these cases, the key would do nothing. But it's arguable that these cases do not need any explanation at all. For other items, that could be handy.

[Llorean]

Text describing every menu entry would result in the language files being several times larger (and imagine what it would do to the voice files).

We have the manual for looking up things later, and odds are good if someone doesn't know what a feature is, they probably do not urgently need to make use of it.

Meanwhile, if descriptions were to be verbose enough to be helpful we'd  basically end up duplicating the manual in the language file (or else our manual could do with optimizing).

[saratoga]

I guess this might work if the descriptions were stored on disk and loaded only when you requested them.  Probably kind of a pain, but might make more sense on things like Android where you have a pretty big screen. 

[Llorean]

On android couldn't you just keep a copy of the PDF to view?

[saratoga]

Yes but it would be much easier if the GUI could point you towards the correction information.  Additionally, integrating documentation into the GUI has some advantages in that its much easier to notice if something is undocumented (or not compiled for a given manual). 

[fml2]

Initially, I thought about plugins. They would store the texts directly in them and would not need voicing. But then I thought that it could be extended to the core as well. But yes, it would implode the language files. And it would probably make no sense to provide such contextual help for only some items. I.e. all or nothing.

But for plugins this still could work nicely.

[saratoga]

Maybe there could be some kind of hook in settings menus to load a plugin and then pass the name of the menu as an argument.  Then have the plugin actually display text.