MiniOS Help

MiniOS Help is the native GTK 3 offline documentation viewer for MiniOS. The installed application does not parse Markdown and does not use WebKit, HTML, JavaScript, Node.js, or a Mermaid runtime. It renders a precompiled MiniOS markup document tree through minios_gui.DocumentTextView.

The editable documentation source remains the sibling ../docs repository. Files under share/docs/ are generated release inputs and must not be edited by hand. Markdown is parsed during documentation synchronization with the original Node.js markdown-it and pinned plugins; Mermaid fenced blocks are rendered to SVG by the official Mermaid CLI. The resulting JSON documents and SVG/image assets are the only documentation formats shipped in the binary package.

A Debian source build consumes the already generated share/docs/ bundle. It therefore does not need Node.js, npm, Mermaid, Chromium, or a sibling documentation checkout.

Refreshing the documentation

Install the shared pinned Node.js build tools from the sibling minios-gui repository:

../minios-gui/tools/npm-ci.sh

This keeps node_modules, the npm cache and the Puppeteer browser cache inside the repository's ignored paths; nothing is installed globally. Then refresh the compiled documentation bundle with:

tools/sync-from-docs.sh

The shared minios-gui build toolchain uses Node.js 20 or newer and includes @mermaid-js/[email protected]. --mermaid-command /path/to/mmdc remains available when an alternate Mermaid CLI executable is required.

The sidebar is the source of truth for which documentation pages belong in the offline bundle, so adding or moving a section does not require changing the synchronizer. It validates that contract, UTF-8 input, internal links, anchors, path containment, compiled document checksums and asset checksums before atomically replacing the bundle. Browser-only Mermaid CSS animations, drop shadows and custom properties are stripped from the static SVG; output containing scripts or foreignObject is rejected. This keeps the assets renderable by the native GTK SVG loader, including librsvg 2.40 in Ubuntu 18.04.

Development

Runtime/package tests do not need Node.js build dependencies:

make check

After ../minios-gui/tools/npm-ci.sh, compiler and synchronizer tests run with:

make test-build-tools

When developing minios-help and minios-gui side by side without installing the latter, run runtime tests with the sibling source on PYTHONPATH.

The runtime application is kept compatible with Python 3.6 and GTK 3.22. The build-time Markdown parser and Mermaid renderer require Node.js 20 or newer; the Python synchronizer itself uses only the standard library.