[Lazarus] New Help System & Viewer - sneak preview

[Marco van de Voort]

On Thu, Oct 01, 2009 at 11:34:45AM +0200, Graeme Geldenhuys wrote:
> > You plan to convert the FPC docs each time something is changed ?
> > I hope you have a latex->something converter program :-)
> 
> That would be stating the obvious. ;-)  The new help format is a
> hybrid INF format (from OS/2 INF help files). INF is an excellent
> format with many build-in features. I'm adding a few customizations of
> my own to bring it into the 21st century. The FP Text IDE was a great
> source of information regarding various help file formats.

Do you have an overview of what works and what not, and practical aspects of
the system?

E.g.
- what the "key" is, that identifies a topic
- how links over module bounderies work, 
- if you can have abstract aliases (that automatically aggregate over
  multiple help modules)
- do you support legacy "id" based numeric keys?
- How are the index and toc organized? Do they support multiple entries per
  key? Can an (index) search return multiple entries?
- How is the fulltext search organized? Does it add up with multiple files?
- Does you system need write access (e.g. for cache files)?
- What is the time to load the LCL index file and merge it with the FCL and
   RTL files?
- Can you create combined TOCs?
- Are big tocs loadable in stages?
- Can you pack arbitrary HTML into a file?

These are only the ones I can think of quickly.

Note that my CHM experience have made me doubt "generalized" systems of help
a bit (multi format ones) like the current textmode IDE and the Lazarus IDE.
As always with general systems, you get only the lowest common denomitor.