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DocView IDE Integration

FpGUI's docview (INF documentation viewer) can be integrated with various IDE's to give you context sensitive help using a simple keyboard shortcut. Alternative methods exist (like in the case of Lazarus IDE), but that requires recompiling the IDE.

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mgsalvador
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138 views

DocView IDE Integration

FpGUI's docview (INF documentation viewer) can be integrated with various IDE's to give you context sensitive help using a simple keyboard shortcut. Alternative methods exist (like in the case of Lazarus IDE), but that requires recompiling the IDE.

Uploaded by

mgsalvador
Copyright
© Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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fpGUI Toolkit http://fpgui.sourceforge.net/docview_ide_integration.

shtml

The fpGUI Toolkit Project

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DocView IDE Integration


This page describes how fpGUI's DocView (INF documentation viewer) can be
integrated with various IDE's to give you context sensitive help using a simple
keyboard shortcut.

For this to work, we opted to use the External Tools feature of each IDE or
programming editor. Alternative methods exist (like in the case of Lazarus IDE), but
that requires recompiling the IDE - and that seems like just to much effort.

If you don't have DocView yet, you can compile DocView yourself from the fpGUI
source code, or opt to download pre-built binaries of DocView and various INF
documentation, by visiting this link.

Note:
When viewing the "FPC Language Reference" document (ref.inf), you have to tell
DocView which text encoding to use. If not, you will see lots of garbled text. Simply
change the Text Encoding combobox in the top right corner of Docview from eg
CP850 to UTF-8. This problem is caused due to a limitation in the help compiler I
used, and because I opted to write the ref.inf file using UTF-8 encoded text (to get
those nice looking syntax diagrams).

Lazarus

The first example uses an environment variable FPCHELP which lists the INF help
files you want DocView to use. How you setup environment variable depends on
your operating system. For more details see the docview.inf help file, included with
DocView.

Here we also setup the Ctrl+F1 keyboard shortcut to trigger loading DocView.

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fpGUI Toolkit http://fpgui.sourceforge.net/docview_ide_integration.shtml

The second example makes use of the global BOOKSHELF or HELP environment
variable that DocView automatically searches. We then simply supply a
concatenated list of INF help files (no need to include their file extensions) DocView
should use.

Also note that in this example we decided to use the F1 keyboard shortcut, so
remember to disable the default F1 shortcut assigned in Lazarus's
Environment Options dialog.

MSEide

As in the first Lazarus example, here we are using a custom FPCHelp environment
variable that points to any FPC related INF help files. The value of the environment
variable can be a directory or a concatenated list of INF help files.

Delphi 7

In this example we simply decided to point DocView to the c:\apps\ directory and
use all INF files in finds in that directory.

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fpGUI Toolkit http://fpgui.sourceforge.net/docview_ide_integration.shtml

The latest fpGUI Published by The fpGUI Team.


Toolkit release is: Copyright © 2012 Graeme Geldenhuys.
version 0.8 All rights reserved.
Site last updated: 23
March 2012

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