[Lazarus] Help System with Chromium Embedded component

[Lars]

On Fri, November 11, 2016 4:03 am, Graeme Geldenhuys via Lazarus wrote:
> On 2016-11-11 01:11, Lars via Lazarus wrote:
>
>> port alternative to port 80 which may be blocked by firewall. That I
>> would want to avoid, as it's just another hassle.
>
> You can always use any other port >1024 for that.

No issues with default firewalls?  Last thing I want, is a customer having
to futz around with router firewall, windows firewall, etc.

....
> But for help, firing up Chrome of Firefox is just too damn slow, and
> eats way to much memory. Also you will have to implement your own search
> (which will be slow over HTML files), table of contents and index pages.

But isn't that what iota full text search is for, to preindex all the
search stuff so no time is spent grepping through html files....

The issue with Iota I found was that it was written in an old fpc style
where some things are not proper code, but compiled at that state of fpc
development.  iota, if you don't know, is a full text search indexing
library for fpc.  Discussed briefly on the fpc mailing lists eons ago.

> Then what about other useful features like bookmarking a help topic,
> inline annotations (user defined notes added to a help topic at runtime).
>

User defined notes, were not available in chm files were they? I thought
chm/hlp file were just dumb, fixed help files with no bells an whistles.
i.e. total commander style help.

With a chrome embedded browser object, you can use the DOM to manipulate
the document. That's basically how chrome plugins work in the browser
where you can modify the html page and add widgets to someone else's site,
on your client side. If you wanted to add notes to html help you could use
the DOM to do it and store those extra notes in a database, or something. 
I'd be interested in how many people do this: add notes to their help,
inline.  We know that people add notes at the end of the documentation,
like the php manual where people add comments to the bottom of the page. I
didn't realize there were help systems were you could inline some notes?


> As for communications with a external [dedicated] help viewer. fpGUI's
> Docview does that via IPC, Microsoft's WinHelp I think could do it too,
> OS/2 VIEW help viewer did lots of 2-way communications with applications.
>
>

Which is an interesting question: why hasn't firefox allowed IPC from
external apps. Could be a security vulnerability. Maybe just one of those
interesting features that could be, should be, would be, but no one has
thought of implementing.  If firefox had IPC you could navigate to an
anchor from an external exe.

Also an interesting question is why hasn't adobe got something like this
so that adobe files could be used as help files: scroll to a certain part
of the pdf file programmatically using IPC, or maybe using an adobe
embedded object.  I find pdf files just a little too slow, though, and not
as responsive, due to them being like a resource intensive graphic. So I
suppose pdf files ruin the zippy feeling of a fast help system.