Re: [lazarus] Helpfiles for Lazarus apps
On 11/12/2007, Sérgio Marcelo - Sumicity Networks <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Drewski (at irc.freenode.org #lazarus-ide - Andrew) is already working on > having a better help / chm files in Lazarus. > He seems to be VERY close to have it finished. Talk to him first before > coding the same thing twice :-) That's why I mentioned chm support has improved a lot over the last view months. I'll definitely look at his work first. I just hope it's generic enough (hint-hint) to work with fpGUI based applications as well - but that would me our issue to solve, not Andrew's. :-) I have seen chm patches go into FPC if I'm not mistaken, so believe he had some forward thinking in that regards. Regards, - Graeme - ___ fpGUI - a cross-platform Free Pascal GUI toolkit http://opensoft.homeip.net/fpgui/ _ To unsubscribe: mail [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe" as the Subject archives at http://www.lazarus.freepascal.org/mailarchives
Re: [lazarus] Helpfiles for Lazarus apps
On 11/12/2007, Mark Morgan Lloyd <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > What are you thinking of using as the underlying document set- a collection of > HTML files etc.? That would be one of the choices yes, but so far not the first choice. Alternatively we are looking at XML or WikiText. WikiText being the easiest format to type by a non-technical writer and closest to plain text. The latter doesn't mean our output (what is displayed) will be plain text - we want a rich output, but must also be easy enough to process so the viewer (or other tool) can export the content to other formats. We already have a WikiText parser. Current generated output formats are plan text (no markup) and XHTML. Regards, - Graeme - ___ fpGUI - a cross-platform Free Pascal GUI toolkit http://opensoft.homeip.net/fpgui/ _ To unsubscribe: mail [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe" as the Subject archives at http://www.lazarus.freepascal.org/mailarchives
Re: [lazarus] Helpfiles for Lazarus apps
Graeme, Drewski (at irc.freenode.org #lazarus-ide - Andrew) is already working on having a better help / chm files in Lazarus. He seems to be VERY close to have it finished. Talk to him first before coding the same thing twice :-) Sérgio Marcelo Graeme Geldenhuys escreveu: On 10/12/2007, Hess, Philip J <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: It's been a while but I think I concluded that a separate HTML file would be needed for each topic with the Lazarus help system on Linux and OS X if a browser is used to view the help. Definitely not ideal. Our company is going to develop a cross-platform help system and viewer which will support TOC, Search, Index and opening in a specific location of a page. Plus we need a easy deployment solution so are looking at a single archive file format. eg: .chm or .zip We are leaning more to the .zip format at the moment, but the chm support has improved a lot in Lazarus over recent months. I guess we will decide closer to the time. Unfortunately we are a few months away from starting that part of our project, but I'm pretty sure we will release the source code. Regards, - Graeme - _ To unsubscribe: mail [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe" as the Subject archives at http://www.lazarus.freepascal.org/mailarchives
Re: [lazarus] Helpfiles for Lazarus apps
Graeme Geldenhuys wrote: On 10/12/2007, Hess, Philip J <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: It's been a while but I think I concluded that a separate HTML file would be needed for each topic with the Lazarus help system on Linux and OS X if a browser is used to view the help. Definitely not ideal. Our company is going to develop a cross-platform help system and viewer which will support TOC, Search, Index and opening in a specific location of a page. Plus we need a easy deployment solution so are looking at a single archive file format. eg: .chm or .zip We are leaning more to the .zip format at the moment, but the chm support has improved a lot in Lazarus over recent months. I guess we will decide closer to the time. Unfortunately we are a few months away from starting that part of our project, but I'm pretty sure we will release the source code. What are you thinking of using as the underlying document set- a collection of HTML files etc.? -- Mark Morgan Lloyd markMLl .AT. telemetry.co .DOT. uk [Opinions above are the author's, not those of his employers or colleagues] _ To unsubscribe: mail [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe" as the Subject archives at http://www.lazarus.freepascal.org/mailarchives
Re: [lazarus] Helpfiles for Lazarus apps
On 10/12/2007, Hess, Philip J <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > It's been a while but I think I concluded that a separate HTML file > would be needed for each topic with the Lazarus help system on Linux and > OS X if a browser is used to view the help. Definitely not ideal. Our company is going to develop a cross-platform help system and viewer which will support TOC, Search, Index and opening in a specific location of a page. Plus we need a easy deployment solution so are looking at a single archive file format. eg: .chm or .zip We are leaning more to the .zip format at the moment, but the chm support has improved a lot in Lazarus over recent months. I guess we will decide closer to the time. Unfortunately we are a few months away from starting that part of our project, but I'm pretty sure we will release the source code. Regards, - Graeme - ___ fpGUI - a cross-platform Free Pascal GUI toolkit http://opensoft.homeip.net/fpgui/ _ To unsubscribe: mail [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe" as the Subject archives at http://www.lazarus.freepascal.org/mailarchives
