On 2013-04-20 20:21, Lubos Pintes wrote: > ... And something that is totally inaccessible.
As Sven said, I have implemented a open source pure Pascal viewer that currently runs on Linux (even 10 year old distros), Windows 95-8, FreeBSD, Solaris, Raspberry Pi, WinCE and other Linux ARM Embedded devices. OS/2 and eComStation obviously also can read INF file because it is the native help format on those platforms. There are also INF-to-HTML converters (even IBM has some of there docs currently online like that). I'm also already working on extending DocView to have a PDF export function. Exporting a whole INF document, or selected topics to PDF - thus making it consumable by the select few platforms I don't yet support. The INF format has been well documented by myself and prior developers - the layout document is included in fpGUI's repository. So you are free to study it, and implement another viewer if you want. I'm also investigating iOS and Android viewers. The IPF Compiler (used to generate INF binary help files) is also open source - currently implement in OpenWatcom C/C++. I am busy implementing a 100% pascal compiler too. So "totally inaccessible" is grossly overstated. > So please, please, no something "proprietary". ps: CHM is proprietary too, so is the old Microsoft HLP format, and so too is PDF. Doesn't stop anybody from using those. I studied for months various help systems and help formats. INF was superior for the task I wanted. It is very compact (the same help content is much smaller using INF, compared to PDF, HTML or even CHM), has Indexing support, Full Text Search, Image Support, simple markup language etc. Is self contained too - as single file. And most importantly, it can be integrated with applications so you can do context sensitive help. Regards, - Graeme - -- fpGUI Toolkit - a cross-platform GUI toolkit using Free Pascal http://fpgui.sourceforge.net/ -- _______________________________________________ Lazarus mailing list [email protected] http://lists.lazarus.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/lazarus
