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Re: Topic browser wishes [message #522 is a reply to message #521]

Sat, 07 January 2006 12:16

mirek
Messages: 13976
Registered: November 2005

Ultimate Member

Well, there of course is a lot of truth there...

However, whole thing begins with the QTF issue. In the beginning, we needed some rich-text format mainly to create reports of our database applications.

Well, real choices back then were:

- HTML
- RTF
- develop the format

Now:

HTML - problem is that HTML lacks complete typography, so it cannot be used there. It is also quite verbose and parsing is not trivial.

RTF - totally unusable if you are going to use it in code to create things (like programmatically create the table). Also, complete implementation is not trivial.

That left us (back then) with "develop the format".

Later we started to use the same format for e.g. dialog boxes (right now, almost any text in U++ GUI is QTF enabled - just prefix it with \1).

Even later we have created wordprocessor package and while it can in fact work with any format, QTF was the natural choice for the default one.

It is non-standard, but does its job very well.

QTF allows using Topic++ for creating application rich-text resources. Topic++ is multi-purpose tool; one of purposes is to create the help for the application or other document resources (like copyleft text in the About.. box of TheIDE). .tpp files can be directly compiled into the aplication, not external files are needed to ship with it (self-containment is one of goals we always tried to achieve with U++). See "reference/Topic" example.

As for HTML, the QTF->HTML conversion is trivial. The whole U++ website is generated by exporting .tpp files and all code documentation topics are there as well, so if you prefer HTML, just read the docs at the website.

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