DelphiDabbler's Blog

This is the third in a series of blog posts about my experience of using HelpNDoc in a real life project to produce documentation for my Unit2NS program. Please note that there have been a couple of updates to  HelpNDoc  since I started this series, but I have stayed with v7.7.0.519 throughout for consistency. In part one I covered: An introduction to HelpNDoc Starting a new project Adding content, including: Adding & editing topics Formatting text & using styles Creating hyperlinks Inserting images Using variables Generating help documentation And in part two I discussed: Customising document output using HelpNDoc scripts Conditionally including content depending on the type of document After part two, the left-over subjects were: Source code generation Keywords Inhibiting the Copyright message in help topics Using custom build tags Customising document output. Various topic properties not covered to date The first three subjects will be discussed in this post, w...

This is the second part of a series of blog posts taking a close look at HelpNDoc . Here are links to the other posts in the series: part one part three part four In the first part of this deep dive into using HelpNDoc  we ended up with a complete help document for my Unit2NS  program. There was more to do though, which I listed at the end of that post: Scripting. Conditional content. Source code generation. Keywords. Inhibiting the Copyright message in help topics. Custom variables build tags. Customising document output. Various topic properties not covered previously. In this post we'll be taking a close look at the first two items in the list. The others will be returned to in subsequent posts. Scripting In part 1 I said I wanted to create four different document types from our single HelpNDoc  project: HTML Help file. HTML5 web site. Markdown. PDF. We managed to generate 1, 2 & 4 in part 1 , but we left the Markdown version for lat...

I've just updated my system information unit  with the following changes to the operating system detection class TPJOSInfo : Updated to detect the new Windows 10 version 22H1 preview. Changed Windows 11 RSPRERELESE build 22509 to report "Windows 11 Insider Preview" instead of "Windows 11 Version 21H2". More info . Fixed a problem where Windows Server  was being reported as Windows 2019 Server . It seems that a couple of Windows Server releases between Windows 2019 Server  and Windows 2022 Server  did not include the year number in the release name. This meant introducing a new  TPJOSProduct.osWinServer product type. More info . The demo programs were also updated to report the newly added Windows Server  product where detected. You can get the new version from my website or direct from  SourceForge  (direct download link). 

If you've got enough years under your belt you'll know the feeling. Someone describes an item as "retro" or "vintage" and you had one when it was new. All of a sudden you're feelin' your age. A while ago someone was looking at one of my guitars and asked where I found such a cool vintage instrument - Bob Dylan played one, ya know. I had to confess that I just walked into a shop in 1982 and bought it new! Bob borrows my guitar Well that nice guy who runs the rather excellent Retro Shack YouTube channel does it to me every time he puts out a video about a Commodore 64 , or a Sinclair ZX Spectrum , or a BBC Micro ...  Retro Shack restores a Beeb He reminds me I owned a Tandy TRS80  model I, a PC XT with 5.25" floppies, a Psion Series 5 PDA (remember them?) and a Sinclair QL (of which more in a later post). Oh yeah, and my first "portable" was like a suitcase - think it was an Amstrad PPC 512 - eek! Tandy TRS-80, Model I. Photo by  Dav...

The last of my projects holding out in a Subversion repo has finally made the move to Git. What was once the DDabLib project on SourceForge is now being developed in Git as the delphidabbler/ddablib project on GitHub. At least for the time being, releases are still hosted on SourceForge - see the Files tab - and bugs and feature requests are still using the SourceForge Ticket System  . EDIT: I've now moved the bug /feature requests over to GitHub Issues . The SVN repo will remain in place as an archive, but will not be updated any further. The library's documentation has been maintained on GitHub for a while now in the delphidabbler/ddab-lib-docs project. I haven't decided yet whether to merge that into ddablib or to leave it be. The GitHub repo still looks a bit "Subversiony". Things still need some tidying up.

The Delphi Tips micro site has at long last been re-integrated into DelphiDabbler.com . It now has its own sub-domain: tips.delphidabbler.com . The site still has its own identity, but I think the URL is a bit more memorable. The original URL ( delphidabbler.github.io/delphi-tips ) and the later URL (delphidabbler.com/delphi-tips) should both automatically redirect to the new URL. The tips microsite will continue to be maintained in the  delphidabbler/delphi-tips  repo on GitHub, separate from the main site which lives in delphidabbler/delphidabbler.github.io . Teething Troubles The change to the new subdomain broke the link to the site's style sheet. This has been fixed now and the site's styling should appear similar to the following picture: But if it looks more like the next picture, you need to force a refresh (e.g. Ctrl+F5 on Chrome): Note: both the above images are in mobile view, not desktop, but it's the colours that are the give away. Right, I'm off to chang...

This is the second in a little mini series where I take a look at some applications that Delphi developers may find useful. Developers please note that I'm happy to blog about other useful development software or libraries that may be useful to Delphi or other Pascal developers. Free of charge. Gratis. For full details see my " Promoting Delphi developers & applications? " blog post. This time I'm focussing on  HelpNDoc 7  by  IBE Software . And this really is a long look! In fact there's so much to describe I've split this over more than one post. Here are links to the others: part two part three part four HelpNDoc 7.7 Home Screen For the sake of transparency I want to disclose that  I received a free license for this product, for which I'm grateful. Introduction Given that HelpNDoc  has a lot  of features, a simple walk through would be way too long. So instead I decided to actually develop some documentation for my relatively new (and simple) Unit2...