[Lazarus] Building help files: the nitty-gritty

[Mark Morgan Lloyd]

Graeme Geldenhuys wrote:
> On 23 July 2012 19:27, Michael Van Canneyt <michael at freepascal.org> wrote:
>> I use PDF for application help. Works perfectly, F1 and all. It has all
> 
> Yes, you told me that a long time ago. But I also remember you told me
> that it only works in Windows. Plus the "help" is at the mercy of the
> documentation writer.... by that I mean, there might not be a Index or
> a Table of Content, and Searching PDF's are damn slow. And while we
> are talking about slow - Acrobat Reader (installed by most users,
> especially under Windows) has the longest start-up time of any PDF
> reader.
> 
> Yup, still a crazy idea.  ;-)

It's not as crazy as using a pseudo-standard such as one of the MS Word 
or Open/Libre Office formats, or the sanitized versions which IBM et al. 
are pushing in their attempts to prove to various governments that they 
are 100% behind open standards. But I remain very concerned about the 
level of support- i.e. with any reader on any platform- to jump to a 
predefined entry point in a PDF.

And quite frankly, when looking at a fairly wide range of OSes and CPUs, 
Adobe's reader is better than the alternatives particularly when there's 
a thousand or so pages in a document (like the IBM S/390 manual I'm 
using to put myself to sleep at night).

 From the POV of the Lazarus IDE, /the/ important thing is rapid and 
correct loading of a page in response to F1. If the storage format that 
this dictates can be easily created and exploited by user-written 
programs- which (with the possible exception of F1 support) is pretty 
much where we are with .chm- then all the better, because it means that 
the maximum number of people are focusing on improving performance and 
reliability.

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

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