User's Manual

This user's manual explains how to use the LaHelper GUI and is not an introduction to LaTeX. See the LaTeX Introduction on the Help menu for an introduction to LaTeX.

Overview

This application is a GNOME and GTK+ based utility intended to ease the creation of LaTeX based documents. The main GUI provides a menu system that you can use to access various LaTeX formatting instructions. The instructions are then displayed to a central text widget and are copied to the clipboard and highlighted by default.

You then paste the text into the text editor of your choice by clicking your third mouse button in the text editor's window or using the Paste command on the Edit menu. This utility is a replacement for keeping an advanced book on LaTeX beside the keyboard, and it serves to reduce the learning curve of LaTeX.

The screen shot above is GNOME with the Marble 3D theme and Sawfish with a modified Crux theme running on a Linux Mandrake system.

Some Technical Details

The information used to create the menus is contained within an XML file. The LaHelper GUI provides a convenient way to use this information. The lahelper executable can accept a single argument, the filename of the XML file that contains the menu definitions.

Like LaTeX itself, this application has separated the information content from its presentation. The GUI does provide features expected from a LaTeX development environment, and this utility can be used with any text editor and tools that the user is comfortable with. LaHelper will never have its own text editor, but it may have the ability to communicate with some text editors via a CORBA interface to bypass the clipboard's cut and paste operation.

This application is distributed with a script named sgmlhelper that starts lahelper in an SGML Tools mode by causing it to read the sgmltools.lah file. An XML file of this type can be created for any markup language, programming language, or other situations where example text needs to be provided along with help text. A user can even create their own file for personal use and start lahelper using a lahelper /path_to_file/file.lah command. LaHelper does NOT require a certain type of file extension such as .lah to work correctly. The filename is completely arbitrary.

In some ways, LaHelper provides a generic concept for a learn by example help system. The XML file that LaHelper uses can be read by any operating system, so a GUI comparable to LaHelper can be created under any operating system and with any toolkit. The early LaHelper development was purely GTK+, and that version may be resurrected in the future for another purpose.

The main goal of the LaHelper project is to create a small and stable GNOME interface to assist building LaTeX documents. A secondary goal is to create a generic help utility that is cross platform and provides only the menu system, example text widget, and help text widget. This secondary goal may be achieved by using WxWindows, Qt, or GTK+. This secondary application will not contain the toolbar or automated LaTeX operations.