Voice of the PPL

I am still working very hard on this new help system. It is really shaping up to be one of a kind. Now, it creates an index table (searchable) andit creates a nice Table of Contents automatically. There will be enhancements to allow development of user’s manuals as well as references to functions/procedures and classes/properties/events/methods. You can define Topics manually now and choose to include it in the table of contents or not. I will implement an easy way to link topics together and add images very easily.

The code examples are now being generated on the fly as jpg images with full syntax highligthing, very nice feature. I will also implement custom tags to generate syntax highlighted code images to be embedded into your description.

Example:

The main user interface is made up of 5 panels. #img=Main.jpg Adding images to your help system will support Pasting (ctrl+v) directly in the text editor and the image will be formatted and saved with your help file.

Another example:

#begincode
For (i$ = 1 to 10)
  ShowMessage(i$);
end;
#endcode

If you need more information, check the following topic #topic=5894722, you can also link topic by name, #topic=”Application.Caption”.

There will be a Topic chooser dialog to simplify the task of selecting topics to link to. As the page gets generated to HTML, it will convert the special tags to be user friendly.

Oh yeah, I almost forgot, when you import component definition file or a PPL file to the help system, it will analyse your parameters and set default descriptions for you and assign See Also topics, as well as automatically detecting Tags based on the name of the Function, Procedure, Property, Event or Class name. These features can be enhanced to your liking by editing the following two files:

• DefaultParams.txt
• DefaultTags.txt

The DefaultTags.txt file, uses advanced regular expression to analyse the name of the item being scanned.

I still have lot of work to do on this help system but I really think it is worth it big time. It is revolutionary from a programmer’s view point.

The main goal of this system is to simplify documentating your components and code libraries to a maximum.

Sorry for this long incomprehensible post, I will use it as development notes as well!