[Lazarus] New Help System & Viewer - sneak preview

Graeme Geldenhuys graemeg.lists at gmail.com
Mon Oct 5 10:09:00 CEST 2009


2009/10/5 Marco van de Voort <marcov at stack.nl>:
> - you don't need to know _full_ html to write help, and more importantly,
> tools to help you (and other tools that export it) are plenty.

You also don't need to know full IPF tags to write help. The least
amount of tags you would need to write INF help would be 2 IPF tags:
userdoc, h1

If you want paragraphs in your content, then it would need 3 IPF tags
in total: userdoc, h1, p     :-)

As for wysiwyg editors, there are plenty - but only for OS/2. :-) I
plan change that though!



> Nobody else has cared about text IDE help in the last 10 years, so I think
> that is reasonable.

Maybe it just worked for the last 10 years. ;-)


> But if you ask "hey, I updated something about the IDE, please test if .INF
> still works" you get no reply. Let alone if you need to change the helpfile

That applies to any project with any feature. Help systems are
definitely not an isolated case.


> I thought that you of all people would understand this, since what good are
> fast indexes and TOC's if they aren't used? Same for fast concatenation and
> the like.

I don't know other exotic help formats, so I really cannot comment.
What I can say though, is that FPC Text IDE is a really nice "library"
of code for reading / learning help formats. It would be a shame to
loose that library of code. So maybe if we can archive the help format
code somewhere and not simply delete it - that would be nice.

For example: The INF format has never been officially released by IBM.
It was reverse engineered with a lot of hours and pain. Having a
working code example on how to read INF is a real plus point!  The
same would apply for all those other formats. That is probably the
single biggest reason I say, not do just delete the code. Next year
some developer might join the Free Pascal community, but he has
thousands of documents in Virtual Pascal Help format. If he wanted to
write a tool to do the conversion, he could have looked at FP Text
IDE's help system.

Maybe cleaning up and moving that code into FCL as a "help format"
package etc might be nice.


> This because the generic helpsystem has to stick to the lowest common

I fully understand this point. That is my issue with LCL as well. :-)


PS:
My INF help viewer now supports searching too. It can search a single
file, concat help files passed in via the command line, or a global
library of help files (library path defined via HELPLIBRARY
environment variable). The search results are also tagged with a
"relevance" rating and sorted accordingly.


-- 
Regards,
  - Graeme -


_______________________________________________
fpGUI - a cross-platform Free Pascal GUI toolkit
http://opensoft.homeip.net/fpgui/




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