RE: [lazarus] Helpfiles for Lazarus apps
I think the issue is that most programs, whether word processors or browsers, if they receive a file spec that includes a page anchor (e.g., "#something" with HTML) the program sees this as part of the file name and chokes. It's been a while but I think I concluded that a separate HTML file would be needed for each topic with the Lazarus help system on Linux and OS X if a browser is used to view the help. My original investigation was for OS X. The Carbon API's AHGotoPage function does allow an anchor to be specified for scrolling to with the Mac Help Viewer, but this would require direct calls to Carbon from my app rather than through the Lazarus interface. I never got around to following up on this. Thanks. -Phil -Original Message- From: Mark Morgan Lloyd [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, December 10, 2007 4:17 PM To: lazarus@miraclec.com Subject: Re: [lazarus] Helpfiles for Lazarus apps Hess, Philip J wrote: > You can launch a program via file extension with both Windows and Mac, > but I'm not aware of any standardized way to do this on Linux. You can > see how the HelpUtil.pas in this toolkit does it with OS X and Linux: > > http://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/XDev_Toolkit Thanks, looks interesting. I must confess that I've never got into creation of Windows help files via RTF since we've never really been a Windows "shop" when it comes to development. Can ViewDoc start at a given location in the file? Otherwise I think it's back to looking at the htmlhelp stuff to see whether it supports a fragment specification in the URL. -- Mark Morgan Lloyd markMLl .AT. telemetry.co .DOT. uk [Opinions above are the author's, not those of his employers or colleagues] _ To unsubscribe: mail [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe" as the Subject archives at http://www.lazarus.freepascal.org/mailarchives _ To unsubscribe: mail [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe" as the Subject archives at http://www.lazarus.freepascal.org/mailarchives
Re: [lazarus] Helpfiles for Lazarus apps
Hess, Philip J wrote: You can launch a program via file extension with both Windows and Mac, but I'm not aware of any standardized way to do this on Linux. You can see how the HelpUtil.pas in this toolkit does it with OS X and Linux: http://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/XDev_Toolkit Thanks, looks interesting. I must confess that I've never got into creation of Windows help files via RTF since we've never really been a Windows "shop" when it comes to development. Can ViewDoc start at a given location in the file? Otherwise I think it's back to looking at the htmlhelp stuff to see whether it supports a fragment specification in the URL. -- Mark Morgan Lloyd markMLl .AT. telemetry.co .DOT. uk [Opinions above are the author's, not those of his employers or colleagues] _ To unsubscribe: mail [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe" as the Subject archives at http://www.lazarus.freepascal.org/mailarchives
Re: [lazarus] Helpfiles for Lazarus apps
Mark Morgan Lloyd wrote: The test app that I'm recoding to "get into" Lazarus has a couple of right-button options: one of them treats highlighted text as a file name and opens it using another instance of the same program, the other treats it as a command and executes it. Under Win-32 the command can have a .txt suffix which opens whatever editor is associated, an http: scheme which opens the default browser and so on, it would be nice to be able to duplicate this functionality even if it was limited to desktops which conform to freedesktop.org. xdg-open from freedesktop.org's Portland project does exactly this although as yet it's not very widely bundled- I see it with Debian but not Slackware as particular cases. I don't think this encapsulates an accessible .so, I'll see if I can add it to helphtml once I'm more confident that I understand how things work. -- Mark Morgan Lloyd markMLl .AT. telemetry.co .DOT. uk [Opinions above are the author's, not those of his employers or colleagues] _ To unsubscribe: mail [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe" as the Subject archives at http://www.lazarus.freepascal.org/mailarchives
RE: [lazarus] Helpfiles for Lazarus apps
You can launch a program via file extension with both Windows and Mac, but I'm not aware of any standardized way to do this on Linux. You can see how the HelpUtil.pas in this toolkit does it with OS X and Linux: http://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/XDev_Toolkit Thanks. -Phil -Original Message- From: Mark Morgan Lloyd [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, December 10, 2007 7:12 AM To: lazarus@miraclec.com Subject: Re: [lazarus] Helpfiles for Lazarus apps A.J. Venter wrote: >> I was looking at the relevant source file yesterday and I noticed that if the >> location of the browser isn't specified it's found by brute force. When >> running under Win-32 I've used ShellExecuteEx() which automagically associates >> an http: prefix with an HTML viewer: does anybody know whether KDE etc. >> exposes an API (dcom/dbus etc.) that can do this? > > They all do, but none of them share it. > Gnome shares the default browser from gconf, kde you can use kfmclient > which will revert back to the configured one, every other desktop > doesn't do anything like that at all. Pretty much every file manager > not part of