[fpc-devel] Determin file size - how?

[Marco van de Voort]

In our previous episode, Graeme Geldenhuys said:
> > for e.g. special indexes.
> 
> Just curious.
> 
> I remember years ago I had an application that used HLP help (Win95
> days). The application had a "tutor" mode - teaching the end-user how
> to use certain features of the application. The HLP help viewer
> displayed a popup window with instructions. As soon as the user
> completed one instruction in the application, the "tutor" window
> automatically updated to the next instruction. It is as if the
> application and help viewer communicated with each other.  I've seen
> this done in OS/2 as well.
> 
> Do you know if CHM supports this?

The Windows CHM help is instrumentable. But it is also said to be mostly a
first time effort, with MS already directing resources to htmlhelp2 (and
later 3), so many parts don't work reliably or are not implemented, and
doing it is horribly underdocumented.

The trouble is that the successors (which I didn't like, too many loose
files) never was distributed for general use (only for Windows, VS and
Office internal help)

I never tried to instrument CHM beyond simple lookup, but from what I know
from reading CHM webpages with some effort you can do quite some
instrumentation.  Usually by using different aspects of CHM access:

there are three ways to access the htmlhelp(=chm) system:

- via the API (see winunits-base example dir for examples)
- via the hh.exe commandline utility
- via an OCX, originally meant for in browser use.

and then using mostly API, but hh for stuff that doesn't function properly.

But most of the info I have on this is from win98 period.