There are many concepts mixed in this conversation and it would be useful to separate them and agree on what specifically is being requested:
- Bitwig native devices vs plugins.
- Annotations in a broad sense vs editing Bitwig’s Help interface (F1)
The Help interface is only available for native devices. They can do this because they can render the help page in the same way that they are rendering the devices themselves, resulting in the amazing interactive help where you can read documentation and play with the device at the same time.
The Help interface is not available for plugins (or at least I never came across a plugin that would offer a help page in the same way that Bitwig devices do. This makes sense because (please correct me if I’m wrong) the plugin is running in a virtual environment and Bitwig has little to no control over it. It cannot reproduce the UI on a Help page.
Even for Bitwig devices, allowing users to edit the Help page of a device feels like opening a can of worms unless you just give them a static scrollable window somewhere with a fixed position.
For these reasons I still think that Text annotations would solve this problem. A textarea in the Inspector Panel that all native devices and plugins have would provide you the place you need to write your documentation.
@holar the idea of having separate fields for devices and presets makes sense and it could be integrated to Text annotations.