Hi,

After some replies in other thread about TiddlyWiki, I realized something. That could be a perfect solution to Lazarus IDE help!

The following two files are wiki website, but they are contained in a single file! This means the wiki can be maintained only, but also download via File | Save As... using your web browser. It even has a search feature built in! The look of the pages can be customized etc... I'm very impressed by this concept. The usage possibilities are endless. It could even be used as a help file for your own developed applications.

http://www.tiddlywiki.com/
http://tiddlyfolio.tiddlyspot.com/

Links from the IDE to this single html page should also be pretty straight forward. Here is an example of a link to the "Good Passwords" section in the wiki page (site)

my_tiddlypage.html#[[Good Passwords]]

The tiddlywiki is also supported my just about all web browser. The tiddlywiki site shows a table of supported browser. The tiddlywiki can even be updated to newer versions without loosing the content. Instructions are available on the website.

The only hard part, and also a issue with all wikis, is extracting the data from the existing one, to the new wiki page. Oh, and tiddlywiki supports plugins, so I am pretty sure it wouldn't be long before there is some "export content" function - that's if one doesn't already exist.

What's your thoughts on this... Download any one of the listed wikis, or even the 200Kb "empty" wiki and play around to get an idea of how cool this concept really is! :-)

Regards,
- Graeme -

_______________________________________________
fpGUI - a cross-platform Free Pascal GUI toolkit
http://opensoft.homeip.net/fpgui/

Ehm.
The FPC help alone is about 32000 HTML pages. How will your browser react if you cram all that in 1 page and load it in the browser ?

I can't even imagine what would happen if you add the LCL help...

Such small tools are OK for small (as in tiny, tiddly) projects, but not for serious projects.

Michael.

Ehm.. ;-)
As the title of the message said: "IDE help"

I was not referring to FCL, RTL or LCL help. Those are already in fpdoc format. And users can already download "offline" versions of them. The IDE itself _doesn't_ have a offline version. So users without internet connection have _no_ IDE help, because it's in a online wiki format only. And I'm pretty sure the IDE Help is a lot smaller than FCL, RTL or LCL. So it should be doable.

Using something like TiddlyWiki the IDE Help can still be maintained online, but could also be made available offline, because the wiki content is in a single file and works exactly the same offline as it does online. No http server or CGI scripts required to view it offline
- just a web browser.

This is also why I said, it could be handy for developers using it as a help format for their own applications. Just a though.

Regards,
- Graeme -

_______________________________________________
fpGUI - a cross-platform Free Pascal GUI toolkit
http://opensoft.homeip.net/fpgui/

It depends on what belongs to the IDE help.
Basically everything in the wiki could be helpful and should be available in the off line version.
AFAIR the last time I did an export of the wiki content it was 8 mb (without images). I don't know what tiddly will do with that. I doubt, that every browser works fluently with such a monster.

Yes, that's true. But I agree with Michael: Tiddly does not scale.

Mattias

For developers... what I did was create a wikispaces wiki for my help, and use their "export" function. The resulting help is not particularly nice to look at (and I think the CSS is removed - but images remain) but it is a fair help file for a smallish application.

The features in Tiddly is pretty useful though, for instance search etc. -------------- next part --------------
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