Yelp, also known as the GNOME Help Browser is the default help viewer for

GNOME A gnome is a mythological creature and diminutive spirit in Renaissance magic and alchemy, first introduced by Paracelsus in the 16th century and later adopted by more recent authors including those of modern fantasy literature. Its characte ...

that allows users to access help documentation. Yelp follows the

freedesktop.org freedesktop.org (fd.o) is a project to work on interoperability and shared base technology for Free software, free-software desktop environments for the X Window System (X11) and Wayland (display server protocol), Wayland on Linux and other Uni ...

help system specification and reads

mallard The mallard () or wild duck (''Anas platyrhynchos'') is a dabbling duck that breeds throughout the temperate and subtropical Americas, Eurasia, and North Africa, and has been introduced to New Zealand, Australia, Peru, Brazil, Uruguay, Arge ...

, DocBook, man pages, info, and HTML documents. HTML is available by using

XSLT XSLT (Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations) is a language originally designed for transforming XML documents into other XML documents, or other formats such as HTML for web pages, plain text or XSL Formatting Objects, which may subseque ...

to render

XML Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing arbitrary data. It defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable. T ...

documents into HTML. Yelp has a search feature as well as a toolbar at the top for navigation through previously viewed documentation. Because it functions as a type of web browser, it uses Firefox as a dependency and Firefox must be installed in order to use yelp. Yelp can be accessed by typing either into GNOME Shell, after pressing within GNOME, or within a terminal using the format. The command can also be used to access Yelp. Although Yelp is not required for GNOME to function, it is required to view GNOME's help documentation.

Ubuntu Ubuntu ( ) is a Linux distribution based on Debian and composed mostly of free and open-source software. Ubuntu is officially released in three editions: ''Desktop'', ''Server'', and ''Core'' for Internet of things devices and robots. All the ...

also uses yelp to provide a customized help interface for its software. A

format string The printf format string is a control parameter used by a class of functions in the input/output libraries of C and many other programming languages. The string is written in a simple template language: characters are usually copied literal ...

vulnerability in GNOME versions 2.19.90 and 2.24 allowed arbitrary code execution through Yelp.

References

External links

GNOME Help
{{GNOME Software GNOME Applications Technical communication Software documentation Online help