[Lazarus] A solution to online AND offline IDE help

[Mattias Gaertner]

On Fri, 3 Oct 2008 15:06:17 +0200
"Graeme Geldenhuys" <graemeg.lists at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Fri, Oct 3, 2008 at 2:29 PM, Michael Van Canneyt
> <michael at freepascal.org> wrote:
> >
> > Ehm.
> > The FPC help alone is about 32000 HTML pages. How will your browser
> > react if you cram all that in 1 page and load it in the browser ?
> >
> > I can't even imagine what would happen if you add the LCL help...
> >
> > Such small tools are OK for small (as in tiny, tiddly) projects,
> > but not for serious projects.
> 
> Ehm..  ;-)
> As the title of the message said:  "IDE help"
> 
> I was not referring to FCL, RTL or LCL help. Those are already in
> fpdoc format. And users can already download "offline" versions of
> them.  The IDE itself _doesn't_ have a offline version. So users
> without internet connection have _no_ IDE help, because it's in a
> online wiki format only. And I'm pretty sure the IDE Help is a lot
> smaller than FCL, RTL or LCL. So it should be doable.

It depends on what belongs to the IDE help.
Basically everything in the wiki could be helpful and should be
available in the off line version.
AFAIR the last time I did an export of the wiki content it was 8
mb (without images). I don't know what tiddly will do with that. I
doubt, that every browser works fluently with such a monster.

 
> Using something like TiddlyWiki the IDE Help can still be maintained
> online, but could also be made available offline, because the wiki
> content is in a single file and works exactly the same offline as it
> does online. No http server or CGI scripts required to view it offline
> - just a web browser.
> 
> This is also why I said, it could be handy for developers using it as
> a help format for their own applications. Just a though.

Yes, that's true. But I agree with Michael: Tiddly does not scale.

Mattias