Re: [Lazarus] Gecko on lazarus
On Thu, Nov 12, 2009 at 12:14:05AM +0200, Graeme Geldenhuys wrote: 2009/11/11 Hess, Philip J pjh...@purdue.edu: No idea. Maybe the lhelp develop knows the answer. I doubt the Mac help viewer can. After all, CHM is a Microsoft format. Hasn't CHM been abandoned by Microsoft due to security concerns? It has been replaced by Microsoft Help 2 - yet another format. But CHM is still popular and used often. It has only been replaced in Visual Studio and e.g. Delphi. The average app doesn't (and can't) use MSHELP2, since it needs the MS SDK to be installed. Note that this is all afaik, if sb has more info, please share. MSHTML3 is pegged for the next VS in 2010, but it seems it has postponed to later VS versions before when the release date came close, so don't take that to literally. As for the security concerns - in that case Microsoft should drop Windows, Office, IE, etc... ;-) If there is any truth in it (I haven't seen anything like that), it is probably the use of IE in the viewer, not the format itself. If there is a format problem, it is that it is an archive, just like ZIP is. You can stuff anything in it, and if you can get the viewer to interpret it, you can instrument it. -- ___ Lazarus mailing list Lazarus@lists.lazarus.freepascal.org http://lists.lazarus.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/lazarus
Re: [Lazarus] Gecko on lazarus
On Thu, Nov 12, 2009 at 12:10:46AM +0200, Graeme Geldenhuys wrote: To be fair to all those users (including me). There was no mention that LHelp is only meant for Lazarus and FPC documentation. Is is said to be a CHM help viewer, so we use it as such. Especially Linux users that might have Windows apps installed and running via WINE. A bit a strange view, since it is a helpviewer designed to integrate with lazarus. It was never explicitely billed as being universal. There is kchmviewer, gnorpm, xchm and whatever for that. Note btw that it could also be used/retargeted to provide application help. And sb wanting very rich content or control over rendering (CSS etc) might want to use a full browser. But I assume that is the exception rather than the rule, specially in the forseeable future. But a option in LHelp to switch rendering engines would be good for compatibility. Alternatively simply point them to the Firefox add-on which allows Firefox to read CHM files directly. All viewing problems solved - but then still lacks searching and Index support. And, even more importantly, being instrumented by the IDE. The most important function of Lazarus help is simply providing choices when sb presses F1 in the source. -- ___ Lazarus mailing list Lazarus@lists.lazarus.freepascal.org http://lists.lazarus.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/lazarus
Re: [Lazarus] Gecko on lazarus
Marco van de Voort wrote: It has only been replaced in Visual Studio and e.g. Delphi. The average app doesn't (and can't) use MSHELP2, since it needs the MS SDK to be installed. Visual Studio and Office as for as I know (but then I don't use Windows so don't quote me on this). Also, Microsoft loves to use VS and Office as a launch pad for new features and then later become standard in Windows. So I'm pretty sure MSHelp2 or 3 will be the next help format for Windows. If there is a format problem, it is that it is an archive, just like ZIP is. You can stuff anything in it, and if you can get the viewer to interpret it, you can instrument it. You did note the simley face, right? But yes I agree, CHM is just some glorified archive. Anyway, what really annoys me is that now even Google's Gmail considers CHM an executable. (Maybe because of IE bugs and that JavaScript is allowed inside CHM content). You cannot attach a CHM in Gmail, just like you cannot attached a .EXE in Gmail. F**ken annoying!!! There are much better ways to curb viruses from spreading that limiting the user to what attachments they may or may not use in emails. Regards, - Graeme - -- fpGUI Toolkit - a cross-platform GUI toolkit using Free Pascal http://opensoft.homeip.net/fpgui/ -- ___ Lazarus mailing list Lazarus@lists.lazarus.freepascal.org http://lists.lazarus.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/lazarus
Re: [Lazarus] Gecko on lazarus
