[Lazarus] Extending FCL documentation

[Graeme Geldenhuys]

On 8 February 2012 11:55, Felipe Monteiro de Carvalho  wrote:
>
> Are you saying that we should choose between chm and inf?

No, I'm saying: Make a decision - any decision!

Points to consider:

  * Is offline help an option. If not - ignore everything I posted today
  * What help viewer to use, or must a new one be created
  * What features should the help viewer contain
      - full text search
      - various search syntax (OR, AND etc)
      - highlighting of search terms in found help topics
      - Index support
      - Table of content support
      - run-time concatenation of help files
      - ability to search across multiple help files (RTL, FCL, LCL,
packages etc)
      - print support
      - exporting of help topics to plain text or PDF
      - Bookmarks
      - user annotations
      - viewer controllable via an external application (IPC etc)
  * What help format to use for the IDE itself (dialogs, ide settings etc).
    This will also help for applications developed with Lazarus LCL.
  * If a new (non-existent) help format is chosen, then tools like fpdoc should
    be modified to output the RTL, FCL etc class documentation to that format.
  * What about the other FPC docs like the Language Reference.
  * [important to some] Does the documentation look good in the help viewer.
    It is an insult to the help authors, if there hard works looks
crap in the final
    product.
  * does the help viewer perform well. No point in having a sluggish help viewer
     that takes forever to load, or search or just even scroll long
bodies of help
     content.


> I just wanted to test your theory that the IDE help system is in
> shambles and I did a little google and found this link:

Yeah, I believe those directions were fixed a few days ago - after the
millionth Lazarus user couldn't get it working following the previous
instructions.

But now those instructions probably don't apply to any previous
released or current stable Lazarus release - thanks to the menu and
dialog overhaul Lazarus had in Trunk.

Once again, the wiki only caters for Lazarus Trunk.


> I don't use releases, but I will also check if releases come with
> offline help out of them.

I'll save you the trouble.... No they don't. No pre-compiled binaries
of any help viewer and no offline help of any sorts.


-- 
Regards,
  - Graeme -


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