Hi, I've been working on a new help system for fpGUI and Lazarus (IDE & apps). Attached is a screenshot of the Help Viewer I am working on. (please ignore the floating button - it's only there for debugging) It is showing the FPC Language Reference documentation (not fully converted from LaTeX yet). Currently the help viewer is written using fpGUI Toolkit, but the bulk of the help system is GUI toolkit independent classes and units, so it should be very easy to create a LCL based help viewer if the need arises. The help viewer could even be used for MSEgui - it seems all FPC based projects have a lack of a decent help system / viewer.
Why a new help system?
----------------------
* Wiki pages as a help system is awful.
- You have to edit it while online
- Help in applications only exist if you have a internet
connection. No Offline Help!!
* HTML is designed for the web, not as a help system.
- HTML viewers are bulky (Firefox, Internet Explorer etc.)
- HTML text is inefficient, verbose and large in size.
- Various HTML viewers do not present the content in a
consistent manner. Some HTML viewers show the content
looking different.
* No offence to Michael. :-) PDF's are great for books etc.
That's if you plan to print them at some stage. They do not
work well for a help system though. That was not what they
where designed for.
My Help Viewer features consist of:
-----------------------------------
* Very fast viewer
* Purpose built help format which optimises size and speed. HTML
as used in CHM is not optimised for a help system. That's my
opinion.
* Purpose build help viewer window for consistent displaying of
help.
* The viewer can load multiple files and concatenate their
Indexes and Table of Contents to make a "virtual bookshelf".
So you could load the Ref, Prog and LCL help files together
and see one large TOC and Index pages.
* Searching works across the "virtual bookshelf".
* The help format has built-in Full Text Search. Each word in the help
contents only appear once in the compiled help file. The rest is
dictionary lookup pointers. This causes a huge increase in speed
and size of the compiled help file.
* No unpacking of help content before they can be viewed.
* External notes can be added to help pages, so when you load those
pages at a later date, you can view your notes again.
* Bookmarking is supported
* Printing sections or all content will be supported.
Please note that not all features have already been implemented. TOC,
Indexes, Searching and viewing multiple files already works.
--
Regards,
- Graeme -
_______________________________________________
fpGUI - a cross-platform Free Pascal GUI toolkit
http://opensoft.homeip.net/fpgui/
<<attachment: Screenshot-fpGUI_Help_Viewer.png>>
-- _______________________________________________ Lazarus mailing list [email protected] http://lists.lazarus.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/lazarus
