On 2026-09-10 19:40, Marco van de Voort via fpc-pascal wrote:
Op 10-9-2026 om 14:44 schreef Tomas Hajny via fpc-pascal:
.
.
Apart from both of us knowing that CHM should be preferred, where
exactly is it documented as such?
The fact that 3.2.4 RCs come with them integrated and preinstalled on
Windows? The fact that the IDE says to download the CHMs if they are
not?
Indeed, it says so if you go to Contents or Index. It doesn't say
anything like that if you go to Help->Files.
More importantly - we're about to release 3.2.4 _and_ redesign the WWW
site. However, the link provided in the IDE will stop working after the
WWW site redesign. I guess we should still fix it for the final release
in this case? @Michael? I know that this isn't a regression in RC2, but
it is something that we should probably take care of in the context of
the WWW site redesign (together with updating the links in the
readme.txt and FAQ files which are both also distributed with the
release)?
That doesn't say the rest is deprecated, but it does make clear what is
preferred.
File readme.txt supplied with the last release states about the IDE:
"context sensitive help supports help files in HTML, Windows HLP and
Borland TPH format". Our documentation (user manual - user.pdf) states
in the chapter related to IDE:
------
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
=======
Well, fix that then :-)
;-) Somehow, it came across my mind too. ;-) Will do.
And a bit later: "The Free Pascal documentation in HTML format can be
added to the IDE’s help system. This way the documentation can be
viewed from within the IDE."
And while you ask - as far as I can see, the HTML version still seems
to work correctly in the IDE.
On what target? The problems with html were highly target specific,
specially on real dos (not under w9x). Actually the direct impetus to
push for CHM as default back then was testing a FPC release in plain
dos that took HALF AN HOUR to install, all due to extracting the plain
html help.
Very true - it wouldn't work on anything without LFN support, and
extracting and especially indexing the help in this format takes
forever. I tested it under Win32. But that wasn't my point - the HTML
format should either stay supported, or get documented and announced as
not supported any longer rather than breaking the support silently
(which fortunately didn't happen, but I wasn't sure about that
originally and thus asked).
I can't deprecate the rest, but IMHO the fact that there is zero
feedback on them in about a decade says IMHO says enough.
Out of curiousity - how much feedback did you get about the CHM files
recently? Isn't it more because most people use Lazarus or other editors
rather than the text mode IDE? Obviously, that doesn't mean that we
should stop supporting the IDE, just that the amount of feedback to the
help format in IDE may not be directly specifically related to the
format.
Tomas
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