[Development] Assistant WebKit/WebEngine support

[Shawn Rutledge]

On Jun 24, 2019, at 8:20, Palaraja, Kavindra <KPalaraja at luxoft.com> wrote:

> Hi Andre,
> 
> I'm really curious -- why is it bad to make WebEngine mandatory for anything that passes as "Qt Creator's Help Integration"?
> 
> I'm asking because, these days, many Software companies spend a lot of time, energy, and money in making their documentation look and feel good. This includes not just the large chunks of content that's published, but also the in-line text, UI strings, tooltips, etc. They believe that it adds to the developer experience.
> 
> The Qt Project has a unique opportunity here, in that we have our own IDE, which is a luxury. And there's also a way to use an existing module, WebEngine, to improve this look and feel (among other reasons). So why shouldn't we use it?
> 
> Have you seen Qt Creator's Help Integration recently?
> * It doesn't render 1:1 with the default style that is used on https://doc.qt.io
> * It can't display the borders for tables -  so every single table looks weird as all borders are stripped out. Qt's documentation is full of tables.
> * It doesn't scale images accordingly, so you have manually guess what Creator can display and try really hard to shrink your diagrams without losing clarity

Images don’t scale with text size scaling, you mean?  That’s what I can see.

I think we should fix those bugs, FWIW, regardless what we do with Creator’s help system.

Personally I would like to keep using QTB-based rendering in Assistant, and have the appearance improve over time.  That’s because it’s relatively lightweight.  Creator cannot afford to be even more of a RAM hog than it already is, IMO: I guess it’s mostly the clang-based code model though.

There are patches to improve CSS for tables, and I’m trying to work on CSS a little too, in my spare time.