[fpc-pascal] Add API to official documentation search

[Graeme Geldenhuys]

On 17/11/2019 4:29 pm, Ryan Joseph via fpc-pascal wrote:
> https://www.freepascal.org/docsearch/docsearch.var?word=List
> 
> and get back a JSON object that had the search results? This is
> important for integration with 3rd party IDE's.

No such API exists (that I know of), but the desire to integrate the
FPC, LCL, fpGUI and any other API documentation into other IDE's and
Programming Editors has existed for over a decade (by me at least). I
also needed the requirement of having the help available offline,
because I often worked in locations with no internet access. I'm of the
rare breed of developers that actually reads documentation. ;-)

That's why I invested months of research in various help formats and
eventually spent over a year developing a help viewer that could easily
integrate into IDE's and Editors, and even be used from the command line
or via IPC calls. The help viewer is now the default help viewer of
fpGUI, and is called DocView.

It used the INF help format (initially developed by IBM), which is
extremely compact, really fast, supports full text search. DocView takes
full advantage of all that and can concatenate multiple help files and
their Tables of Content at runtime, supports advanced searching,
bookmarks, inline annotation and more.

Details on integrating Docview in various IDE's and editors:

   http://fpgui.sourceforge.net/docview_ide_integration.shtml



Regards,
  Graeme

-- 
fpGUI Toolkit - a cross-platform GUI toolkit using Free Pascal
http://fpgui.sourceforge.net/

My public PGP key:  http://tinyurl.com/graeme-pgp