[Lazarus] Confused by help

[Graeme Geldenhuys]

On 2014-03-22 06:51, Richard Mace wrote:
> Hi Graeme,
> It looks very interesting.
> How would I instruct DocView to open at a particular section of a help
> file from Lazarus?

DocView (binary download) comes with an extensive help file explaining
all it's uses (concatenating help files at runtime, defining help as an
environment variable, etc).

But to answer your question, DocView accepts many parameters. The
docview.inf help file explains that or select "Help->Command Line
Parameters" inside DocView


Supported command line parameters:

  <filename>       Load the help file <filename>
  -h               Show this help
  -k <text>        Search for keyword <<text> in open help files
  -n <id>          Open Topic with numeric ID equal to <id>
  -s <id>          Open Topic with string ID equal to <id>
  -debuglog <filename> Log information to a file

So you can define numerical or keyword help inside your application -
just like you would do with LCL or VCL applications. I don't know if you
can override the default help viewer in LCL based apps. But if not,
simply trap the F1 key (or probably the OnHelp event) and launch DocView
with the the appropriate parameters listed above.

I'm planning on more parameters and integration too. eg: placement and
size of DocView, as well as IPC communication between the application
and docview. The latter will allow you to control docview from your
application.

Regards,
  - Graeme -

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