[Lazarus] Lazarus helpfiles

[Marco van de Voort]

On Wed, Jul 11, 2012 at 09:53:59AM +0100, Lukasz Sokol wrote:

( very old message, ran into it by accident while searching for something
else)

> If the point of CHM is that they use less disk space than unpacked HTML, 
> (yeah, I see the point : lcl.chm 11.577MB, fcl.chm 1.968MB, vs unpacked 
> HTML files that use 187MB) then I'd include this information somewhere 
> on the wiki...

There are multiple ways in which chms are superior to the raw material:

- Primarily they are compressed, and can be used as such (html decompression
    on plain dos can take hours)
- Indexing, TOC and search is better.
- cross package hyperlinking is file position independent. IOW FPC and LCL
   helpfiles don't have to be in the same directory to link to eachother
   (plain html simply does ../<packagename> for all unresolved links)
- The code to use the helpfile is filesystem independent. In the past quite
   often subtle filesystem related bugs (like wrong directory separator)
   came to light only after release(*)

(*) specially on Dos. Dos-under-Windows is more lenient than standalone dos.

Note that the html inside the CHM is 99% the same, but not entirely. Using
one base html for both is not really practical atm. All references between
packages would break.