[Lazarus] Help System with Chromium Embedded component

[Graeme Geldenhuys]

On 2016-11-11 23:09, Lars via Lazarus wrote:
>> You can always use any other port >1024 for that.
> 
> No issues with default firewalls?  Last thing I want, is a customer having
> to futz around with router firewall, windows firewall, etc.

It was 4 years ago, but as far as I remember, we didn't have any
firewall issues on Windows.


> But isn't that what iota full text search is for, to preindex all the
> search stuff so no time is spent grepping through html files....

Yeah, but deployment is going to be a pain isn't it? I know of iota, but
I don't know how it works. I would imagine it needs to run continuously
in the background?

ps:
  I believe the is a FTS indexer as part of FCL as well. Though I think
  it was written for databases, not for HTML files.


> User defined notes, were not available in chm files were they? I thought
> chm/hlp file were just dumb, fixed help files with no bells an whistles.

Now there's an interesting question. :)

WinHelp supported both Annotations and Bookmarks, though the annotations
were not inline - it simply showed a paperclip icon or something that
you had to click to see the user defined notes, and was limited to one
note per help topic.

Window's CHM viewer only support bookmarks (they call it Favourites). So
it actually has less features than WinHelp did. :)

DocView supports inline annotations, bookmarks, full text search,
advanced search terms (eg: search for this but don't include that,
search by phrase, or fine something spelled similar to search term you
entered). Docview also allows multiple annotations per help topic. The
Bookmarks, Annotations and Advanced Search features are not part of the
INF file format, docview implements those. Full Text Search comes
standard with INF though - any word in the whole INF file is only stored
once (all others are simply pointers to the word lookup table). This is
also why INF is so compact (eg: one help file will be 3MB in INF, but
that same help content will be a 12MB CHM file)

On a side note:
  I use Docview's annotations support a lot! My Free Pascal RTL and FCL
  help is full of my own comments, code examples etc. I also use it to
  note down errors in the help (eg: spelling mistakes, grammar,
  examples) and then later when I have time, report those on Mantis as
  they are then easy to find again.


> I didn't realize there were help systems were you could inline some notes?

Take a look here:

  http://fpgui.sourceforge.net/screenshots_apps.shtml

In the first screenshot, note all the green text. They are inline
annotation examples. You can simply click them to edit them too.

The yellow text is the highlighted search terms it found in that page.
Both colors are user configurable, and so too is the font and page
background color.

In the "Search Results" list box, the numbers behind the help topics are
a search rating value. The higher the value, the more precise the search
result was (eg: the search term appeared more than once in that help topic).



Regards,
  Graeme

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

My public PGP key:  http://tinyurl.com/graeme-pgp