[Lazarus] IDE help sample - asciidoc format

[Graeme Geldenhuys]

Hi,





  http://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/Add_Help_to_Your_Application





Plus points for AsciiDoc help format
------------------------------------
 * Because it is plain text it works perfectly in SCM repositories
   to track changes or submit documentation patches. We can even
   include a syntax highlighter for Lazarus IDE so we can edit the
   documentation using the Lazarus editor itself.
 * It is easy to read as-is in the raw (plain text) format. It's
   like writing a standard e-mail or readme.txt file.
 * A help viewer could be written to generate a HTML version at
   runtime as you view the help.
 * A help viewer can even be as simple as a TMemo displaying the
   raw text as-is.
 * The "Search" or "Find" feature in various help viewers would
   be very easy to implement. Simply use the same code as
   "Find in Files" (grep & regex) already used in the IDE.
 * Because the IDE help is in .txt format, every time you update
   your Lazarus from SVN, you will have the latest help as well.
 * The most important point - Help is available offline!





Regards,
  - Graeme -

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

In the message thread "Lazarus IDE help and Application help formats" I mentioned alternatives formats for the Lazarus IDE Help. As I said, I don't think the wiki and "online only" is the best format for IDE help. Attached is a sample Lazarus wiki page converted to AsciiDoc format. I used the following page as my test example. The included .txt file is the raw AsciiDoc format text. As you will see, usage of mark-up syntax are minimal. The .txt file is very easy to read as-is (unprocessed). I then included two generated HTML files. One is HTML v4.01 without any styling applied. The second HTML file is in XHTML 1.1 format with embedded CSS styling. It should be very easy to write our own "asciidoc parser" in Object Pascal which can be included in FPC or Lazarus. That way we will have no external dependencies on other tools / parsers. We can write various output backends for HTML, PDF, LaTeX, DocBook, PostScript, CHM, Unix Man Pages - similar to what fpdoc already does.

asciidoc-help.tar.gz
Description: GNU Zip compressed data

--
_______________________________________________
Lazarus mailing list
Lazarus@lists.lazarus.freepascal.org
http://lists.lazarus.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/lazarus