Zugg Software :: View topic

Posted: Fri Aug 17, 2007 9:41 am

Is there a way to force the CMUD documentation to download all its associated images at once?

The "on demand" feature is nice but I'd like to be able to get them all when I have a high speed connection rather than the occasional pause when I switch to a topic that's downloading an image for the first time. This can be made much worse if it occurs during one of the rare times I'm force to return to dial-up speeds.

Posted: Fri Aug 17, 2007 4:42 pm

I'll consider trying to add that. But right now CMUD needs to load a particular help screen to trigger the HTML image download. So I'd need to write something that went through and displayed every topic. In other words, it's the HTML viewer that displays the help topic that handles the images, not CMUD directly.

SubAdmin Joined: 18 Nov 2001 Posts: 5182

Perhaps there would be a way to use a local directory. What I mean is when displaying the help it checks a subdirectory of CMud for the image file. If it is there then it displays that one and doesn't download anything. If that works then building a download package containing all the images would be feasible. Just put it as a seperate download for those that want it. Perhaps having some check to allow updating of such cached images when the topic is displayed would be needed.

Posted: Fri Aug 17, 2007 6:53 pm

It actually already does that. It uses the 'help' subdirectory within your CMUD Data Files directory. It first looks for the image there, and if it doesn't find it, then it downloads the image from the URL in the HTML help text (just like a web browser would). When you use the Get Updates feature to update the help database, it deletes any old images used by the help topics being updated. This forces it to download a fresh copy of the image for any updated topics.

So yes, in theory I could provide a download of all images. It would just take a while to put together a list of all the images. Unfortunately, I didn't put them into a unique folder on the web server...they are just in the main "images" directory along with all of the other images on this site.

Wizard Joined: 14 Aug 2004 Posts: 1269

But you probably have a complete set of them in your 'help' subdirectory within your CMUD Data Files directory since you're certain to have looked at all the imges, so you could just zip that up and put it on the web site? Wink

Posted: Fri Aug 17, 2007 9:57 pm

It wouldn't be too hard to click on them all and get the new images actually. Most of the articles in the help are in the Command and Function references, and none of those have images.

EDIT: In fact, here you go. Currently up-to-date:

http://fang.xianfu.googlepages.com/cmudhelp.zip

But like I say, doing it manually doesn't take very long at all. You can even use the keyboard to navigate the tree to be even faster.

Posted: Sat Aug 18, 2007 3:59 am

I just love how helpful everyone is around here! Thanks Fang, even though it was quick and easy for you, it saved me the time of doing it. And more importantly, I didn't get distracted from my bug fixing :)

When I have some time, I'll put together an auto-build script here so that I can easy update a zip archive whenever I change an image. Something for my to-do list. I expect a bunch of new images when I start documenting v2.0, so I won't do anything till after that.

Posted: Mon Aug 20, 2007 2:39 am