[Lazarus] New Help System & Viewer - sneak preview

[Graeme Geldenhuys]

On 01/10/2009, Marco van de Voort <marcov at stack.nl> wrote:
>  >
>  > How do I generate the FCL and RTL documentation in INF (actually IPF) format?
>
> You tell me! I'm not the IPF expert. I assumed you had found some way to
>  export one of the existing formats to it.

I meant with the existing Makefile in the fpc docs repository. But
Michael confirmed in private that the current Makefile setup only
supports HTMl output for RTL and FCL.

I'll knock together a few scripts tomorrow the generate IPF outpuf
from the RTL and FCL.

>
>  > > - how links over module bounderies work,
>  >
>  > Explain "module"?
>
> Bundles of help generated separately from eachother.

It's possible, and I have seen INF files that do that, but I don't
know the tag format involved. I'll search the INF Reference manual for
clues tomorrow.


>  parts are not implemented yet. Fulltext search is fine and efficient, except
>  for the generation (LCL takes 4 minutes to generate)

I'll report back tomorrow after I generated the IPF files. But I can't
imagine the IPF Compiler taking that lock. I have thrown quite large
help docs at it and they normally complete in seconds. I'll give exact
figures tomorrow.



>  > I have loaded 10+ help files (totalling about 9000+ help pages), all
>  > over 2MB in size each. Loading time was instant.
>
> (I assume that means with index, search and TOC combination)

Yes, and user notes and user bookmarks - if they existed.


>
> CHM also allows to have a "toplevel" CHM that overrides the TOC and Index
>  for the "slave" CHMs.

Does that mean you have to compile a special "toplevel" CHM? You can't
simply concat them from the command line, at runtime? If CHM can't at
runtime, then the "toplevel" idea is pretty useless. When you buy
products that come with CHM help, you don't have the source of the
CHM. Also every time you want to add a new CHM to the "toplevel", you
have to edit and recompile the toplevel CHM. Definately not ideal.


>  > > - Can you pack arbitrary HTML into a file?
>  >
>  > I don't see the use of this. Can you explain why you would want too?
>
> You already encountered that. There only is HTML of ref,user etc. (there
>  might be others, but other converters might be an adventure. And after that
>  with fixing HTML layout, I don't want to ever go there again)

The current ref and user docs are not in HTML, they are originally in
LaTeX. And just as you have a LaTeX to HTML converted, so you can have
a LaTeX to IPF converted.

Also the benefit of INF is that it's similar to LaTeX in the regards
that the document writer doesn't need to bother much about the layout.
Simply specify a few things and the layout is generated for you. I
have seen CHM help which was completely rubbish simply because the
document writer had no clue about layout, color choice and CSS
stylesheets. This never happens in INF help - just like it never
happens in LaTeX generated documents.


>  > The INF has a very easy to learn mark-up language (48 tags to be
>  > exact) - similar to HTML and XML tags so should be easy to learn.
>
> And nobody knows them. And no system outputs them.

They are pretty self explanitory. Not to mention, I will probably
implement some preprocessor or GUI editor for it (like FPDOC Editors
hiding the XML structure). This is a no-brainer to do.


> I'm thinking about changing the Text IDE to CHM only in time. But not yet

I heard many objects about that. Of one, other platforms have all
there class and api help in different (non CHM) formats, so they will
not be able to integrate that with the IDE.


-- 
Regards,
  - Graeme -


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