[lazarus] help format

[Michael.VanCanneyt at Wisa.be]

On Wed, 23 Jan 2002, Mattias Gaertner wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> A month ago, there was a discussion about the help format for lazarus.
> It was mentioned, that a browser based help system would be far too slow.
> The alternatives for the format were html, windows help, custom format or fpdoc.
> The alternatives for the viewer were custom helpviewer or gtkhtml.
>
> The help should be easily to edit under at least linux and windows.
> The context sensitive help system for the IDE needs a link based system, which can be remote controlled. Remote control should be possible via help IDs and via keyword search like "TTreeView" -> "Items". It would be nice, if the help viewer has got only one window, instead of three like Delphi. I think, the Delphi navigation of properties to the left and explanation to the right is nice, but I miss the big context. It would help, if the left side shows a tree of the complete help instead of just one node.
> Did I miss something important?
>
> Is there any help format+viewer+editor available?
>
> We already got some texts. But we need a format to publish them.

For what it is worth:

The core team (i.e. mostly me, I assume) from now on uses fpdoc for the
documentation of the FCL mainly for these reasons:

- The format is more or less 'designed' for FPC documentation.

- The fpdoc tool is written in pascal and maintained by us. We can extend
  it in any way we like/see fit.

- At this moment, it generates nice HTML, and printable LaTeX
  (and hence, e.g. PDF) but it can be easily extended with any back
  end you want. I'm myself planning to add RTF after I tweaked the
  LaTeX
  You could add any custom format you would like.

- Making an editor for it should be easy, and is definitely planned.
  Michael Hess knows about this.

Using fpdoc would enable you to cross-link to the FCL docs without
problem. Since you can create any back-end you like, you could make
an output format that is easy to display for you.

Michael.