[Lazarus] installing chm help

Graeme Geldenhuys graemeg.lists at gmail.com
Thu Feb 16 10:16:27 CET 2012


On 16 February 2012 06:12, waldo kitty wrote:
>  but i am one of (apparently very few) who
> need/require /offline/ documentation to be equal to or (even better) local
> documentation... in my mind, offline documentation should come first and
> then (possibly!!) linking to online documentation for the equivalent or
> less...


+1000000000

We seem to be the minority. :-(

For me, offline help and documentation has huge benefits over online help:

  - I can get help at any time
  - it doesn't cost me money every time I press F1 (yes my internet
data is limited and very expensive)
  - it is much faster than online help.
  - it should look better than online help
  - the help viewer is a lot more rich in feature to online web browser systems.
  - I can add my own notes that are always with me and accessible
  - I can bookmark interesting topics

I can probably list a lot more... To address all these, I spent many
months reviewing various file formats and even considering creating a
new custom file format. At the same time I reviewed many help viewers
too, listing the pros and cons. I also looked at what features a
programmer and end-user would like to have in a help viewer - things
that actually help you, not hinder you. I also looked at how much
effort it would be to author documentation (electronic book style) and
application help. Also how easy and successful one could integrate
this with existing tools (fpdoc, Lazarus IDE, MSEide etc). This is how
I came to the decision of using INF, and developing DocView.

-- 
Regards,
  - Graeme -


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




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