This is a mothballed project and is no longer being development. Anyone can take it over if they wish. Please see the project's home page for details.

Component Help Installer installs Delphi-compatible help files into Delphi's OpenHelp system in such a way that the help files are integrated with Delphi. Context sensitive help for components, classes and routines installed by CHI is accessible from the Delphi code editor, form editor and property inspector. CHI works with Delphi versions 3 to 7..

CHI2 comes in two flavours:

1. A stand-alone Windows application (CHI.exe). This detects which versions of Delphi are installed on the system and allows any available version to be chosen from the main interface.
2. A command line application (CHInst.exe) is provided mainly to enable installation of help files from batch files. The program can also be called from install programs. It provides all the functionality of the GUI based application through a command line interface. The CHI help file provides an example of using the command line application.

When used with Delphi 6 and 7 CHI will merge any .als a-keyword files found in the same directory as the help file into Delphi's master .als file. This feature works only with Delphi 6 and 7, since .als files are not supported in earlier versions of Delphi.

The WinHelp program required to display help for Delphi 3-7 is not included with Windows Vista and later OSs by default but must be downloaded and installed separately. See Microsoft Knowledge Base article KB917607 for details.

DIPasDoc itself is a console application which uses the TDIPasDoc class as its documentation engine. Based on TComponent, TDIPasDoc includes a Pascal scanner, tokenizer, and parser which read the Pascal units, extract identifier information and documentation comments. It then formats, links and writes the help project. Finally, TDIPasDoc can invoke help compilers if necessary.

The documentaion generated by DIPasDoc includes overviews of Units, Classes (with Hierarchy), Types, Variables, and Functions & Procedures. Each identifier can have its own description as well as a short abstract. Links to identifiers are resolved automatically. Users can choose from many documentaion languages.

The package contains precompiled Win32 executables and program documentation. Examples are included to run DIPasDoc on its own sources.
 
Fully functional
Source: Included

• conforms to Delphi help style;
• integrable into Delphi help system.

• Table of contents / Theme groups;
• Categories;
• Packages, Units, Elements (Constants, Procedures, Classes, Methods, Interfaces etc.);
• Examples;
• See-also-list;
• F1-keywords and Index entries.

• Html editor;
• Source code parser;
• In-Source-Help (Help-comments in source code);
• Object tree;
• Auto-Tagging for text outlines;
• Help, Example, Quickstart, Wizard.

Unlike standard help development tools, Help Development Studio automates all the work with the help compiler. When a new help project is created, it already has default values for all the parameters necessary for the compilation. Thus, the user can run the help file by a simple choice of one menu command.

Help Development Studio can create .hlp and .chm files. But as the both help systems have a lot of differences, to avoid mess, the program divides help projects into Win and HTML Help projects and doesn't allow to use what relates to another help system.

A help project contains not only parameters of the help file, but also all the topics with their text and properties, windows, contents, index and etc, except graphic files.

Help Development Studio supports segmented hyper graphics files which are used in help systems to define hotspots. Also the program allows to use them in HTML Help, automatically converting them to .gif files and writing the hotspot data to the html source.

Help Development Studio is the only help authoring tool which has a plug-in system. Additional plug-ins can add working with new file types, export and import for projects of other help authoring tools and etc.
 
Evaluation (time-limit)
Source: None
Price: $94.95