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Internal Task - Help Documentation Generator

Concurrent with the pending DK11 release, TatukGIS is switching to a new, internally developed, on-line help system. Although there are some good party help systems on the market, some are platform specific, others are discontinued. No available solution met our criteria. Therefore, we felt we had no choice but to develop our own help documentation generator.

Our criteria for the new help system included the following:

1. Ability to parse Pascal with all necessary variants: Delphi, Oxygene (Net), Oxygene (Java).
2. Ability to produce proper syntax teaser for Delphi, Oxygene, C++ Builder, C#, VB, Java.
3. Use of XMLDoc to store basic content without polluting source code with long content, like remarks or samples.
4. Ability to serve samples for more then one language.
5. Ability to easily edit remarks and samples, preferably using the Web.
6. Proper resolving type aliasing for platforms that do not support such features.

The TatukGIS solution parses a XMLDoc from source code and produces proper syntax for each supported language. Results are presented in a DokuWiki which stores remarks and samples and allows easy, concurrent editing of additional content. Then the content is produced to a final help system accessible by users. So far we have published a DocuWiki based system, but compiled help output is planned. The process is blazing fast - a whole generation required less than one minute to process.

Proper syntax resolving.