[Lazarus] [Fwd: Re: Is Lazarus a Delphi plagiat?]

[Graeme Geldenhuys]

Lee Jenkins wrote:
> 
> Personally, I've come to like Adobe's LiveDocs format which seems to be a hybrid 
> of Wiki and TOC oriented format and its indexed by google making searches easy 
> and fast.
> 
> Anyone else care for this kind of format?

No. :-)
I would much prefer a off-line documentation format. I find it *extremely*
annoying when I sit at home with my laptop and can't get help on a dialog
or product because such help is only available online (and I don't always
have internet access). This is why I spent a considerable amount of time
researching documentation formats and ended up choosing the IBM INF format
(used for OS/2 help files and other OS/2 documentation/books) as my
starting point.

INF is extremely fast and efficient (a magnitude of 15+ times faster than
CHM), the output INF files are small and compact, the tagging language
(IPF) is easy to learn - the 45 tags are mnemonic making it easy to
associate them with their functions. IPF tagging language was specifically
designed for documentation, so it is well suited for generating good
looking output.

DocView (The INF viewer I wrote) supports a Table of Content, a Index view
and generates one at runtime if the INF document doesn't include one, full
text search, search algorithm that rates search results so you get more
relevant results, keyword highlighting of search text, annotations,
bookmarks, topic browse history, font substitution, Library mode (opening
multiple INF documents and combining there TOCs at runtime) and the list
goes on.

I am almost finished with translating the FPC Language Reference to INF so
others can use it with DocView from inside Lazarus IDE or stand-alone. This
should be a good example of what INF can do and how it looks, plus the new
fpdoc IPF output writer that can build class documentation in INF format.


Regards,
  - Graeme -

-- 
fpGUI Toolkit - a cross-platform GUI toolkit using Free Pascal
http://opensoft.homeip.net/fpgui/