Help files without internet access?

We don’t allow internet access for the majority of our Rhino users. How can they access the help files without it?
Is there downloadable content that can me placed on our server and then the help pointed at that?

Thanks,

Dan

Previous thread: No interactive commandline help for offline V6 beta users

I would also like dowloadable help for V6. I have internet access but when I access Help in V6 I often have to pause and wait for the content to load.

Thanks for the link. I missed that discussion.

We are going to have over 100 users who will not have access to any help files in V6.

That’s not going to go over well.

Dan

Apparently, if one really wants the offline help, one will need to wait on the upgrade until it is available.

Here’s another comment by DanBayn on this topic in the RhinoScriptSyntax docs. Next steps thread:

You may have missed the point of this specific discussion, but you are spot on about the general help. Especially when a new major release is here with new functionality. There is no other time that a help file is needed as much as it is right now.

It almost seems (and no offense intended here) that software developers are out of touch with how industry and businesses allow internet connectivity. We have close to 300 employees in 3 countries. If we gave everyone internet access, our productivity would drop. That’s just how it is. Just last year I had to let an employee of 17 years go because of abuse of his internet privileges. And this was from a senior employee sitting in the same room as I do! So we only allow internet access to a few, and that is monitored to make sure it’s usage is appropriate for the job (for example, if you need to find out the cutting speed of stainless steel, don’t be browsing for a good deal on a new car).

Dan

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@DanBayn
It’s “Open” on the YouTrack list:
https://mcneel.myjetbrains.com/youtrack/issue/RH-43313

Hi John,

I don’t have permission to see that.

Thanks,

Dan

All is says is to come up with some way that off-line users can get access to the Help files.

Sounds good to me, direct and to the point.

Thanks,

Dan

Please refresh my memory. Does “open” just mean someone put it in YouTrack but it’s not received any attention or priority yet, or does it mean that it’s actually being actively worked on?

Open means the developer has seen it and prioritized it.
It is on the 6.x release target which means it is expected to be fixed in the 6.x development cycle.

Thanks, John. I sure hope it’s 6.1!

Well… throwing in a tad of expectations management: RC 1 of SR 1 already being behind us, I would think this goes into 6.2 at the earliest.

You’re probably correct. We are trying to continue to push out service releases at around a monthly rate. Most of the code that we are putting into Rhino at the as of today will show up in 6.2 unless they are deemed as absolutely necessary for shipping 6.1. The current 6.1 release candidate already has several months of code in it that needed additional testing while we stabilized on 6.0. That said, as soon as SR1 is released we will ship an RC1 of SR2.

I get it if you are talking about the super-satisfactory ultimate solution, but methinks the quick stop-gap solution isn’t so much a coding issue as a minor change to the installation process and/or a registry entry change. I’m talking here about letting the user download a current snapshot of the online website (no matter how many days it takes) and directing Rhino to look for it locally instead of over the internet.

I’m just letting you guys know what our plans are for release schedule. This specific issue may be solved outside of that process since it may not require changes to Rhino.

@brian How is this coming along? Is it far enough along that you can estimate when it will be available? Perhaps it already is? I’m still using the last beta.

Kelvin has generated a chm and it is on my list to wire this up to rhino. I don’t know exactly when I’ll be able to get to it. Hopefully soon

The poop is hitting the fan here like I knew it would. I now have 120 installs and people are asking why their help files don’t work. I’ve been printing out the pages they need and handing them out.

Any estimation as to when we might see off-line help? It looks like a while since this has been worked on.

Thanks,

Dan

It looks like we’ve got a workable solution figured out now - two pieces remain: bolting the support into Rhino, and building an installer for the offline help.