Graeme Geldenhuys wrote:
Hi Marco,
Nice chatting to an old friend again. ;-)
So lets all try to keep this friendly and constructive, without
launching into a "my IDE's better than yours" exercise :-)
I'm writing this from the position of an outsider, so am happy to be
corrected by Marco, Andrew et al. However if I there are areas that I
haven't been able to "get my head round" after several days scouring the
Wiki and Google, it's going to be far worse for a tyro. If somebody
thinks I've got things wrong, I suggest that exploring /why/ I've got it
wrong and what can be improved is in order.
On 16 July 2012 20:14, Marco van de Voort <[email protected]> wrote:
Since linux doesn't guarantee any helpsystem, any solution is going to be a
compromise.
It's not about Linux not having a dedicated help system, it is about
what works with LCL-based applications. And more specifically about
context sensitive help in those applications. eg: I don't want my
users to press F1 and then be taken to the start page of the help
(this is how most Linux Gnome/KDE apps currently work, and that is
totally braindead!). I mean like the focus is in an edit field, and F1
will give help about that specific edit field, or fall-back to help
about that specific dialog. That is context sensitive help in
applications, and how help is supposed to work.
The current situation- and this is with Lazarus trunk, not stable-
appears to be that HTML keyword-based application help works well
provided that you're prepared to tolerate browser startup time. However,
even worse than the startup delay is the fact that in the general case
neither the IDE nor general apps can tell an existing browser to change
the page it's displaying: I believe there's a backdoor for this sort of
thing in IE on Windows but on unix you can end up with multiple browser
instances that don't go away when the program's shut down.
I very much look forward to the CHM reader being made available for apps
rather than just for the IDE, I'm starting to code what could be my
magnum opus and I'd like the opportunity to exercise it.
As I told somebody in a earlier reply, I don't mind shipping the help
viewer - that is not a problem at all. I just don't want to leave it
up to chance... eg: maybe no CHM help viewer is installed, so then
application help doesn't work. Or, as is currently the case under
Linux, each CHM help viewer has vastly different features and
performance. I'd much rather use a specific help viewer, and know what
experience my end-users will have.
The end user is entitled to have all files of a particular type (chm in
the current case) look and handled the same, but I'm not sure it should
be the developer's choice which program is opened for a given file type,
unless he is prepared to take full responsibility for things going wrong
in other apps.
As a general point, current desktops (including KDE and Gnome) have a
standardised set of programs for opening files by extension (xdg-open
etc.), and to be quite honest I think it's not to the credit of anybody
who tries to open a browser or viewer without reference to these.
And I'll say that that is absolute rubbish. fpdoc was designed as a
source code documentation tool, and that is what it is good at. It
definitely doesn't have the design or features required for
application help.
In theory CHM files can be created with any html tool, can be organized with
normal MS
html workshop, and then compiled using FPC's chmcmd (2.4.4 in theory, but
2.6.0's is better)
So where do you define the TOC or Index items? Inside the HTML files?
Is there documentation or a wiki page on the usage of chmcmd?
..
And this URL...
http://wiki.freepascal.org/Add_Help_to_Your_Application
...explains a bit more, but uses plain HTML files located in a folder.
Still no TOC, Index or Search support, because they are simple HTML
files that will be viewer with a web browser, and not CHM help.
I added a section to that page on adding a TOC yesterday and how to find
what options are supported by chmcmd. I didn't want to be too verbose
since it's hardly my area of expertise, but I felt it needed to be
documented somewhere.
As I mentioned in a earlier post too. I remember using HelpScribble,
which is a commercial Windows product that we used in the Delphi 7
days to author application help. It now (for some time I guess)
supports CHM too, but the help source is in a proprietary format, and
magically generates a CHM file from that. You define the TOC and Index
items from within HelpScribble. What is the equivalent for LCL
application developers (eg: cross-platform application developers)?
HelpScribble is a Windows only tool, and uses the Microsoft help
compiler - but I guess it could possibly run under Linux WINE, but I
haven't tried.
The canonical tool appears to still be the Microsoft Help Workshop (or
some similar name), and almost everything else appears to be based on
this in some way: chmcmd is pretty much unique, to the extent that I've
seen a Debian bug report asking why it's not packaged separately because
of it's general usefulness. The Wiki page above mentions a
product/project to convert Tex to chm which I've not investigated, I'm
now able to convert Lyx source or PDF to HTML hence to a .chm including
semi-automatic TOC (single-level) but it doubtless needs more work and
I'm not sure what the situation is regarding integrating CHM in an app.
Got to go, sorry if anything above is incomplete or unchecked.
--
Mark Morgan Lloyd
markMLl .AT. telemetry.co .DOT. uk
[Opinions above are the author's, not those of his employers or colleagues]
--
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