[Lazarus] Building help files: the nitty-gritty

[Marco van de Voort]

On Mon, Jul 23, 2012 at 10:16:04AM +0000, Mark Morgan Lloyd wrote:
> Marco van de Voort wrote:
> 
> > Well, the pdf manuals are on average 100-150 pages, but sometimes 300 pages,
> > 40-60% of which is custom per project. Then on top of that, blueprints and
> > BOMs of all mechanical parts.
> 
> Do you ever have a situation where you need to index into a PDF, and if 
> so how do you cope?

No. We don't do help. Stronger even, I haven't really in past jobs either,
since those were server apps.

So all my helpfile stuff is hobby, but that goes back a long time. I was
already dabbling with helpfile systems in my topspeed days (before FPC)

> I'm looking at something where it would be beneficial to have a 
> collection of electronics info, and I'd want immediate access to a given 
> section. Allowing for the dominance of PDF in that industry, the best I 
> can think of so far is to burst each PDF into pages, and then convert 
> each page back to PDF.

Since I don't HAVE TO deploy anything, I only work on long term
solutions. IMHO this is not one :-)

For the same reason, I don't like the constant Kylix help recommendations
either. Fine for isolated cases, but shouldn't be promoted as general thing
to do IMHO