[Lazarus] New Help System & Viewer - sneak preview

[Marco van de Voort]

On Mon, Oct 05, 2009 at 09:09:13AM +0200, Graeme Geldenhuys wrote:
> 
> >> 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!

Doesn't matter.
- you don't need to know _full_ html to write help, and more importantly,
tools to help you (and other tools that export it) are plenty.
- Most people will already know enough html.
 
> > 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

Correct.

> and forcing CHM on everybody that uses the Text IDE. 

Nobody else has cared about text IDE help in the last 10 years, so I think
that is reasonable.

> 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.

If you threaten to remove something, it suddenly is always used. I bet they
even didn't test if it actually worked, just replyed out of reflex.

But if you ask "hey, I updated something about the IDE, please test if .INF
still works" you get no reply. Let alone if you need to change the helpfile
abstraction, and the .INF needs updating. It is all dead weight for
imaginary use.

I thought that you of all people would understand this, since what good are
fast indexes and TOC's if they aren't used? Same for fast concatenation and
the like. 

This because the generic helpsystem has to stick to the lowest common
denomitor and loads all lists and sorts and processes them again (after a
few times copying them).