Graeme Geldenhuys wrote: 2009/11/11 Hess, Philip J pjh...@purdue.edu: No idea. Maybe the lhelp develop knows the answer. I doubt the Mac help viewer can. After all, CHM is a Microsoft format. Hasn't CHM been abandoned by Microsoft due to security concerns? It has been replaced by Microsoft Help 2 - yet another format. But CHM is still popular and used often. As for the security concerns - in that case Microsoft should drop Windows, Office, IE, etc... ;-) Just to add some wood to the fire. I've implemented locally a reader for MSHelp 2 files. It only can read the file format and extract files so far. It doesn't yet know how to read the internal files that contain the toc, index or any other feature of the format(and may never if I don't find a spec). :) Regards, Andrew -- ___ Lazarus mailing list Lazarus@lists.lazarus.freepascal.org http://lists.lazarus.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/lazarus
Re: [Lazarus] Gecko on lazarus
Andrew Haines schrieb: Just to add some wood to the fire. I've implemented locally a reader for MSHelp 2 files. It only can read the file format and extract files so far. It doesn't yet know how to read the internal files that contain the toc, index or any other feature of the format(and may never if I don't find a spec). :) I wrote an HH2 helpfile decompiler some time ago. I can try to find the sources, if you're interested in it. DoDi -- ___ Lazarus mailing list Lazarus@lists.lazarus.freepascal.org http://lists.lazarus.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/lazarus
Re: [Lazarus] Gecko on lazarus
Hans-Peter Diettrich wrote: I wrote an HH2 helpfile decompiler some time ago. I can try to find the sources, if you're interested in it. Yes I would be interested in that, thanks. Currently I can extract any file from the hh2 file. I just don't know the file format of the internal files for the toc etc. My motivation is to read lit files (ebooks) which use the same format as mshelp2 but would certainly be interested in seeing how to read the files specific to the toc, index, and search db of help files. I have implemented everything documented on this page: http://www.russotto.net/chm/itolitlsformat.html Regards, Andrew -- ___ Lazarus mailing list Lazarus@lists.lazarus.freepascal.org http://lists.lazarus.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/lazarus
Re: [Lazarus] Gecko on lazarus
Graeme Geldenhuys wrote: Zaher Dirkey wrote: TWebBrowser in Delphi has the same dependencies, but IE already included in the system Windows. And that being the BIG difference! No extra deployment libraries needed when using TWebBrowser. This will not be the case with a Gecko engine. so what happens on other OS'? what is used, if anything, with TWebBrowser on them? mac, *nix, bsd, etc... -- ___ Lazarus mailing list Lazarus@lists.lazarus.freepascal.org http://lists.lazarus.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/lazarus
Re: [Lazarus] Gecko on lazarus
waldo kitty wrote: so what happens on other OS'? what is used, if anything, with TWebBrowser on them? mac, *nix, bsd, etc... In Delphi's case it's quite simple. No other platform is supported other than Windows. As for LHelp, I think the current custom implemented HTML viewing widget is the best solution at the moment. No extra libraries and it will work on all platforms. But as already discussed. If Gecko is to be used in LHelp, it should be a user selectable option - selecting between Gecko or the custom HTML component. Regards, - Graeme - -- fpGUI Toolkit - a cross-platform GUI toolkit using Free Pascal http://opensoft.homeip.net/fpgui/ -- ___ Lazarus mailing list Lazarus@lists.lazarus.freepascal.org http://lists.lazarus.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/lazarus
Re: [Lazarus] Gecko on lazarus
On linux ??? rsrsrsr 2009/11/11 Graeme Geldenhuys gra...@mastermaths.co.za: Zaher Dirkey wrote: TWebBrowser in Delphi has the same dependencies, but IE already included in the system Windows. And that being the BIG difference! No extra deployment libraries needed when using TWebBrowser. This will not be the case with a Gecko engine. Regards, - Graeme - -- fpGUI Toolkit - a cross-platform GUI toolkit using Free Pascal http://opensoft.homeip.net/fpgui/ -- ___ Lazarus mailing list Lazarus@lists.lazarus.freepascal.org http://lists.lazarus.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/lazarus -- ___ Lazarus mailing list Lazarus@lists.lazarus.freepascal.org http://lists.lazarus.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/lazarus
Re: [Lazarus] Gecko on lazarus
Osvaldo Filho wrote: On linux ??? Yes, even on Linux. For example, you can have a KDE based distro which includes Konqueror instead of Mozilla Firefox. This also applies to other platforms like Windows, Mac OS X or FreeBSD etc... None of them guaranteed to have Firefox installed by default. Regards, - Graeme - -- fpGUI Toolkit - a cross-platform GUI toolkit using Free Pascal http://opensoft.homeip.net/fpgui/ -- ___ Lazarus mailing list Lazarus@lists.lazarus.freepascal.org http://lists.lazarus.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/lazarus
