The Sinclair QL Forum

desin wrote: Mon Feb 10, 2025 5:07 pm <>
2) Being able to display that on a QL platform.
IMHO no chance; SMSQE as it is has no means to display that huge amount of info properly
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I agree, but some people appear to think that they want it thus

RalfR wrote: Sun Feb 09, 2025 1:42 pm Jochen Merz's program is "Hyperhelp". I think Derrick has already started something there.

I use Hyperhelp in QD to display S*Basic syntax definitions, or anything else that is defined in the QD_HELP file, makes a nice programming environment, when the basic program in QD can be run or compiled the QD Thing.

I could never remember the DBAS commands syntax, Hyperhelp solves thus for me.

I have made Help files for: S*BASIC from online manual, DBAS, QMENU, EasyPTR, But lost track of where I am with the project.

It all depends if QD is required, but it needs the Extended Environment installed or SMSQ/E.

Lynx can be used to display Text HTML files, which allows linking to other files.

For documentation (read outside of the QL), PDF is the best option. It is a format that retails the look that the author wants. It does have hyperlinks if they are added. I know that it is not readily editable. All of the documents that I produce are originally done in Open/Libre Office. If needed, they are DTP'd with Scribus. In either case, the end result is a PDF file.

For documentation to be viewed on the QL, I've always thought that Dilwyn's "Viewer" is the way to go. As it says on the download site: "text file viewer v1.21 with limited graphics display and hyperlinking facilities, including a basic PIC file cropper". It is native QL, supports native QL graphics and has hyperlinks for navigation. I looked into this years ago, but did not have enough of a need (or audience) to produce a document in that format. I think it fits the bill of what is being looked for, unless there is a need for the file format to be cross platform.

If interested, I'd be willing to convert documentation for QLIRC, or some other program, to the Viewer file format and see how that works.

Tim Swenson

Ah! Thanks Tim!

That was what I had found previously, but couldn't locate it when researching this time around.

I'll try to find it again and see if it fits...

Be warned it uses very non-standard links. Personally, I don't think it would be up to the job.

I'll take a look at the browser project I started (and never finished) to see if the html/plain text parts of that can easily be extracted. It was capable of following HTML links, links to pictures (viewed using Photon/GPTK) and simple text tables, but not text markup like fonts, bold, italic etc. It worked by rendering fairly basic HTML down to plain text, building tables of links and images to allow them to be clicked on.

Might that be of interest?

Time as ever is the enemy, I'll have a quick look when I get home tonight to see what might be possible.

Good morning Dilwyn!

I was reading your comprehensive documentation on Viewer, once Tim put me on the right track and, I agree that it would require further work.

As I have vested interest (and a bit of time right now), I'd very happily collaborate or else pick up the challenge myself, assuming you'd be happy to share the original source (and there's no presumption here that you would/should.)

M.

Just to point out if people are discussing html viewers the QL already has one in the lynx port!

file://mdv1_document_htm should be valid I think!

Thanks for the reminder, yes.

I had doubts as to whether Lynx would run on a memory-expanded, but otherwise base-line QL and, of course there's the topic of images (which naturally, Lynx does not support by design.)

Still, an open discussion and one that seems to be garnering interest from several quarters...

There is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AmigaGuide which was used obviously on 68000 based machines very successfully!

The is nothing Amiga specific about the format, and has advantage there are PC viewers already!

What about, as a starting point, recipe mark-up languages? (or is it markup?).
https://ashn.dev/blog/2022-08-03-over-e ... guage.html
and
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RecipeML