At 09:38 AM 7/05/2004 -0400, you wrote:

>I have used the help files that come with IB Objects as well as the
>On-line help. The reason I go to the online help is that a number of
>subjects in the help that comes with the product has nothing more than a
>one-line description about a particular component. Often times this type
>of help is not very useful. I have gone to the online help in hopes that
>there might be more information, but the online help has no search
>mechanism build in, so it is very difficult to find what you are looking for.
>
>Since I have paid several hundred dollars (US) for this product it would
>be reasonable to assume that a professional documentation package would be
>available.
>
>Are there any plans to upgrade the existing documentation? I often find
>myself frustrated and dependent on this forum. As it stands there are
>numerous questions I have never had fully answered.

OK, first thing to realise is that the IBO help doesn't document anything
that's inherited directly from Delphi. In many cases (though not all) the
one-liners occur just because the component publishes the inherited
property unchanged.

The next thing is that this help is built with Time2Help, which uses
Delphi's own object hierarchy for the help file structure. For about a
year, I've been building the help with the inherited IBO properties
duplicated throughout the hierarchies, because people weren't using the
hierarchy button. If you have an older helpfile, you might like to get one
of the more recent ones.

The download help file is built to show you only public and published
properties and methods. This was to try to keep the size of the help
down. If you want a "component developer's version" I can link you to
it. It's much larger, but includes the doc for the protect props and methods.

Whe IBO4 came out we shifted a lot of the stuff out into Tech Info sheets,
again to reduce the size but also to consolidate it into a more useful
form. It was necessary at Delphi 5 and 6, because the IBO helpfile was so
big, it "blew out" the Delphi help system. About D7, I don't know, as I
have only D7 PE. Something we could perhaps do with those TI sheets is put
them all into one Adobe document and index it.

We're due for another build of the helpfile which, with Jason's permission,
I'll do after Fulda. Jason writes it as he goes along so new stuff gets
picked up when the next help build is done.

The online FAQ is keyword-searchable - do you ever use it?

Helen