Re: [Lazarus] Gecko on lazarus
Graeme Geldenhuys schreef: Andrew Haines wrote: I'm excited about the possibility of using gecko as the rendering engine of lhelp. This is great news. For displaying HTML that would be great, but at what cost? How much bigger is LHelp going to get (executable size) if you add a complete Gecko engine into the executable. :-( Or does it use an existing Gecko install on your system and simply display output inside your application? That would still mean you need to have something like Firefox install before you application will work. That wouldn't be much of a problem under Linux, but will be under OS X, Windows etc.. I guess, the gecko renderer is optional and both ways of rendering should be supported. If the internal (pascal) renderer is good enough, nobody will use the external Gecko renderer. OTOH, some people want to trade speed and resources for a better rendering in some cases. You can compare it (a bit) with the internal and external (gnu ld) linker in the windows compiler. Nobody uses the external linker on windows, except if you think there is a bug in the internal linker (or are using the external assembler for debugging purposes). Vincent -- ___ Lazarus mailing list Lazarus@lists.lazarus.freepascal.org http://lists.lazarus.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/lazarus
Re: [Lazarus] Gecko on lazarus
Vincent Snijders wrote: If the internal (pascal) renderer is good enough, nobody will use the external Gecko renderer. OTOH, some people want to trade speed and resources for a better rendering in some cases. My personal opinion is that help files should not be that complex in layout design to require something as complex as Gecko to render correctly. That would also mean that those CHM files will probably look different when viewed with Windows CHM help viewer as well (rendering differences between IE vs Gecko). Help files is about getting information across, not about eye-candy. Maybe it's just me, but that's what I think. :) Regards, - Graeme - -- fpGUI Toolkit - a cross-platform GUI toolkit using Free Pascal http://opensoft.homeip.net/fpgui/ -- ___ Lazarus mailing list Lazarus@lists.lazarus.freepascal.org http://lists.lazarus.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/lazarus
Re: [Lazarus] Gecko on lazarus
Graeme Geldenhuys wrote: And that being the BIG difference! No extra deployment libraries needed when using TWebBrowser. This will not be the case with a Gecko engine. Is that me we cannot use the Engine if Firefox already installed in the system? -- Zaher Dirkey -- ___ Lazarus mailing list Lazarus@lists.lazarus.freepascal.org http://lists.lazarus.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/lazarus
Re: [Lazarus] Gecko on lazarus
Marco van de Voort schreef: On Wed, Nov 11, 2009 at 02:52:46PM +0100, Vincent Snijders wrote: If the internal (pascal) renderer is good enough, nobody will use the external Gecko renderer. OTOH, some people want to trade speed and resources for a better rendering in some cases. I think the internal renderer should and could be perfect (read fast,without any serious layout problems) for the own generated docs, because they are simple and we control both sides. Then there could be an override option to open topics external CHMs with a full browser. Yes, that might be useful. A lot of bug reports come from people throwing any chm file against lhelp assuming it will open any chm file, not just the lazarus help files. For those people, an escape route to Gecko could be offered. You can compare it (a bit) with the internal and external (gnu ld) linker in the windows compiler. Nobody uses the external linker on windows, except if you think there is a bug in the internal linker (or are using the external assembler for debugging purposes). Good analogy. Though I shouldn't need to install such a browser (or even configure it) if I don't want to use it. It should be totally optional. Same for ld, everything works fine without, it is an option. Vincent -- ___ Lazarus mailing list Lazarus@lists.lazarus.freepascal.org http://lists.lazarus.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/lazarus
Re: [Lazarus] Gecko on lazarus
By rights, on OS X the help should probably open in the OS X Help Viewer, not
in lhelp or a browser. I believe Help Viewer can display most HTML. A quick and
dirty way to use it is:
{$IFDEF DARWIN}
Shell('Open -a Help Viewer ' + HelpFile + '');
{$ENDIF}
Thinking ahead, what it you wanted to put some level of interactivity or
animation in parts of the help? A full browser would help out there.
