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6.13 The help system

More information on how to handle the IDE, or about the use of various calls in the RTL, explanations regarding the syntax of a Pascal statement, can be found in the help system. The help system is activated by pressing F1.

Navigating in the help system

The help system contains hyperlinks; these are sensitive locations that lead to another topic in the help system. They are marked by a different color. The hyperlinks can be activated in 2 ways:
  1. by clicking them with the mouse,
  2. by using the TAB and SHIFT-TAB keys to move between the different hyperlinks of a page and the ENTER key can be used to activate them.

The contents of the help system is displayed, if SHIFT-F1 is pressed. To go back to the previous help topic, press ALT-F1. This also works if the help window isn’t displayed on the desktop; the help window will then be activated.

Working with help files

The IDE contains a help system which can display the following file 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 files.

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

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

  1. The HTML viewer of the help system is limited, it can only handle the most basic HTML files (graphics excluded), since it is only designed to display the Free Pascal help files. 6.
  2. When the HTML help viewer encounters a graphics file, it will try and find a file with the same name but an extension of .ans; If this file is found, this will be interpreted as a file with ANSI escape sequences, and these will be used to display a text image. The displays of the IDE dialogs in the IDE help files are made in this way.
The menu item ”Help--Files” permits to add and delete help files to the list of files in the help table of contents. The help files dialog is displayed in figure (6.37).


Figure 6.37: The help files dialog

PIC

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

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

If the added file is an HTML file, 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 file 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 files, if the documentation was installed as well.

The about dialog

The about dialog, reachable through (”Help--About...”) shows some information about the IDE, such as the version number, the date it was built, what compiler and debugger it uses. When reporting bugs about the IDE, please use the information given by this dialog to identify the version of the IDE that was used.

It also displays some copyright information.

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