Hi Mark, On 10 July 2012 18:40, Mark Morgan Lloyd <[email protected]> wrote: > Relevance noted, will revisit. In that pretty pictcha of yours, should > FPCHELP be decorated with a $ to indicate it's a shell variable?
No, DocView will handle that automatically. DocView can handle many types of parameters and all are tested when DocView starts up. eg: It queries the environment variables defined on your system for a match. Yes/No. Query if it is a directory? Yes/No. Query if it is a one or more help files without the .inf extension (in which case it then uses a predefined help directory/directories specified by the BOOKSHELF environment variable)? Yes/No. Query if it is a full path to a .inf (with the .inf extension). Yes/No. If still nothing, simply start up with no help file loaded. DocView comes with its own extensive docview.inf application help file, which explains all this and much more. > [Nod] I suspect that we're not the only people asking for guidance. And it seems everybody is reluctant to give an answer. I guess LCL based applications simply don't ship with help? Well, for the few LCL based apps I have tried (excluding Lazarus IDE), that sure was the case. I just remembered form years ago when I still used Delphi 5 & 7, we used to use a product called HelpScribble to author our .HLP help files. HelpScribble now supports .CHM authoring too. So I guess that answers my own question. You need to purchase a proprietary CHM help authoring tool to generate your own CHM help, and you'll probably be limited to author those help files under Windows only. I'm still fuzzy on how LCL based applications know which CHM help viewer to use though. This is especially important under Linux & MacOS because the free CHM help viewers available on those platforms have vastly different features and functionality. Some don't support searching, some don't have Index support, some don't support CSS etc etc. And I'm 100% sure they have different parameter options, so the LCL app needs to know what it can and can't pass the the CHM help viewer. > Good point. But at the same time most unix-style OSes can't read .inf, so > one would need to bundle docview or whatever. Correct, and I don't have a problem with that. What I was getting at is that different CHM help viewers support different features, and there command line parameters will differ too. So how does LCL based apps know how to tell each of those CHM help viewers that they must display Help Topic Index 1234, or Help Topic String 'MyDialog1', from the CHM help file of application X. These are the most basic things that need to be address for an application help to have working application help. Amazing no LCL developer has come across this yet. Maybe the little bit I know of LCL is just too little. ;-) -- Regards, - Graeme - _______________________________________________ fpGUI - a cross-platform Free Pascal GUI toolkit http://fpgui.sourceforge.net -- _______________________________________________ Lazarus mailing list [email protected] http://lists.lazarus.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/lazarus
