On 2015-10-11 20:28, Richard Mace wrote: > I was wondering what people thought about using a Google Doc as a help file?
I'm sorry to be blunt, but that is a terrible idea. Personally I find it very annoying if applications don't include help - and by that I mean "Context Sensitive Help". Simply supplying a massive web page, or PDF document is just terrible for the end-user. It's as if the developer or company forgot about the documentation or just made it a afterthought. This seems to be the trend unfortunately - giving no context sensitive help. I miss the attention to detail we saw in the 90's. If you include a PDF, it tells me there should be printed documentation to, because that is what the PDF supplements. When I press F1 or click the Help button in a dialog, I want help specific to that dialog or the widget that had focus. I want very fast help loading times - you will not get that with PDF's or even worse, with Google Docs (shared document). I want full text searching. I want advanced searching functions. I want annotation support. I so often add my own notes inside help so that the topic is more clear to me. Sometimes I even include some source code examples - depending what the help file relates too. I suggest using something like INF (with DocView) or CHM help. DocView has all the features (and more) listed above. Here is a complete example showing how to use DocView with LCL applications. You need to be logged in to the forum to see the actual attachment with source code. http://forum.lazarus.freepascal.org/index.php/topic,27864.msg173887.html#msg173887 ps: I have nothing against Google Docs for generating documents like letters, shared software specs etc. It is good in that sense, and works really well - at least as long as the documents are not too big - in which case it becomes really slow. eg: OpenOffice, LibreOffice and MS-Word opens a 150 page spec in an instant, and it is fast to jump around. With Google Docs, Office 365, Atlassian Confluence etc it is dog slow. Regards, - Graeme - -- fpGUI Toolkit - a cross-platform GUI toolkit using Free Pascal http://fpgui.sourceforge.net/ My public PGP key: http://tinyurl.com/graeme-pgp -- _______________________________________________ Lazarus mailing list [email protected] http://lists.lazarus.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/lazarus