Thanks.
-Phil
From: Vincent Snijders [vsnijd...@vodafonevast.nl]
Sent: Wednesday, November 11, 2009 3:34 PM
To: Lazarus mailing list
Subject: Re: [Lazarus] Gecko on lazarus
Marco van de Voort schreef:
On Wed, Nov 11, 2009 at 02:52:46PM +0100, Vincent Snijders wrote:
If the internal (pascal) renderer is good enough, nobody will use the
external Gecko
renderer. OTOH, some people want to trade speed and resources for a better
rendering
in some cases.
I think the internal renderer should and could be perfect (read fast,without
any serious layout problems) for the own generated docs, because they are
simple and we control both sides.
Then there could be an override option to open topics external CHMs with a
full browser.
Yes, that might be useful. A lot of bug reports come from people
throwing any chm file against lhelp assuming it will open any chm file,
not just the lazarus help files. For those people, an escape route to
Gecko could be offered.
You can compare it (a bit) with the internal and external (gnu ld) linker in
the
windows compiler. Nobody uses the external linker on windows, except if you
think
there is a bug in the internal linker (or are using the external assembler
for
debugging purposes).
Good analogy. Though I shouldn't need to install such a browser (or even
configure it) if I don't want to use it. It should be totally optional.
Same for ld, everything works fine without, it is an option.
Vincent
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Re: [Lazarus] Gecko on lazarus
Hess, Philip J schreef:
By rights, on OS X the help should probably open in the OS X Help Viewer, not
in lhelp or a browser. I believe Help Viewer can display most HTML. A quick and
dirty way to use it is:
{$IFDEF DARWIN}
Shell('Open -a Help Viewer ' + HelpFile + '');
{$ENDIF}
Thinking ahead, what it you wanted to put some level of interactivity or
animation in parts of the help? A full browser would help out there.
Can OS X Help Viewer open chm files? Can it use its index and table of
contents?
Vincent
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Re: [Lazarus] Gecko on lazarus
No idea. Maybe the lhelp develop knows the answer.
Hasn't CHM been abandoned by Microsoft due to security concerns?
Thanks.
-Phil
From: Vincent Snijders [vsnijd...@vodafonevast.nl]
Sent: Wednesday, November 11, 2009 3:44 PM
To: Lazarus mailing list
Subject: Re: [Lazarus] Gecko on lazarus
Hess, Philip J schreef:
By rights, on OS X the help should probably open in the OS X Help Viewer, not
in lhelp or a browser. I believe Help Viewer can display most HTML. A quick
and dirty way to use it is:
{$IFDEF DARWIN}
Shell('Open -a Help Viewer ' + HelpFile + '');
{$ENDIF}
Thinking ahead, what it you wanted to put some level of interactivity or
animation in parts of the help? A full browser would help out there.
Can OS X Help Viewer open chm files? Can it use its index and table of
contents?
