Attached is a fully working example of an LCL application using fpGUI's DocView help viewer. It shows context sensitive help and general help. The
docview application needs to be in your PATH environment, but a small tweak to the code supplied and it can look for DocView in the same path as the application executable (maybe that would be preferred).
For example:
- Set the focus to a specific control and press F1. It will show the help topic for that specific control.
- Click the Help button and it will show the help topic for the dialog/form.
- Select the "Help -> Show Help" menu item and it will show the general application help and display the first topic in the help file.
You can change the help file location to any relative or absolute directory location. For example:
procedure TForm1.FormCreate(Sender: TObject);
begin
Application.HelpFile := 'help/helptest.inf';
{ or even }
//Application.HelpFile := '/usr/local/share/myapp/helptest.inf';
...snip...
end;
The help file is a INF help file which is included in fpGUI's repository in the
tools/wipfc/ directory. Binaries of the IPF Compiler are supplied for Linux and Windows in the zip and tar.gz archives in that directory. Help is authored using IPF (Information Presentation Facility) format which can be used for application help and eBook documents. IPF is very easy to learn tagging language. It is much less verbose than HTML and the tags are mnemonic, making it easy to associate them with their functions. INF files are also magnitudes smaller and faster that CHM.
Pre-built binaries of Docview (the help viewer) can be downloaded from fpGUI's SourceForge page:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/fpgui/files/fpGUI/1.4/Included in the fpGUI repository is an extensive document explaining the IPF syntax with lots of examples. See the
<fpgui>/docview/docs/IPFREF_v4.INF file - viewable with DocView of course.
Hope this helps.
Screenshots of DocView http://fpgui.sourceforge.net/screenshots_apps.shtmlSee Also:Docview integration into various IDE's.
http://fpgui.sourceforge.net/docview_ide_integration.shtml