ANN HelpNDoc 9.2 is available: AI-Powered Technical Writing, improved documentation import, and more...

[HelpNDoc 22]

Fellow Delphi developers,

 

This is with great pleasure that we announce the immediate availability of HelpNDoc 9.2, an easy to use yet powerful help authoring tool producing CHM help files, responsive HTML 5 and mobile Websites, DocX and PDF manuals, Markdown documents, ePub and Kindle eBooks as well as Qt Help files from a single source. HelpNDoc is Free for personal use and evaluation purposes and is available at: https://www.helpndoc.com

 

HelpNDoc 9.2 provides many new features and enhancements such as an AI Assistant for smarter content creation, improved PDF generation, enhanced import capabilities for external formats, and much more... You can learn more about this update at: https://www.helpndoc.com/news-and-articles/2024-04-30-boost-your-technical-writing-with-artificial-intelligence-introducing-helpndocs-ai-assistant/

 

Video of some of the new features in HelpNDoc 9.2:

 

 

Download HelpNDoc now and use it for free for personal and evaluation purposes: https://www.helpndoc.com/download

 

Follow our step-by-step video guides to learn how to use HelpNDoc:

 

 

Best regards,
 
John, HelpNDoc team.
https://www.helpndoc.com

[Anders Melander 1654]

29 minutes ago, HelpNDoc said:

an AI Assistant for smarter content creation

...depending on your definition of "smarter"

[Anders Melander 1654]

While I have your attention 🙂

Have you considered adding functionality, or creating a new product, that solves the same needs as Documentation Insight? I.e. API documentation.

 

I really like the way DI works but it seems like it went into maintenance mode many years ago. Probably because its HTML editor is based on Internet Explorer. Also, I've been waiting a decade for template support which was promised but never delivered.

[HelpNDoc 22]

1 hour ago, Anders Melander said:

Have you considered adding functionality, or creating a new product, that solves the same needs as Documentation Insight? I.e. API documentation.

We do not plan any Delphi integration if this is what you are asking for. However, the idea of extracting comments from Delphi source code is intriguing and could potentially be a useful feature. We will consider this further if we see significant demand for such functionality. The feasibility of implementing this feature will also depend on the complexity involved and the availability of a suitable Delphi parser.

[Anders Melander 1654]

The integration isn't really the important part although it's nice to be able to navigate the source while the help editor/navigator follows along.

 

Extracting comments from the source can already be done by the compiler so that isn't that interesting for me personally. Also, I find that, although it appears to make sense to document the API in the source, it ends up completely obfuscating the source.

I prefer to have the help text separate from the source. DI has an option to either maintain in-source comments or store the data in external files. Like this:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<doc>
  <members>
  <member name="AnsiCompareText(string,string)">
    <summary>Compares strings based on the current locale without case sensitivity.<br></br>
      <br></br>
      AnsiCompareText compares str1 to str2, without case sensitivity. The comparison operation is controlled by the current locale.<br></br>
    </summary>
    <param name="str1">The first string to be compared.</param>
    <param name="str2">The second string to be compared.</param>
    <returns>
      <list type="table">
        <listheader>
          <term>Condition</term>
          <description>Return value</description>
        </listheader>
        <item>
          <term>str1 = str2</term>
          <description>Zero.</description>
        </item>
        <item>
          <term>str1 &gt; str2</term>
          <description>Positive value.</description>
        </item>
        <item>
          <term>str1 &lt; str2</term>
          <description>Negative value.</description>
        </item>
      </list>
    </returns>
    <seealso cref="CompareText"></seealso>
    <seealso cref="AnsiCompareStr"></seealso>
    <seealso cref="CompareStr"></seealso>
  </member>
...

 

If your project/document architecture allows for separating layout (the way it looks), structure (classes, members, functions, types, etc) and content (help text per structure item), then "all you need" is a parser and some UI to manage the parts. Easy-peasy, when can I have it 🙂

[HelpNDoc 22]

So basically, this would work like a XSLT for your XML documentation files ?

[Anders Melander 1654]

That's up to you. I just need the three parts separate: layout, structure, content.

• Layout is provided by some kind of customizable templates.
• Structure data is provided by the source code parser.
• The user provide the content via some nice editors.

I don't care if the content format is XML as I can easily migrate any existing data to another format.

Here's a small example of some documentation built with DI: https://github.com/andersmelander/DWScriptStudio/tree/master/Documentation

And another: https://developer.sigmaestimates.com/api-reference/

 

Both of these were built by generating pascal source code from DWScript meta data and then let DI have a go at that source. Since the source is generated, the help content has to be external to the source. However, the big problem with the output generated by DI is that it is impossible to integrate it properly into an existing website since it must be embedded in an iframe.

For example I have another site where the main content of the site is conceptual help. I would like to have the API documentation integrated in this but because of the iframe it is impossible to link from the conceptual help directly into the API help and vice versa.

[HelpNDoc 22]

Thank you for your feedback 👍

We do not plan to provide another product specific to API / code documentation but will investigate your request for a possible integration in a future update of HelpNDoc. I can't promise anything at this time though.