[Lazarus] Lazarus trunk help options: CHM Help browser does not show up

[Marco van de Voort]

On Fri, Feb 17, 2012 at 08:05:48PM +0100, Reinier Olislagers wrote:
> >> Chances of it being available on Windows, OSX, are not much higher than
> >> on Linux. Requiring it just to build documentation seems... excessive.
> > 
> > I don't see why.
> 
> I mentioned that because the Lazarus people seemed to manage with their
> lcl_build_docs (IIRC), which uses fpdoc to generate CHM files from XML
> source - either by using my Tex installation on Windows, or not
> requireing latex.

fpdoc is a FPC package, and the RTL and FCL doc sets of FPC work with it
too.

However, those are all documentation of sources. 

The latex manuals however are not XML. Editing latex is much more
confortable, and allows high quality PDF using a lot of the latex features,
not in the least the macro system.

The extra requirements are certainly a pain, but changing this would just
create a bigger pain.

Moreover, documentation building is not exactly that the average user does
regularly (seeing that there are less than 10 patches for it per quarter),
so it doesn't make sense to optimize it.

I do think it should at least be possible to do this on Windows. From a
philosophical perspective, FPC should not force a certain platform on people
wanting to be developers.

My first latex-on-windows attempt was in '98, so be sure that I have been
waiting quite some time :)

latex is already doable.  fpdoc based docs already work, but not via the
make system. (IIRC calling fpdoc via createprocessex does work, since the 
API limit is much higher than the shell limit). 

The commandline problems can be avoided via the project system, and on a
slightly longer term, maybe fpmake will allow to kill off the horrible
makefile of fpdocs.

But even then,
tex4ht on Windows is still an unknown factor. But for now, one thing at a
time :-)