On 5 April 2010 16:19, John Coppens <j...@jcoppens.com> wrote: > > Sorry for my ignorance - what are INF files? Google seems confused too.
INF files are compiled (binary) IPF [Information Presentation Facility] help files. It is the help file and digital document format originally created by IBM for the OS/2 operating system. IPF is a very easy to learn mark-up language specifically designed for documentation and produces very good text layout. INF can be used as a help file or as a digital book (similar to PDF). For the fpGUI Toolkit project, I looked for a cross-platform help file format that I can use for the fpGUI project itself and that developers could use to implement help for their own projects/applications. I needed something that is a single file (so no raw HTML), that is very fast and compact. I evaluated various help file formats and decided to use INF. Since then, I created a add-on for FPC's fpdoc program to generate IPF output for class documentation. I also implemented a cross-platform INF viewer called fpGUI DocView. The Open Watcom project implemented a open source IPF Compiler (wipfc) which runs under OS/2, DOS, Windows and Linux. wipfc is a 1MB download. At a later date I'll implement my own IPF Compiler in Object Pascal which can hopefully be included with FPC. I also translated the FPC Language Reference (latex) document to INF format, so now language reference, class documentation (RTL & FCL0 help is available in IDE's like Lazarus or MSEide. DocView is very easy to integrate with these IDE's via their 'external tools' options - no need to write some add-on plugin/package for the IDE's. Docview supports: Table of Contents, runtime generated Index or can use the Index included in the INF file, bookmarks, inline annotations, full text searching, search keyword highlighting, reading multiple INF files together as one help file (all done at runtime), font substitution, exporting articles to text etc. Wikipedia has some information on IPF. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_Presentation_Facility I'm busy redesigning the fpGUI website which will then include more information regarding INF and DocView and some screenshots. -- Regards, - Graeme - _______________________________________________ fpGUI - a cross-platform Free Pascal GUI toolkit http://opensoft.homeip.net/fpgui/ _______________________________________________ fpc-pascal maillist - fpc-pascal@lists.freepascal.org http://lists.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/fpc-pascal
