[fpc-pascal] Docs - structural change

[Michael Van Canneyt]

On Thu, 10 Sep 2026, Tomas Hajny via fpc-pascal wrote:

> On 2026-09-09 23:09, Michael Van Canneyt via fpc-pascal wrote:
>
>
> Hi Michael,
>
>> It always bothered me that it is cumbersome to navigate the docs - the
>> standard tex4ht mechanism is too bare-bones.
>> 
>> So I added some postprocessing to add a (optional) sidebar:
>> 
>> https://www.freepascal.org/~michael/docs-demo/docs/sidebar/
>> 
>> Which makes navigation more comfortable.
>> 
>> It loads the sidebar at runtime with some javascript, to avoid bloating 
>> every page with the same sidebar HTML.
>> 
>> Comments, suggestions welcome.
>> 
>> (site might be slow currently, seems we're being visited by some bots...)
>
> It looks nice and is certainly useful. There's just one caveat - could you 
> please check whether HTML files created this way are still usable in our IDE? 
> It isn't critical if not as long as the CHM version of all the help files is 
> provided as an alternative (and it works correctly with that version), but if 
> the direct HTML files aren't supported as the help in the IDE any longer, we 
> should communicate it clearly (especially considering the fact that some 
> users might have this configured for their existing installations, but also 
> for new installations).

As I understood it, the IDE uses CHM files, but all this is disabled for CHM.
So we should be OK.

But to make sure I tested, and the help pages still display. It's as expected: 
The sidebar and the theme switching buttons are created and enabled using Javascript; 
since there is no javascript, the IDE simply sees the original HTML.

Michael.