Lee Jenkins wrote: > > Personally, I've come to like Adobe's LiveDocs format which seems to be a > hybrid > of Wiki and TOC oriented format and its indexed by google making searches > easy > and fast. > > Anyone else care for this kind of format?
No. :-) I would much prefer a off-line documentation format. I find it *extremely* annoying when I sit at home with my laptop and can't get help on a dialog or product because such help is only available online (and I don't always have internet access). This is why I spent a considerable amount of time researching documentation formats and ended up choosing the IBM INF format (used for OS/2 help files and other OS/2 documentation/books) as my starting point. INF is extremely fast and efficient (a magnitude of 15+ times faster than CHM), the output INF files are small and compact, the tagging language (IPF) is easy to learn - the 45 tags are mnemonic making it easy to associate them with their functions. IPF tagging language was specifically designed for documentation, so it is well suited for generating good looking output. DocView (The INF viewer I wrote) supports a Table of Content, a Index view and generates one at runtime if the INF document doesn't include one, full text search, search algorithm that rates search results so you get more relevant results, keyword highlighting of search text, annotations, bookmarks, topic browse history, font substitution, Library mode (opening multiple INF documents and combining there TOCs at runtime) and the list goes on. I am almost finished with translating the FPC Language Reference to INF so others can use it with DocView from inside Lazarus IDE or stand-alone. This should be a good example of what INF can do and how it looks, plus the new fpdoc IPF output writer that can build class documentation in INF format. Regards, - Graeme - -- fpGUI Toolkit - a cross-platform GUI toolkit using Free Pascal http://opensoft.homeip.net/fpgui/ -- _______________________________________________ Lazarus mailing list Lazarus@lists.lazarus.freepascal.org http://lists.lazarus.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/lazarus