Graeme Geldenhuys wrote:
On 23 July 2012 19:27, Michael Van Canneyt <[email protected]> wrote:
I use PDF for application help. Works perfectly, F1 and all. It has all
Yes, you told me that a long time ago. But I also remember you told me
that it only works in Windows. Plus the "help" is at the mercy of the
documentation writer.... by that I mean, there might not be a Index or
a Table of Content, and Searching PDF's are damn slow. And while we
are talking about slow - Acrobat Reader (installed by most users,
especially under Windows) has the longest start-up time of any PDF
reader.
Yup, still a crazy idea. ;-)
It's not as crazy as using a pseudo-standard such as one of the MS Word
or Open/Libre Office formats, or the sanitized versions which IBM et al.
are pushing in their attempts to prove to various governments that they
are 100% behind open standards. But I remain very concerned about the
level of support- i.e. with any reader on any platform- to jump to a
predefined entry point in a PDF.
And quite frankly, when looking at a fairly wide range of OSes and CPUs,
Adobe's reader is better than the alternatives particularly when there's
a thousand or so pages in a document (like the IBM S/390 manual I'm
using to put myself to sleep at night).
From the POV of the Lazarus IDE, /the/ important thing is rapid and
correct loading of a page in response to F1. If the storage format that
this dictates can be easily created and exploited by user-written
programs- which (with the possible exception of F1 support) is pretty
much where we are with .chm- then all the better, because it means that
the maximum number of people are focusing on improving performance and
reliability.
--
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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