A QB Online Help Online (QBOHO) for the 21.1st century - Printable Version +- Qbasicnews.com (http://qbasicnews.com/newforum) +-- Forum: QBasic (http://qbasicnews.com/newforum/forum-4.html) +--- Forum: QB Projects (http://qbasicnews.com/newforum/forum-12.html) +--- Thread: A QB Online Help Online (QBOHO) for the 21.1st century (/thread-10263.html) |
A QB Online Help Online (QBOHO) for the 21.1st century - Jofers - 09-11-2011 About a decade ago I was learning perl, and programming QBASIC, and so I took a stab at making this: http://qbasicnews.com/qboho It was basically a translation of the old QuickBasic 4.5 online help files to HTML. Â Wildcard agreed that it was ballin' and put it up for the world to see. At the time, it was a huge project for me. Â I tried so hard to find information about the Quickhelp format that I somehow contacted Ralph Walden of Microsoft about it. He actually replied by email, basically telling me that he lost the 1980s-era source code between his couch cushions and that I should find a girlfriend or something. Â What I ended up creating was a mix of regular expressions, IE's propietary DOS codepage support and horribly broken IE-only shtml that would make your face melt away Raiders-style if clicked "view source". Of course, since then I've acquired many a job and degree and my better half that normally keeps my stupid-project-starting in check is out of town. Â So I thought it would be a cool labor day project to revamp the old girl, and give her some friends: QuickBASIC 4.5 http://betterwebber.com/projects/qoho/qb45.php?article=qck!h.default QuickBASIC 7.1 http://betterwebber.com/projects/qoho/qb71.php?article=qck!h.default QBASIC 1.1 http://betterwebber.com/projects/qoho/qbasic.php?article=qbasic!h.pg1 DOS 6.22 http://betterwebber.com/projects/qoho/dos622.php?article=help!h.pg1 http://betterwebber.com/projects/qoho/dos622.php?article=help!cmdcontents This time around I wrote a full-on RTF parser, and HTML emitter that keeps track of tag order uses Unicode instead of hoping that you're just using a dos-based browser. Â It's in Python, while it's contradictory to write a QBASIC love letter in Python, it gets the job done. Â Gets the job done about as fast as a handicapped turtle climbing upstairs to pass a reform bill through congress, but it gets the job done. Source code: http://betterwebber.com/projects/qoho/qoho.zip I was hoping to use just straight-on UTF-8 encoding and the white-space: pre CSS tag, but IE8 hasn't really gotten it's act together with CSS 2.1 support and MySQL doesn't like non-BWM unicode pages so I'm stuck using HTML special tags for everything. Â But it's flexible enough to produce output however you like. If anyone is interested in hosting a copy on their website, including the proprietor of this fine website, all the machinery necessary is included in the source code. Â I'd be happy to provide support if there are issues. Re: A QB Online Help Online (QBOHO) for the 21.1st century - wildcard - 09-14-2011 Really nice work, I will put up the new version when I get a chance. Good to see you still around. |