How about having an integrated documentation of CHDK in the camera? Patch is attached to this post. As always, feedback, any kind, is welcome. Does anybody find this feature useful or is it just me? The basic idea is to be able to show help on each menu item on the camera.

Motivation
The problem is, when you are away from home and you want to read up on one of CHDK's many menu options, most likely you will be in trouble, because the documentation is not available without a computer/laptop/pda/internet/whatever. And even if you do have one available it is very troublesome to put down your camera and browse another device for some document. My point is that having a manual is a good thing, but alone it is very impractical because it is unavailable when you are using your camera on the field. Also, I think much more people would read some quick help on the camera instead of having to search for and download a 30-page online manual. I realized these things during my travels last week where I rarely had access to internet, but I had my camera with CHDK loaded up.

Implementation
I have prepared a patch for public testing, I am awaiting suggestions and feedback. The way it works is that there is a special help button on the camera. If the user presses this button while the menu is shown, the camera will display a scrollable multiline text for the currently selected menu item. The current implementation is memory-friendly (only loads the text for the current item when it needs to be shown and does not read in all the text for every item as the document could get very large). It also supports help in multiple languages, with fallback to english if the OSD language is not available, and a localizable fallback message if help for a single item is not present. The help files for each language are stored in CHDK/HELP/<language>.lng, much like language files for the menu. The language files have a similar but different format to the files in the LANG folder. The text IDs used inside the files are the same as in LANG, and the special ID -1 is used for the "no help" message. This new feature increases the binary size by appr. 0.9Kilobytes, but it can be disabled by undefining OPT_HELP in buildconf.inc just like any other feature.

What needs to be done
- Writing the help items. To be honest, I'll offload most of this to others.
- Determining the help button for cameras. This is the button that needs to be pressed for the help to show. The problem is that those buttons which are common to all cameras are already being used for other functions in the menu. On my camera I use the Flash button, but this is not available on all models. The patch below uses the Flash button, for incompatible cameras a single define BTN_SHOW_HELP in gui_menu.c needs to be changed. The Set button (BTN_HIDE_HELP) exits the help. I assume the defines will be specialized for some cameras with #ifdefs. Or maybe you have a completely different idea how/when to show the help? Any ideas on this?
- Testing & polishing. I do not know any bugs, but users are always creative, so some might pop up during testing.

If you want to try it
- Get a recent version of CHDK sources.
- Apply patch in this post.
- Make sure your camera has a Flash button, or adapt gui_menu.c as described above.
- Copy the CHDK/HELP folder to your memory card. This is a new folder added to CHDK.
- Optional: If you want to actually have some help instead of just the default message, update a language file in the CHDK/HELP directory.
- There are no changes to the CHDK configuration file. There is no need to delete or overwrite anything in the CHDK folder on your memory card.
- Use it.

ultimA

chdk_help.diff

16.6KB