Creating a skin that displays text from a reference manual
Posted: March 20th, 2020, 1:36 am
ok so I am not necessarily new to rainmeter, more of a casual rainmeter enthusiast. up until this point I have been downloading skins on deviant art and editing the .ini files to achieve my desired desktop, now I have a skin that I really want to exist and I think I can make it happen but it depends on a few things.
First of all the skin I want to create will allow for a (probably very specific) search in a specified documentation repository,
docs.microsoft, docs.rainmeter, etc... and then display the associated text from that search in a Rainmeter text display skin.
for example if I search "webparser" in a skin titled "Rainmeter Documentation"
it should return the plain text from the website,
https://docs.rainmeter.net/manual/measures/webparser/
and display it in a window that allows scrolling.
now, here are the things I do understand.
reading text in a scrollable window is super possible, so is parsing web data.
doing the search function to a specific web directory shouldn't be a problem for rainmeter. theoretically I could just have the search open a web browser with my desired page and call it a day, but I am looking for something more elegant.
documentation repos tend to be fairly static and don't rely on much more than a few text elements to promote readability.
what I don't understand-
I am unclear on weather regex is able to read through and html file and sort through the proper elements. word on the street is if you try to convert html pages using regex, you're going to have a bad time. I know there is some pretty cool technology that can make the text in to a more regex friendly format, but I don't know where to start with making rainmeter do the same thing.
furthermore If I can somehow parse the plain text, can I then somehow change the font size or type to display in a rainmeter skin, so at the very least, headings, sub headings, and code elements are displayed differently?
and finally, are there any other bleeding flaws in this before I dive head first?
And before someone tells me to RTFM, try to understand that I WANT to, but only if its from a cool desktop gadget.
First of all the skin I want to create will allow for a (probably very specific) search in a specified documentation repository,
docs.microsoft, docs.rainmeter, etc... and then display the associated text from that search in a Rainmeter text display skin.
for example if I search "webparser" in a skin titled "Rainmeter Documentation"
it should return the plain text from the website,
https://docs.rainmeter.net/manual/measures/webparser/
and display it in a window that allows scrolling.
now, here are the things I do understand.
reading text in a scrollable window is super possible, so is parsing web data.
doing the search function to a specific web directory shouldn't be a problem for rainmeter. theoretically I could just have the search open a web browser with my desired page and call it a day, but I am looking for something more elegant.
documentation repos tend to be fairly static and don't rely on much more than a few text elements to promote readability.
what I don't understand-
I am unclear on weather regex is able to read through and html file and sort through the proper elements. word on the street is if you try to convert html pages using regex, you're going to have a bad time. I know there is some pretty cool technology that can make the text in to a more regex friendly format, but I don't know where to start with making rainmeter do the same thing.
furthermore If I can somehow parse the plain text, can I then somehow change the font size or type to display in a rainmeter skin, so at the very least, headings, sub headings, and code elements are displayed differently?
and finally, are there any other bleeding flaws in this before I dive head first?
And before someone tells me to RTFM, try to understand that I WANT to, but only if its from a cool desktop gadget.