chmhelp
Lazarus has a chmhelp package (components/chmhelp).
The package is an external help viewer (lhelp) that communicates with the IDE using SimpleIPC; see Installing Help in the IDE and Help protocol for more details. The CHM support is based on FPC package chm.
Troubleshooting: recompiling and configuring the package and lhelp.exe often do the trick. Read the file components/chmhelp/README.txt.
There are multiple help files you can/should download/use:
- the FPC rtl.chm and fcl.chm that document FreePascal components can be downloaded in a zip file from [1].
- the Free Pascal Programmer's Guide (prog.chm), Free Pascal: Reference guide (ref.chm), Free Pascal: User’s Guide (user.chm) and FPDoc: Free Pascal code documenter: Reference manual (fpdoc.chm), probably available in the zip file mentioned above
- the Lazarus Component Library help file, lcl.chm, can be downloaded from [2].
If you want to edit/generate your own chm help files, also put any .xct (cross-reference) files in the same directory as the chm files. If you are just using help, there's no need for that.
Lazarus IDE help
Most help for the Lazarus IDE is kept on the Lazarus wiki. A drawback is that it is not available as an (regularly updated) archive, and with a free-form structure (as expected in a wiki), which is less suitable for automated transformation.
There is a wikihelp tool in lazarus-ccr that should be able to download and relink the wiki for offline use (which then could be transformed into a meagre quality but working chm), but the Lazarus Wiki was closed for bulk downloads due to attacks in the past.
Wikihelp:
- original home: http://wiki.ullihome.de/index.php/WikiHelp-Download/de
- lazarus-ccr location : applications/wikihelp (requires synapse)
