[Lazarus] Lazarus IDE help and Application help formats

[Michael Van Canneyt]

On Mon, 17 Aug 2009, Mattias Gärtner wrote:

> Zitat von Graeme Geldenhuys <graemeg at opensoft.homeip.net>:
>
>> Mattias Gärtner wrote:
>>>
>>> Almost any text format fits these requirements. You should be more 
> specific.
>>> For example the documentation needs
>>> * a toc
>>> * possibility to combine docs to modules
>>> * links to docs in the same module
>>> * links to docs in other modules
>>> * external links
>>
>> These are all supported by AsciiDoc.
>>
>>
>>> * keywords to refer from outside
>>
>> This can be created by us - using a documentation generator or 
>> something. Similar to what fpdoc does for CHM help.
>>
>>
>>> * viewers for all platforms:
>>
>> This is easy. Default help can be HTML format. Lazarus already 
>> includes an HTMl viewer component as used by 'lhelp'. I'm sure there 
>> are many more available.
>>
>>
>>> ** a good search engine
>>> ** allow to load/view several modules at the same time
>>> ** remote control in both directions
>>
>> I don't understand these? What do they have to do with documentation?
>
> It's not sufficient to only have help files. The important piece is to 
> find and present the help. Just take a look at the mails. We have 
> thousands of help pages and still people say we have no usable help.
>
>
>> If you publish your docs online, a search engine will be able to index 
> them.
>
> And if you view them offline?
> And: An index is not enough.
>
> When someone needs help at a certain place, then a F1 should open the 
> help for that - context sensitive help. For example when a user is in 
> the compiler options dialog, a F1 should tell the help viewer to open 
> the help for the 'compiler options dialog'.
> That's what I mean with support for "keywords" and "remote control".
> The online help currently shows the help for the LCL and the FCL.

FPDoc has support for keywords in the sense that you can refer to a topic
with the name of the keyword.

For the HTML help (user/programmer/ref manual) I implemented the support for
keywords at your request ?

Michael.