[Interest] [Development] Short/medium term evolution of the Assistant?

[Oleg Shparber]

Hi,

On 10 November 2017 at 15:06, René J.V. Bertin <rjvbertin at gmail.com> wrote:

> Last but not least: Zeal is indeed very closely related to Dash. So close
> in fact that it cannot advocate Mac compatibility for licensing/legal
> reasons, and that it would probably be delicate even to provide it via
> MacPorts.
>

Zeal developer here. The reason it is not available for macOS is the
agreement [1], that grants our users free access to ~200 docsets maintained
by the author of Dash. Unless we find another comparable source of
documentation with close to zero maintenance, there will be no official
macOS support. Zeal can be built for macOS, but looks quite ugly over
there, and nobody tests if everything works.

Back to the topic of this discussion. We've recently switched to Qt WebKit
5.212, and sadly it didn't make all our problems go away due to a number of
regressions. And even if Qt WebKit worked perfectly, a full scale browser
engine still feels like an overkill for a simple task of displaying
documentation.

QTextBrowser while quite capable often struggles with displaying anything
but very basic pre-HTML5 content, plus it doesn't support HiDPI screens.
Improving QTB is an idea I occasionally entertain, but that would require a
significant time investment.

Another alternative I am currently considering is falling back to MSHTML on
Windows. There was a similar effort for Qt Assistant in the past [2], but
didn't make it. For a documentation viewer MSHTML should provide everything
required.

1. https://github.com/zealdocs/zeal/issues/24
2. https://codereview.qt-project.org/100930

Cheers,
Oleg
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