[Lazarus] Building help files: the nitty-gritty

[Mark Morgan Lloyd]

Mattias Gaertner wrote:
> On Tue, 10 Jul 2012 19:45:46 +0000
> Mark Morgan Lloyd <markMLl.lazarus at telemetry.co.uk> wrote:
> 
>> [...]
>>> make bigide does not include chmhelppkg. You have to pass
>>> OPT=-dUseCHMHelp to do that.
>> I made using bigide, and the package was in the installed list.
> 
> See ide/lazarus.pp
> Maybe you are confusing "installed" lists?

I mean in the sense of the "If you are using Lazarus from Subversion" in 
the 
http://wiki.freepascal.org/Installing_Help_in_the_IDE#Installing_CHM_Help_for_The_RTL.2C_FCL_and_LCL_in_the_Lazarus_IDE 
page which is cited by the trunk IDE's Help -> Online Help page: the 
instructions are accurate (it's only page and link organisation that 
I've been querying).

>> I still had to build lhelp manually.
> 
> Check if you have local modifications. In trunk the makefile target
> bigide includes lhelp.

Same applies.

>>> The docs have references to the RTL+FCL docs, which are outside the
>>> Lazarus sources and have references to programmers guide, which
>>> requires latex. The whole doc build chain has too many dependencies and
>>> need several minutes to build. That's not feasible for a simple make
>>> command.
>> So what's best to do here: download them as binaries and install where/how?
> 
> Download the chm files and put them into "yourlazarus/docs/chm/".

OK, so I get 
ftp://freepascal.stack.nl/pub/fpc/dist/2.6.0/docs/doc-chm.zip and 
unpack. The .txt file says copy the files to docs/html which I'm 
assuming is wrong, so I end up with .chm (etc.) files in 
/usr/local/share/lazarus-trunk/docs/chm and the Lazarus IDE picks them 
up automatically.

Congratulations and thanks to everybody who's worked hard to get the IDE 
to this point (and who's put up with my occasionally bull-headed questions).

-- 
Mark Morgan Lloyd
markMLl .AT. telemetry.co .DOT. uk

[Opinions above are the author's, not those of his employers or colleagues]