[Lazarus] Building help files: the nitty-gritty

[Michael Schnell]

On 07/18/2012 02:35 PM, Mark Morgan Lloyd wrote:
>
> But first you have to identify the need: that you're thirsty :-)
>
Yep. Seemingly both are: The application programmers that want to 
provid3e a help system to their users, and the application programmers 
that want to use a help system when working with Lazarus. Moreover those 
willing to provide/update content to the Lazarus help system are 
thirsty, too.

> I think Reinier and I are saying that the need in the current case is 
> how to intercept F1 and recover an associated keyword, and how to pass 
> that keyword to lhelp.
Of course you are right. This is one aspect of the functionality that 
might be provided by the Lazarus LCL to have the application programmers 
provide a "help" functionality to their users. Other aspects of this 
functionality is launching a help viewer (or providing an internal one) 
and allowing the programmer to create the help files in a decent way.

Beer: _When_ all this is resolved in a perfect way for the IDE, any 
application programmer can just use it for his own product.
Tee: some unrelated system might be integrated in the LCL that is usable 
for the application programmers' product. Same supposedly will use some 
3rd party help writing tool.

-Michael