The help system

More information on how to handle the IDE, or about the use of various calls in the RTL, explanations regarding the syntax of a Pascal statement, can be found in the help system. The help system is activated by pressing .

Navigating in the help system

The help system contains hyperlinks; these are sensitive locations that lead to another topic in the help system. They are marked by a different color. The hyperlinks can be activated in one of two ways:

by directly clicking the one you want with the mouse, or
by using the and keys to move between the different hyperlinks of a page and then pressing the key to activate the one you want.

When is pressed, the contents of the help system are displayed. To go back to the previous help topic, press . This also works if the help window isn’t displayed on the desktop; the help window will then be activated.

Working with help files

The IDE contains a help system which can display the following file formats:

TPH: The help format for the Turbo Pascal help viewer.
INF: The OS/2 help format.
NG: The Norton Guide Help format.
HTML: HTML files.
CHM: CHM files.

In future some more formats may be added. However, the above formats should cover already a wide spectrum of available help files.

Remark: Concerning the support for HTML files the following should be noted:

The HTML viewer of the help system is limited, it can only handle the most basic HTML files (graphics excluded), since it is only designed to display the Free Pascalhelp files. ⁹.
When the HTML help viewer encounters a graphics file, it will try and find a file with the same name but an extension of .ans; If this file is found, this will be interpreted as a file with ANSI escape sequences, and these will be used to display a text image. The displays of the IDE dialogs in the IDE help files are made in this way.

The menu item permits help files to be added to, and deleted from, the list of files in the help table of contents. The help files dialog is displayed in figure [fig:helpfils].

The dialog lists the files that will be presented in the table of contents window of the help system. Each entry has a small descriptive title and a filename next to it. The following actions are available when adding help files:

New

Adds a new file. IDE will display a prompt, in which the location of the help file should be entered.

If the added file is an HTML file, a dialog box will be displayed which asks for a title. This title will then be included in the contents of help.

Delete

Deletes the currently highlighted file from the help system. It is not deleted from the hard disk; only the help system entry is removed.

Cancel

Discards all changes and closes the dialog.

OK

Saves the changes and closes the dialog.

The Free Pascaldocumentation can be added to the IDE’s help system. This way the documentation can be viewed from within the IDE. If Free Pascalhas been installed using the installer, the installer should have added the FPC documentation to the list of help files, if the documentation was installed as well. The preferred format of FPC documentation for using it in the IDE is CHM (HTML may be used as well, it needs to be indexed when adding it, which takes some time, and it may not work in certain specific cases like 8.3 limited filesystems).

The about dialog

The about dialog, reachable through () shows some information about the IDE, such as the version number, the date it was built, what compiler and debugger it uses. When reporting bugs about the IDE, please use the information given by this dialog to identify the version of the IDE that was used.

It also displays some copyright information.

An experiment, built from development snapshots. Not the official Free Pascal or Lazarus documentation.