[fpc-pascal] OS/2 INF help support

[Tomas Hajny]

On Tue, September 8, 2009 13:35, Marco van de Voort wrote:
> In our previous episode, Graeme Geldenhuys said:
>> I'm been doing some reading on various help file format - to be used in
>> my applications and possible Lazarus IDE. From my OS/2 2.1 and OS/2 Warp
>> days I remember the INF help was very impressive. Searching was
>> lightning quick even on old hardware and INF files a few megabytes in
>> size.  Apparently this is due to the very efficient INF help format.
>
> Or maybe because it cached the search index to disk, like most helpfiles.
>
> This is what I'm currently researching for CHM. (merged CHMs/.chw files)
> While currently it is fast enough, performancewise, "nice" results
> probably
> need to mine more info.
>
>> Anyway, I want to try and implement a GUI version of the INF Help Viewer
>> code available in the FP IDE. But ultimately, I would like to compile my
>> own help as well, under Linux and Windows. Would this be possible?
>
> I'd go shopping by the OS/2 centric compilers like sybil and vpascal. But
> fat chance that they used some OS/2 tool for it that isn't ported.

VP doesn't use .INF files even internally (proprietary help format,
similarly to TP) and certainly doesn't provide an IPF compiler. For Sibyl
I strongly believe that they rely on the IBM tool.

Tomas