[Lazarus] Extending FCL documentation

[Graeme Geldenhuys]

On 8 February 2012 11:07, Michael Schnell  wrote:
>
> Would DocView as a primary Help viewer be able to support Help hints in the
> current or an even  better way ?

There are many ways to support code hints. VB6 used to have a small
window below the Object Inspector. Other IDE's used a help panel. Some
used a status bar. Some use a popup window etc.. You can embed the
help viewer component (in the case of DocView, that would be the
TRichView component) in any of them.

As I mentioned in my previous message, you could also allow the IDE to
control an external viewer (which could take any shape or size) via
IPC etc.



> Are there decent chances to allow the users to select DocView as their
> primary help viewer in the IDE (rather than install it as an external tool)
> ?

There is nothing that needs to be changed in DocView as far as I know.
No technical limitations. You simply need to create a Lazarus Package
that registers DocView as a viewer, for what help context and format.

I used to do this, but it never worked well in Lazarus IDE. Did you
see the recent comments in this mailing list about end-users that
can't get the CHM viewer working? My point exactly!  So using the
External Tools method was fool proof, 15 seconds max to setup and
doesn't require an IDE recompile.


> IMHO, forcing a decision is always bad, as long as there still are
> possibilities to allow for flexibility.
>
> Why not extend the Tool interface (or derive  an additional special
> "helpviewer" interface from same) and handle the help viewer as a selectable

Not making any decision is even worse!  Also the problem is bigger
than just the help viewer. The help format is another problem.
End-users don't know where to contribute help too. Currently we have
HTML, XML, Wiki, PDF etc. The help is scattered all over the place,
and no specific versions are available for each Lazarus release.


-- 
Regards,
  - Graeme -


_______________________________________________
fpGUI - a cross-platform Free Pascal GUI toolkit
http://fpgui.sourceforge.net