[Lazarus] Extending FCL documentation

[Graeme Geldenhuys]

On 7 February 2012 08:36, Hans-Peter Diettrich  wrote:
> documentation, I think that there exist reasons for maintaining additional
> documentation directories, which are *not* under version control


I think you are approaching the problem from the wrong angle.
Additional documentation should be the job of the Help Viewer (LHelp,
DocView etc), not the documentation generator. Otherwise, you are
forcing everybody to generate their own documentation, just to get
their own personal notes included in the help. And every time you want
to add a new note, you have no generate the docs again! :-(

I have lots and lots of "additional documentation"  - extended notes,
new code samples, simple inline comments etc. This is done via
DocView's "annotations" feature. The annotations are added directly to
the help topic I am viewing in DocView. Simply click where you want
the annotation, click the annotation toolbar button and start typing.
These personal notes are automatically stored external to the INF help
file, in a <help_file_name>.notes file. As soon as I load a help file,
DocView checks if there is a associated *.notes file, and loads that
too. When viewing my help topics, those annotations appear inside my
help topics. By default they are colored green, but this is user
customizable. To edit/amend an annotation, simply click the green text
and start typing.

See the screenshot of DocView showing some example annotations inline
as green text. And yes, more than one annotation can be inserted into
a single help topic.

  http://fpgui.sourceforge.net/screenshots_apps.shtml


-- 
Regards,
  - Graeme -


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