This guide

This guide is a set of web pages that need no server to be read. Parseh serves them, but the same pages open straight from the disk, and can be put on any website.

1. Opening it#

From Parseh, at https://localhost:7654/guide/:

• the guide button in the hub’s top bar;
• Guide, How the toolbox works, the last door of the hub’s mobile interface;
• the guide at the foot of the hub;
• the guide button of the clip tray’s top bar, which opens it in a tab of its own.

Served by Parseh, every page of the guide has a Parseh link in its top bar, back to the hub.

From the disk, open html-guide/index.html, in the Parseh folder, in any browser. Everything works there too — the list of pages, the search, the exercises, the formulas — because nothing on these pages asks a server for anything. The one exception is a YouTube video: YouTube plays one inside a page only when the page was served, so from the disk each video is a card, Watch on YouTube (on a phone, YouTube and the time the clip starts at), that opens it on YouTube in a new tab.

On the web, the project publishes it at https://parseh.io/guide/: the same pages, under a slim bar that leads to Parseh’s site. That is the address a page exported from Parseh gives for the guide, and it stays. Anyone’s own copy can be published the same way, to GitHub Pages, at https://<account>.github.io/<repository>/; Compiling and publishing says how that is switched on.

2. When it needs compiling#

The pages are written in Markdown, in html-guide/markdown/, and become the web pages you are reading when they are compiled. The installer does that every time it runs — ./install.sh --guide does it and nothing else — so after an installation they are simply there.

When they are not — the pages were never compiled, or the Markdown has changed since they were — the guide’s front page, opened from Parseh, says so and offers the button:

A compile takes a second or two, and while it runs it is on Parseh’s Working… list: Compiling the guide on the pill in the corner of this page, and on the hub. One that ends with errors still writes every page it can, opens them, and shows what went wrong on the front page. A page of a guide never compiled leads back to the front page, where the button is.

Opened from the disk, where there is no server to compile it, the front page says instead that the guide has not been compiled yet, that the installer compiles it, and that Parseh’s guide button opens the page with the button on it; the list of pages says The list of pages appears once the guide is compiled.

3. Finding your way#

• The list of pages, on the left: the sections and their pages, the one you are reading marked and its section open. ☰ puts it away and brings it back, and the list remembers that, and which sections you opened or closed, from page to page. On a phone it is a drawer that ☰ slides over the page; a tap beside it, or Escape, closes it.
• The search box, at the top of the list — Search the guide — looks through every word of every page as you type, and lists the pages that have all of your words (No page has all of these words. when none has). Press / anywhere to jump into it; ↑ and ↓ pick a result, Enter opens it, Escape clears the box.
• On this page, on the right of a wide screen and folded at the top on a phone, lists the page’s headings.
• Previous and Next, at the foot of every page, walk the whole guide in the order of the list.
• Every heading has its own address: point at it and click the # beside it, and the address bar holds a link to that very place.
• The foot of every page, and of the front page, has three links, GitHub, to Parseh’s own repository, parseh.io, to Parseh’s website, and imbrunoursino.net, to the website of Bruno Ursino, who made Parseh — the same three as the hub’s foot. Each opens in a tab of its own; nothing is fetched from any of the addresses until you click.

4. On a page#

• A block of code has a Copy button that copies it exactly, and says Copied.
• A picture opens large when you click it; Escape, or a click anywhere, closes it.
• The exercises work: answer them, and Check exercises at the end of the page marks them.
• An example of the studio’s Markdown shows the Markdown and, under it, what the studio makes of it.
• The ◐ button changes the theme, light, dark and sepia. Served by Parseh the guide shares the toolbox’s setting: change it here and the hub follows, and the other way round.

There is no other manual: these pages are the whole of it.