[Lazarus] FPDoc now with Markdown support

Don Siders don.siders at gmail.com
Sun Jan 3 20:48:03 CET 2021


>Hello !
>
>I didn't make it quite in time for the new year, but still:
>
>The fpdoc engine (what is used to document the FPC & Lazarus units)
>is now capable of outputting the documentation in markdown.
>
>This can be used as input for mkdocs or another engine such as sphinx.
>As a first engine, I tackled mkdocs.
> ...

Happy New Year, Michael.

I'm glad to see that FPDoc is getting some "love". I applaud any
effort to improve or modernize the help.

>I've been looking at allowing markdown for the description files (they would
>be less verbose then), but there seems to be no decent markdown parser available
>for pascal. If somone cares to contribute one...

Oh boy. I guess it is inevitable, but I don't think it's a
particularly good idea.

I have no aversion to XML tagging. I don't mind its rigid nature
because it guarantees consistent, predictable input.

Markdown is anarchy in my opinion, and you can't impose order on
anarchy. Markdown is great for readme or FAQ files. Not so great for a
large, structured documentation project. I would never choose to
author reference topics using markdown.

I would rather see sectioning added to the FPDoc tags/content model:

<topic>
  <section>
    <title>Using the Control</title>
    <p>Lorem ipsum sic dolor amet.</p>
  </section>
</topic>

I'd like to see PDF output from FPDoc too.

>Enjoy,
>Michael.

Thanks for your efforts.

Best regards,

Don


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