You can do some pretty amazing things with a script, and being able to iterate through the documentation in classical parent / child relationships is very helpful. One of the really cool things about Help & Doc is that it supports pascal scripting. Wait, what? Script support? Scripting docs ![]() But for a hard-core Delphi and object pascal developer, Help & Doc has everything I need – and then some! NET components (oh the humanity!) and desperately needed to please Visual Studio. Perhaps it would be different if I was writing casual books for a publisher, or if I made. I’m very much impressed and don’t regret getting this over the more expensive Help and Manual. When you combine that with script support, Help & Doc is flexing some powerful muscles. Windows and Linux can have their own, unique sections - and you don’t need to maintain 3 nearly similar documentation projects. With Apple OSX, iOS and Android added to the compiler target (for Delphi), the need to separate Apple only instructions on how to use a library, and then only include that for the Apple output is real. ![]() Using the conditional operations you can isolate the differences. NET and COM (yes people still use COM believe it or not) you don’t need 3 different copies of the same documentation – with only small variations between them. And it does that very, very well.įor example if you have documentation for a component, one that targets both Delphi. NET documentation and shared editing to justify the higher price -and having to install a CMS to enjoy shared editing? It might make sense if you are a publisher, ghostwriter or if you have a large department with 5+ people doing nothing but documentation but competing against Google Documents in 2018? Sorry, I don’t see that going anywhere.įor me, Help & Doc makes more sense because it remains true to its basic role: to help you create documentation for your products. But their content-management strategy is (at least to me) something of a paradox. At least I do, and I imagine the needs of other developers will be similar.īeing older, Help & Manual have worked up more infrastructure, something which can be helpful in larger organizations. Help & Doc’s main window, clean and pleasing to the eyeīoth suite’s have more in common than similar names (which is really confusing), they offer pretty much the exact same functionality. Except Help & Doc is considerably cheaper and have a couple features that developers favour. This is followed by the younger but equally capable Help & Doc. At least when it comes to producing technical manuals, help files and being written in Delphi.įirst you have the older and perhaps more established Help & Manual. Help & DocĪs far as I know, there are only two documentation suite’s on the market related with Delphi and coding. It will even flip the orientation if you don’t explicitly tell it not to. Like Microsoft Word back in the day, it faithfully favours page-breaks over perspective based scaling. Let’s just say that scaling and perspective is not the best in Open Office. But in their heroic pursuit of cloning Microsoft to death, they also cloned possibly the worst layout mechanisms ever invented namely the layout engine of Microsoft Word 2001. Now before you argue with me over Oo, let me just say that I’m all for Open-Office, it has a lot of great features. The third time I uninstalled it, never to look back.Īnother thing I would like to see, is that the program deals with graphics more efficiently than Google Docs, and at the very least more intuitively than Open Office (Oo in short). The first time this happened I lost half a days work. Not even an exception, nothing, just “poff” and it terminated. Whenever I picked Microsoft PDF printer as the output, it promptly committed suicide. I usually print things out, let it rest, then go over it with an old fashion marker.īesides, my previous documentation suite couldn’t do PDF printing. You need to let the material breathe for a couple of days between sessions to spot mistakes. Writing a solid book, be it a mix between technical reference and user’s guide, can’t compare to a blog post. ![]() If you are pondering why I even mention printing in this digital age, it’s because I prefer physical media. Writing documentation in Open Office feels very much like this
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |