[Lazarus] Documentation and Help for Lazarus

[Chris Kirkpatrick]

Chris Kirkpatrick wrote:
> As well as providing detailed descriptions of all the classes, 
> procedures etc in the Lazarus code, we need to produce a lot of How-to 
> type documentation, and this process is still in its infancy. There is 
> a lot of good stuff in the wiki, but it is not very systematic. Some 
> of the developers are writing a Lazarus book, and we should encourage 
> this to form the basis of a good manual. We need lots of ideas, and a 
> lot of work needs to be done. All offers of assistance will be welcome.
>
> Chris
>
As an exercise, I have copied the material from the Lazarus Wiki page 
"AutoSize" into a Topic in Controls.xml; I performed the editing by hand 
in a text-editor, and the basic one-for-one translation took me about an 
hour. I then had to make a number of corrections and annotations, taking 
about another half-hour.

Obviously the Wiki document could be automatically parsed and translated 
into the XML format required for FPDoc, but we would still need to 
exercise editorial control over the actual material, to ensure that it 
made sense, was clear and consistent with the other documents etc. I'm 
not sure that the FPDoc XML format is the ideal for "How-To" 
documentation, and like the idea suggested by Graeme for a plain 
text-file format which could be treated in a variety of different ways.

At present both the FPDoc editor in the IDE and the LazDE stand-alone 
app have problems which make them less than ideal for producing "How-To" 
documents (I am filing bug reports as appropriate), so any approach that 
leads to the construction of IDE and other documentation on usage would 
be welcome.

Regards - Chris