[Lazarus] New Help System & Viewer - sneak preview

[Graeme Geldenhuys]

2009/10/4 Marco van de Voort <marcov at stack.nl>:
>> reader library, or do you use a publicly available library like
>> libchm.so?
>
> own reader and writer.

Good.


>> As far as I know there is just one INF (IPF) tag format.
>
> Well, it is similar in the sense that the average developer has to learn it,
> contrary to basic HTML.

And looking at some of the websites out there, it seems developers and
web designers still need to learn HTML. There is a lot of crap out
there!

As a test, I asked my wife (a professional photographer, not web
designer) to look at an IPF file and see if she can figure out the
tags without even looking at the IPF Tag documentation. Within five
minutes to guessed most of the tags functions correctly. So no, IPF
tags are not that hard to read / learn. And if you are an HTML
developers (HTML + CSS have a lot more tags than IPF), you will
understand IPF tags without a hitch!

Also creating a preprocessor or WYSIWYG app is also very simple to do.
Most content management systems and many wiki sites even have WYSIWYG
editors for the more complex HTML, so the same would be quite simple
for IPF.

> No. _I'm_ not interested in INF. The only one I'm considering doing myself
> is TPH, because of the turbo vision help.

So that is YOUR opinion only, and forcing CHM on everybody that uses
the Text IDE. That's not very nice. I don't use the Text IDE much, so
to me it would not matter. But when it was mentioned a while back that
all help formats are considering being dropped and only CHM used,
instantly there were replies showing concern. One such reply referred
to the hordes of API documentation for OS/2 which are all in INF
format. Another mentioned the Turbo Vision help.  So judging from
those replies, you are not the only one using the Text IDE - there are
others. To them, having the ability to view whatever format help they
help seems to be important.


-- 
Regards,
  - Graeme -


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