On 27 April 2010 00:51, David Emerson wrote: > > I'm far more comfortable using git than svn
Me too, and it didn't take long either. > Graeme, I have to ask... on the one hand, you noted that having fragmented > documentations over various locations is unhelpful; and on the other hand, > I've > heard you talk quite a bit about your DocView / INF project; I note in > particular that you mentioned rewriting the FPC language reference in IPF. How > is this not an example of the fragmentation you refer to? OK, maybe you guys don't fully understand what I am doing. I'm not creating a new documentation system or documentation format. I'm only creating a more useful cross-platform documentation viewer, and a help file format that is optimised for size and search speed. I am still using fpdoc like everybody else, but instead of generating PDF or HTML or CHM output, I improved the very outdated IPF output writer of fpdoc. As I mentioned, IPF is the documentation source code used to generate binary INF help files. As for the FPC Language Reference. The original document is written using LaTeX (not fpdoc's XML). LaTeX can be quite complex to parse, and that was the case with the FPC documentation, so the INF output it generated was not idea. So I decided to "proof read" the FPC Language Ref doc (something I wanted to do for years), and then at the same time, manually translate it to IPF. By that I mean, I did not change the documentation as such, or add new sections etc. I simply reformatted the text to fit the INF document and viewer better. Improving things like cross-linking between various sections and a better Table Of Content and Index. All my changes to fpdoc will be submitted as a patch when I am done. I have already submitted many Lang Ref fixes for the LaTeX version. And once done, I am submitting the IPF version to the repository as well, but I'll keep in in sync with the original ref.tex file. So no, the documentation is not fragmented etc. I hope to keep everything in the same fpc docs repository, and I hope that the INF versions of RTL, FCL and Lang Ref can become official documentation as well (in combination with the existing PDF versions). > wonder how well it will integrate with the present doc system and if it might > lower the barrier to entry for contributing to the documentation. DocView is simply a INF help file viewer. It is not a fpdoc XML editor like the integrated FPDoc Editor included with Lazarus IDE. What DocView does allow, is much easier integration with existing IDEs (no need to install packages and recompile IDE's), offline help, very fast search, search across all help files at once, bookmarks and annotations, and small to distribute (1.3MB executable with no external dependencies). All of this is lacking in the PDF docs and the Lazarus lhelp viewer. -- Regards, - Graeme - _______________________________________________ fpGUI - a cross-platform Free Pascal GUI toolkit http://opensoft.homeip.net/fpgui/ _______________________________________________ fpc-pascal maillist - fpc-pascal@lists.freepascal.org http://lists.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/fpc-pascal