Call for volunteer: Lisp support for "graphical tutorial"

[David Kastrup]

"Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen at xemacs.org> writes:

> With all due respect to Steve Y, I think this is a valuable addition.
> I'm +1.
>
> Call for volunteers:
>
> All that's needed is a few snippets of Lisp to hook it into the Help
> menu, and provide a M-x guided-tour-sipb command.  "Eventually" I'll
> get to this myself, but you know how that goes....  Anybody up for
> it?

My own opinion is that as a tutorial, something like that would better
sit within XEmacs or Emacs itself.  After all, the latter are
perfectly capable of image display.  Peppering the tutorial with
depictions of opening menus (or being able to open the actual menus in
an autoanimated way for demonstrative purposes) would seem to offer a
lot more in the way of interactivity.  Another, not even requiring
graphical support, would be animated demonstrations of the effects of
editing.

In a completely different vein, it would be nice to be able to dump
the menu structure of Emacs/XEmacs into HTML and/or JavaScript so that
people might explore the menus (even without being able to actually
use them except for possibly implemented gimmicks) on HTML pages
and/or PDF documents.

For illustrations, this sort of off-Emacs demo is quite nice, but I
don't think it is a good tool for use from inside Emacs.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum