[Lazarus] Lazarus helpfiles

[Lukasz Sokol]

On 20/04/2013 15:11, Marco van de Voort wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 11, 2012 at 09:53:59AM +0100, Lukasz Sokol wrote:
> 
> ( very old message, ran into it by accident while searching for something
> else)
> 
>> If the point of CHM is that they use less disk space than unpacked HTML, 
>> (yeah, I see the point : lcl.chm 11.577MB, fcl.chm 1.968MB, vs unpacked 
>> HTML files that use 187MB) then I'd include this information somewhere 
>> on the wiki...
> 
> There are multiple ways in which chms are superior to the raw material:
> 
> - Primarily they are compressed, and can be used as such (html decompression
>     on plain dos can take hours)
> - Indexing, TOC and search is better.
> - cross package hyperlinking is file position independent. IOW FPC and LCL
>    helpfiles don't have to be in the same directory to link to eachother
>    (plain html simply does ../<packagename> for all unresolved links)
> - The code to use the helpfile is filesystem independent. In the past quite
>    often subtle filesystem related bugs (like wrong directory separator)
>    came to light only after release(*)
> 
> (*) specially on Dos. Dos-under-Windows is more lenient than standalone dos.
> 
> Note that the html inside the CHM is 99% the same, but not entirely. Using
> one base html for both is not really practical atm. All references between
> packages would break. 
> 
>
ACK, thanks for the info.

Lukasz