[Lazarus] documentation snapshot

[Graeme Geldenhuys]

On 2013-04-20 20:21, Lubos Pintes wrote:
> ... And something that is totally inaccessible.

As Sven said, I have implemented a open source pure Pascal viewer that
currently runs on Linux (even 10 year old distros), Windows 95-8,
FreeBSD, Solaris, Raspberry Pi, WinCE and other Linux ARM Embedded
devices. OS/2 and eComStation obviously also can read INF file because
it is the native help format on those platforms. There are also
INF-to-HTML converters (even IBM has some of there docs currently online
like that). I'm also already working on extending DocView to have a PDF
export function. Exporting a whole INF document, or selected topics to
PDF - thus making it consumable by the select few platforms I don't yet
support.

The INF format has been well documented by myself and prior developers -
the layout document is included in fpGUI's repository. So you are free
to study it, and implement another viewer if you want.

I'm also investigating iOS and Android viewers.

The IPF Compiler (used to generate INF binary help files) is also open
source - currently implement in OpenWatcom C/C++. I am busy implementing
a 100% pascal compiler too.

So "totally inaccessible" is grossly overstated.


> So please, please, no something "proprietary".

ps:
  CHM is proprietary too, so is the old Microsoft HLP format, and so too
is PDF. Doesn't stop anybody from using those.

I studied for months various help systems and help formats. INF was
superior for the task I wanted. It is very compact (the same help
content is much smaller using INF, compared to PDF, HTML or even CHM),
has Indexing support, Full Text Search, Image Support, simple markup
language etc. Is self contained too - as single file. And most
importantly, it can be integrated with applications so you can do
context sensitive help.


Regards,
  - Graeme -

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