Looking for MarkDown Support (edit, view, helpsystem)?

Carlo Barazzetta · June 26, 2023

If you need an integration for MarkDown files into Delphi apps, you can find some interesting open-source projects that I'm working on.

MarkDownHelpViewer Project

The MarkDownHelpViewer, is an Open-Source project to provide a Delphi-integrated help system using markdown files for online "help" creation.

The project includes a ready Viewer with its setup to be installed on the user's machine (in practice the equivalent of hh.exe for the help in .chm format (see image) and an "interface" file to add to your own application that hooks the viewer to the "HelpContext" or "HelpKeyword" set on the Delphi components.

Besides this also a component that can be used internally to the Delphi application to display help files.

Here is the link to the project:

https://github.com/EtheaDev/MarkdownHelpViewer

This is a "Preview" of the viewer showing the help from the "wiki" of the InstantObjects project:

There's also a small demo in the project that explains how to integrate the help with your Delphi application, including the ability to use a MarkDownViewer component right inside your application:

The MarkDownShellExtensions Project

In addition to the viewer, I recommend to use the MarkDown file editor, which comes with my other project available here:

https://github.com/EtheaDev/MarkdownShellExtensions

with which it is possible to edit the MarkDown files and immediately see the preview of the final result:

Combining the two projects you will be able to offer your Delphi applications a fully integrated and easy to maintain Help system for the end user: when you need to update the images of your application because the GUI has changed, it will be sufficient to update the image on disk and update the associated markdown file, without the need for further updates, in order to always have the help updated to the latest release. Furthermore, the MarkDown format allows it to be easily published (for example as a "wiki" on Git-Hub) and is easily maintainable because it can be subjected to version-control.

Those two projects are based on other Open-source projects, like:

1: SVGIconImageList: https://github.com/EtheaDev/SVGIconImageList

2: HtmlViewer: https://github.com/BerndGabriel/HtmlViewer)
2: SynEdit: https://github.com/SynEdit/SynEdit

3: VCLStyleUtils: https://github.com/RRUZ/vcl-styles-utils

4: Delphi-Markdown: https://github.com/grahamegrieve/delphi-markdown

Edited June 26, 2023 by Carlo Barazzetta
Updated images