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6.13.2 Working with help les

The IDE contains a help system which can display the following le 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 les.

In future some more formats may be added. However, the above formats should cover already a wide spectrum of help les available.

Remark: Concerning the support for HTML les the following should be noted:

  1. The HTML viewer of the help system is limited, it can only handle the most basic HTML les (graphics excluded), since it is only designed to display the Free Pascal help les. 6 .
  2. When the HTML help viewer encounters a graphics le, it will try and nd a le with the same name but an extension of .ans; If this le is found, this will be interpreted as a le with ANSI escape sequences, and these will be used to display a text image. The displays of the IDE dialogs in the IDE help les are made in this way.

The menu item "Help|Files" permits to add and delete help les to the list of les in the help table of contents. The help les dialog is displayed in gure (6.37).


Figure 6.37: The help les dialog

PIC

The dialogs lists the les that will be presented in the table of contents window of the help system. Each entry has a small descriptive title and a lename next to it. The following actions are available when adding help les:

New
Adds a new le. IDE will display a prompt, in which the location of the help le should be entered.

If the added le is an HTML le, a dialog box will be displayed which asks for a title. This title will then be included in the contents of help.

Delete
Deletes the currently highlighted le from the help system. It is not deleted from the hard disk, only the help system entry is removed.
Cancel
Discards all changes and closes the dialog.
OK
Saves the changes and closes the dialog.

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. If Free Pascal has been installed using the installer, the installer should have added the FPC documentation to the list of help les, if the documentation was installed as well.

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