[lazarus] Context sensitive help

Michael Van Canneyt michael.vancanneyt at wisa.be
Sat Apr 12 08:45:56 EDT 2003




On Sat, 12 Apr 2003, Mattias Gaertner wrote:

> On Sat, 12 Apr 2003 01:11:12 +0200 (CEST)
> marcov at stack.nl (Marco van de Voort) wrote:
>
> > > But then we must decide that the official help system for Lazarus will
> > > be HTML files (or whatever.)  I wasn't ready to make that judgement
> > > call.
> >
> > Personally I don't think that HTML or not is that big of a problem. Sure,
> > something else is more efficient, but doesn't matter much.
> >
> > However HTML with an own small subset interpreter, or a 30 MB footprint
> > browser, that is the dilemma.
> >
> > So while I'm not against HTML, I don't think regular browsers are an
> > option. To slow, requires too many resources.
>
> The alternatives are:
>
> a)
> Using a small browser: for instance Dillo - small, fast, needs only gtk+
> (not gnome).
>
> b)
> Creating our own help browser. The TurboPower InternetPro component
> (TIpHtmlPanel) in components/turbopower_ipro/ already works for simple HTML
> pages (i.e. no images). So, we have a HTML viewer component for the content,
> a TTreeView for the TOC, TSynEdit for the examples.
>
>
> It would nice to restart the discussion about the IDE helpsystem. I think,
> extendable is the keyword. Anyone should be able to easily add some help
> texts and send them to one of the developers, and adding the text should be
> as easy as applying a diff. That's why we need editing tools and a simple
> format.

May I again point out that the new fpdoc system is ready, officially included
in the compiler utils - it will be distributed with the compiler by default,
and can be used to generate any format you like, HTML and LaTeX being defaults.
The sources themselves are simple XML (much like HTML for formatting), and
a simple GUI editor is available for it.

Currently, we're making enhancements to be able to include arbitrary pieces
of text (topics) as an addition to the pascal-unit oriented topics which
exist now. This is done especially to accomodate IDE help systems.

Michael.








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