either gnome or KDE uses brute force or 'you have to > configure it' approach. > There was an attempt by ESR a few years ago to get a BROWSER > environment variable standardized, so all apps could simply refer to > $BROWSER and get the user's preferred default one. I have no idea why > it didn't take off, but it didn't - sad because it would have been an > ideal solution. > Perhaps the code should be expanded to check for the existence of > $BROWSER first, and THEN start brute-forcing command names ? Other > than that, it really cannot be much better than it is. Sorry. Thanks for that, interesting. Actually I'm looking at a slightly wider problem which is how to know what program to invoke in order to open any file: using Win-32 ShellExecuteEx() I can pass a file name with either a known suffix (.txt) or a known scheme (http:) and a suitable program is started, similarly with KDE and presumably also with Gnome. The test app that I'm recoding to "get into" Lazarus has a couple of right-button options: one of them treats highlighted text as a file name and opens it using another instance of the same program, the other treats it as a command and executes it. Under Win-32 the command can have a .txt suffix which opens whatever editor is associated, an http: scheme which opens the default browser and so on, it would be nice to be able to duplicate this functionality even if it was limited to desktops which conform to freedesktop.org. -- Mark Morgan Lloyd markMLl .AT. telemetry.co .DOT. uk [Opinions above are the author's, not those of his employers or colleagues] _ To unsubscribe: mail [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe" as the Subject archives at http://www.lazarus.freepascal.org/mailarchives _ To unsubscribe: mail [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe" as the Subject archives at http://www.lazarus.freepascal.org/mailarchives
Re: [lazarus] Helpfiles for Lazarus apps
A.J. Venter wrote: I was looking at the relevant source file yesterday and I noticed that if the location of the browser isn't specified it's found by brute force. When running under Win-32 I've used ShellExecuteEx() which automagically associates an http: prefix with an HTML viewer: does anybody know whether KDE etc. exposes an API (dcom/dbus etc.) that can do this? They all do, but none of them share it. Gnome shares the default browser from gconf, kde you can use kfmclient which will revert back to the configured one, every other desktop doesn't do anything like that at all. Pretty much every file manager not part of either gnome or KDE uses brute force or 'you have to configure it' approach. There was an attempt by ESR a few years ago to get a BROWSER environment variable standardized, so all apps could simply refer to $BROWSER and get the user's preferred default one. I have no idea why it didn't take off, but it didn't - sad because it would have been an ideal solution. Perhaps the code should be expanded to check for the existence of $BROWSER first, and THEN start brute-forcing command names ? Other than that, it really cannot be much better than it is. Sorry. Thanks for that, interesting. Actually I'm looking at a slightly wider problem which is how to know what program to invoke in order to open any file: using Win-32 ShellExecuteEx() I can pass a file name with either a known suffix (.txt) or a known scheme (http:) and a suitable program is started, similarly with KDE and presumably also with Gnome. The test app that I'm recoding to "get into" Lazarus has a couple of right-button options: one of them treats highlighted text as a file name and opens it using another instance of the same program, the other treats it as a command and executes it. Under Win-32 the command can have a .txt suffix which opens whatever editor is associated, an http: scheme which opens the default browser and so on, it would be nice to be able to duplicate this functionality even if it was limited to desktops which conform to freedesktop.org. -- Mark Morgan Lloyd markMLl .AT. telemetry.co .DOT. uk [Opinions above are the author's, not those of his employers or colleagues] _ To unsubscribe: mail [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe" as the Subject archives at http://www.lazarus.freepascal.org/mailarchives
Re: [lazarus] Helpfiles for Lazarus apps
> I was looking at the relevant source file yesterday and I noticed that if the > location of the browser isn't specified it's found by brute force. When > running under Win-32 I've used ShellExecuteEx() which automagically associates > an http: prefix with an HTML viewer: does anybody know whether KDE etc. > exposes an API (dcom/dbus etc.) that can do this? They all do, but none of them share it. Gnome shares the default browser from gconf, kde you can use kfmclient which will revert back to the configured one, every other desktop doesn't do anything like that at all. Pretty much every file manager not part of either gnome or KDE uses brute force or 'you have to configure it' approach. There was an attempt by ESR a few years ago to get a BROWSER environment variable standardized, so all apps could simply refer to $BROWSER and get the user's preferred default one. I have no idea why it didn't take off, but it didn't - sad because it would have been an ideal solution. Perhaps the code should be expanded to check for the existence of $BROWSER first, and THEN start brute-forcing command names ? Other than that, it really cannot be much better than it is. Sorry. A.J. _ To unsubscribe: mail [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe" as the Subject archives at http://www.lazarus.freepascal.org/mailarchives
