Hi All,
I was wondering what people thought about using a Google Doc as a help file?

It looks like you can have a contents, use anchors and obviously have pictures.

Any thoughts?

Richard
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---- On Sun, 11 Oct 2015 15:28:18 -0400 Richard Mace &lt;&gt; wrote ----

Hi All,

I was wondering what people thought about using a Google Doc as a help file?

It looks like you can have a contents, use anchors and obviously have pictures.

Any thoughts?

Are you talking about a help file for your app or for Lazarus, itself?

If for Lazarus, what's the problem you are solving by suggesting this? Is the existing wiki so bad?

It is a really bad idea to tie your documentation to a single vendor.

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Sorry, no I was talking about a help file for my application itself.

Richard

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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 -