Lazarus Offline Documentation

With this article you will know to integrate existing HTML documentation about Run-Time Library (RTL) , Free Component Library (FCL) and Lazarus Component Library (LCL) into Lazarus.

First that at all download the file ftp: // ftp.freepascal.org/pub/fpc/dist/docs-2.2.2/doc-html.zip and descompress in the directory $LAZARUS_DIR/docs/offline that before we have created.

To this documentation lacks the relating one to the LCL with what we have several options to obtain it.

If you are a Linux user (I imagine that for MacOS also it serves) you can execute the script update_lcl_html.sh that is in $LAZARUS_DIR/docs/html. When the process finishes have created the directory lcl with the documentation that we will move to $LAZARUS_DIR/docs/offline.

If you are a Windows user (or you want to keep your HTML documentation updated) you can download the file ftp: // ftp.freepascal.org/pub/lazarus/fpc-lazarus-doc-html-20080920.tar.bz2 that comes with the documentation of the RTL, FCL and LCL. Look that it is updated every day, with what tomorrow already the link will not serve and you must enter by hand ftp: // ftp.freepascal.org/pub/lazarus/ and download correspondent fpc-lazarus-doc-html-*.tar.bz2 ;)

Well, in this point already we have the whole structure with the documentation offline in our computer, now only Lazarus is necessary to configure.

For it we go to the menu "Help > Configure Help". In the tab "General" we put in the "FPC Doc HTML Path" the directory $LAZARUS_DIR/docs/offline and in the tab "Database", we select RTLUnits and in BaseURL we put the directory $LAZARUS_DIR/docs/offline/rtl and like that with FCLUnits and LCLUnits with corresponding directories.

Now to verify that we have done it well we go to the source editor, select TForm (for example) we press F1 and voilà, local help is opened in our browser:)