For what it is worth:

The core team (i.e. mostly me, I assume) from now on uses fpdoc for the documentation of the FCL mainly for these reasons:

- The format is more or less 'designed' for FPC documentation.

- The fpdoc tool is written in pascal and maintained by us. We can extend it in any way we like/see fit.

- At this moment, it generates nice HTML, and printable LaTeX (and hence, e.g. PDF) but it can be easily extended with any back end you want. I'm myself planning to add RTF after I tweaked the LaTeX
You could add any custom format you would like.

- Making an editor for it should be easy, and is definitely planned. Michael Hess knows about this.

Using fpdoc would enable you to cross-link to the FCL docs without problem. Since you can create any back-end you like, you could make an output format that is easy to display for you.

Michael.

Sounds very useful.

> By the way, i have a problem with the conversion C->pascal of gtkhtml

w> ith

You can put the structure in a separate file and let h2pas generate the helper functions for you

Someone mentioned that they currently create documentation for the Lazarus project using fpdoc. I'm involved with another open source pascal project. Where could I find fpdoc? (can't seem to find it with google!)

Chris

Hi all,

A month ago, there was a discussion about the help format for lazarus. It was mentioned, that a browser based help system would be far too slow. The alternatives for the format were html, windows help, custom format or fpdoc. The alternatives for the viewer were custom helpviewer or gtkhtml.

The help should be easily to edit under at least linux and windows. The context sensitive help system for the IDE needs a link based system, which can be remote controlled. Remote control should be possible via help IDs and via keyword search like "TTreeView" -> "Items". It would be nice, if the help viewer has got only one window, instead of three like Delphi. I think, the Delphi navigation of properties to the left and explanation to the right is nice, but I miss the big context. It would help, if the left side shows a tree of the complete help instead of just one node. Did I miss something important?

Is there any help format+viewer+editor available?

We already got some texts. But we need a format to publish them.

Mattias

cryst wrote

Someone mentioned that they currently create documentation for the Lazarus project using fpdoc. I'm involved with another open source pascal project. Where could I find fpdoc? (can't seem to find it with google!)

Have a look at the output in
http://www.freepascal.org/docs-html/classes/index.html or the PDF version
http://www.freepascal.org/docs-html/fcl.pdf

We will release fpdoc soon, first I want to to some finishing touches, and write a small 'howto' document.

If you want I can send a binary. Just tell me what platform you need.

Michael.

Hello everybody

This is my first contribution to this list, though I'm following the project from several months ago.

I think that the help system should be HTML based, I don't think it is too much slow. Even, there're some simple-but-fast browsers out there, and we can use them if we keep the HTML code simply enough.

Another choice could be PDF files, the reader from Adobe is free (sorry, I don't know if there is a version for Linux), and there are some free PDF writers.

Finally I like to say that I'll like to contribute to the project (for example, porting some of my Delphi components), but I don't have any Linux in my computer and the Win32 version doesn't appear to work (the editor is always in readonly mode). There is any plan to release a new Win32 version of the IDE?

Jos� Mar�a Gonz�lez Ondina.

You can't. You must write helper functions that access the bits. There are many examples in the gtk translations.

Michael.

Having to install an extra browser pretty much lifts the advantage of HTML.

Editing the HTML directly also isn't nice either, so what advantages are left?

Another choice could be PDF files, the reader from Adobe is free (sorry, I don't know if there is a version for Linux), and there are some free PDF writers.

Slow again, but at least offset by better quality.

Acroread (v. 4 IIRC) exists for Linux, and the Linux version runs on BSD in the Linux emulation. Could be hard to have the acroread pop up at the right section though.

fpDoc was written by on of the core FPC developers. It was designed primarily to work with FPC and pascal. Currently it is only available by checkout from CVS. There are some final tweeks that need to be done before it is formally released.

We are also working on the editor that can be used to create the content file that fpDoc uses. Since all of the content is stored in XML it can be mined and any kind of document can be created. We can make overall user manuals or the context sensitive help files needed for the IDE.

The best format would be HTML.
There are light help viewers for all systems. PDF is not flexible enough. All what is needed to make HTML help is to make one query search page, besides Konqueror and Yelp(new gnome help browser will be light and fast, same is for Windows where Netscape loads even faster than IE.

A little question, GTK2 comming to the scene and he's got some of new features, are these features compatible with old GTK??? Does this affect lazarus in any way. I know it's a bit strange question, but all new distros will have this new gtk, and will be probably avoiding old one. (Ideal would be if it would be like in KDE, where you still have the old core and kde 1.1.2 software is working) But, is this affecting or it would be good to have a port to gtk2.

matjaz

Le Wednesday 23 January 2002 17:56, Mattias Gaertner a �crit :

I'm working on it, but don't have much time to spend to it. Wait a little, and i will present something, probably based on gtkhtml.

By the way, i have a problem with the conversion C->pascal of gtkhtml with some types of variables :

How can i translate :

struct _GtkHTML {
   [...]
	guint in_selection : 1;
	guint button1_pressed : 1;
	guint debug : 1;
	guint allow_selection : 1;
   [...]
};

I don't know how to declare a bit variable in pascal...