Hi Bernd,
thanks for all those fixes in HTMLHELP!
How much faster are Unicode and HTML entity translation now?
I would NOT remove the ZIP feature, because a typical help zip
contains more than 100 files, with a median length of just 1 kB
uncompressed. This would waste a lot of disk space with large
clusters and DOS itself also is slow with large directories.
You can try whether it helps to use UNCOMPRESSED ZIP or TAR
and of course nobody complains about benchmarks either. As
far as I remember, HTMLHELP supports both ZIP and unzipped
contents of the ZIP as input, so comparing both modes should
be easy even without code changes :-)
Maybe the search could avoid reopening the zip many times?
If you want less unpack-overhead, you could even concat
the help texts after the binary in some way and then UPX it.
We have tools for similar tricks in FreeCOM, I believe. As
help is small, everything could fit in RAM after loading.
I would not store Unicode translation tables in a central
place. Maybe you could share tables already used by another
app or driver in some way, but this is too exotic to have
a central component a la ICONV or RECODE, I believe.
You already wanted to check different strategies for tables,
so maybe you can come up with an encoding which is both good
for speed and for memory footprint?
I think it is good that HTMLHELP can be used as generic
viewer for simple HTML hypertext packages, either in ZIP
or as individual files, so I also think that it is good
that it can handle HTML entities and Unicode on the fly.
AMB probably goes the other direction: Files have to be
pre-compiled with extra tools, but the viewer is small.
Regards, Eric
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