On the other hand, not every system has a CHM viewer installed by default, so you might want to include lhelp, a CHM viewer written in Pascal and included with the Lazarus sources (components/chmhelp/lhelp/lhelp.lpi). The advantages of using the CHM system are a smaller, self contained help file instead of multiple files. You can use a TCHMHelpDatabase control like the THTMLHelpDatabase control described below. with the now ancient Microsoft HTML Workshop or with the new Lazarus chmmaker tools in $(lazarusdir)/tools/chmmaker Please see $/components/chmhelp/democontrol/. The database extracts the help content and asks the LCL for a viewer that supports the mime type of the content.įinally, the viewer shows the help content.Ĭontext-sensitive CHM application help can be used from Lazarus 1.0 and later.Ī demonstration program is included that shows how to include context-sensitive help using CHM and the lhelp CHM viewer (the same one that is used for IDE help by default).

Then the LCL asks the database to show the help for the entry. If several entries are returned, the LCL asks the user to choose an entry. When help is requested, the LCL queries each registered THelpDatabase and each database can return a list of entries. For example a viewer for the mime type text/html can start a web browser.

A THelpViewer is a component that shows help content.

It can be a collection of HTML pages or fpdoc XML files or a CHM file or a database or whatever. The Help Viewer is invoked by the Help Database to show the help to the user.

) to the help page (or help web site or.). A Help Database contains the mapping from the keywords (ID, node, message, pascal. The LCL help mainly consists of two parts: Help databases and help viewers. There is a very nice simple demo (chmdemo.zip) here: See the CHM help section if you want to use CHM help files instead of HTML help files. Then give each control of your application a HelpKeyword.

Setup the paths and create some HTML pages. Just drop them on a form of your project. This project demonstrates how to use the HTML help components.

5 INF (using fpGUI's DocView help viewer).4.1 Setup HTML help for your application.

Create chm