[Lazarus] Google Docs for help documentation

[Graeme Geldenhuys]

On 2015-10-11 20:28, Richard Mace wrote:
> I was wondering what people thought about using a Google Doc as a help file?

I'm sorry to be blunt, but that is a terrible idea.

Personally I find it very annoying if applications don't include help -
and by that I mean "Context Sensitive Help". Simply supplying a massive
web page, or PDF document is just terrible for the end-user. It's as if
the developer or company forgot about the documentation or just made it
a afterthought. This seems to be the trend unfortunately - giving no
context sensitive help. I miss the attention to detail we saw in the
90's. If you include a PDF, it tells me there should be printed
documentation to, because that is what the PDF supplements.

When I press F1 or click the Help button in a dialog, I want help
specific to that dialog or the widget that had focus.

I want very fast help loading times - you will not get that with PDF's
or even worse, with Google Docs (shared document).

I want full text searching.

I want advanced searching functions.

I want annotation support. I so often add my own notes inside help so
that the topic is more clear to me. Sometimes I even include some source
code examples - depending what the help file relates too.

I suggest using something like INF (with DocView) or CHM help. DocView
has all the features (and more) listed above. Here is a complete example
showing how to use DocView with LCL applications. You need to be logged
in to the forum to see the actual attachment with source code.


http://forum.lazarus.freepascal.org/index.php/topic,27864.msg173887.html#msg173887


ps:
  I have nothing against Google Docs for generating documents like
letters, shared software specs etc. It is good in that sense, and works
really well - at least as long as the documents are not too big - in
which case it becomes really slow. eg: OpenOffice, LibreOffice and
MS-Word opens a 150 page spec in an instant, and it is fast to jump
around. With Google Docs, Office 365, Atlassian Confluence etc it is dog
slow.

Regards,
  - Graeme -

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