Vincent
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http://lists.lazarus.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/lazarus
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Re: [Lazarus] Gecko on lazarus
On Wed, Nov 11, 2009 at 09:34:54PM +0100, Vincent Snijders wrote: You can compare it (a bit) with the internal and external (gnu ld) linker in the windows compiler. Nobody uses the external linker on windows, except if you think there is a bug in the internal linker (or are using the external assembler for debugging purposes). Good analogy. Though I shouldn't need to install such a browser (or even configure it) if I don't want to use it. It should be totally optional. Same for ld, everything works fine without, it is an option. You don't have to configure or link to LD. And apparnatly nobody noticed we ship a 2005 LD -- ___ Lazarus mailing list Lazarus@lists.lazarus.freepascal.org http://lists.lazarus.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/lazarus
Re: [Lazarus] Gecko on lazarus
2009/11/11 Hess, Philip J pjh...@purdue.edu: No idea. Maybe the lhelp develop knows the answer. I doubt the Mac help viewer can. After all, CHM is a Microsoft format. Hasn't CHM been abandoned by Microsoft due to security concerns? It has been replaced by Microsoft Help 2 - yet another format. But CHM is still popular and used often. As for the security concerns - in that case Microsoft should drop Windows, Office, IE, etc... ;-) -- Regards, - Graeme - ___ fpGUI - a cross-platform Free Pascal GUI toolkit http://opensoft.homeip.net/fpgui/ -- ___ Lazarus mailing list Lazarus@lists.lazarus.freepascal.org http://lists.lazarus.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/lazarus
Re: [Lazarus] Gecko on lazarus
2009/11/11 Marco van de Voort mar...@stack.nl: And apparnatly nobody noticed we ship a 2005 LD I did - two days ago when I setup Lazarus and FPC in a VirtualBox session for Windows testing. I thought by binutils was very old - most files dated 2005. I then downloaded the latest FPC Lazarus installation and to my surprise, most binutils files are still 2005. :) -- Regards, - Graeme - ___ fpGUI - a cross-platform Free Pascal GUI toolkit http://opensoft.homeip.net/fpgui/ -- ___ Lazarus mailing list Lazarus@lists.lazarus.freepascal.org http://lists.lazarus.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/lazarus
Re: [Lazarus] Gecko on lazarus
Having such extra fat or dependencies might not be such a good idea for a help viewer. But still it is good idea to take full support HTML and JS, for example Right To Left not supported with embed HTML viewers mentioned on the forums. TWebBrowser in Delphi has the same dependencies, but IE already included in the system Windows. Thanks -- Zaher Dirkey -- ___ Lazarus mailing list Lazarus@lists.lazarus.freepascal.org http://lists.lazarus.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/lazarus
Re: [Lazarus] Gecko on lazarus
Hans-Peter Diettrich wrote: AFAIK Gecko is not limited to rendering HTML. That's not what I said. I simply meant that even though the Gecko engine will be good at rendering HTML (one of it's functions), the size of LHelp will be considerably bigger and will have more dependencies (it needs Firefox or gecko runtime engine installed first). Having such extra fat or dependencies might not be such a good idea for a help viewer. Regards, - Graeme - -- fpGUI Toolkit - a cross-platform GUI toolkit using Free Pascal http://opensoft.homeip.net/fpgui/ -- ___ Lazarus mailing list Lazarus@lists.lazarus.freepascal.org http://lists.lazarus.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/lazarus
Re: [Lazarus] Gecko on lazarus
On Fri, 6 Nov 2009, Joost van der Sluis wrote: On Thu, 2009-11-05 at 14:01 -0300, Osvaldo Filho wrote: http://www.lazarus.freepascal.org/index.php?PHPSESSID=40f7fe67db8568a9cbb6088b050d5bf5topic=7854.0 Very nice, I've tried the same using Takanori Ito's code. But coudn't get it to work. Compiling went fine, but it didn't run. But thereafter I had exactly the same problem on windows using Delphi, using the original code. Good that you got it working, I'll certainly have a look at it. Actually, I think it's Phil (hess ?) who is working on it. I already downloaded the code, and have already some patches so it compiles on Linux and 64-bit. Michael. -- ___ Lazarus mailing list Lazarus@lists.lazarus.freepascal.org http://lists.lazarus.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/lazarus
