Extensible markup supported in VI documentation and help files. Locally hosting vi.lib help docs.

[otto__]

Integrating markdown, asciidoc, whatever. This would help eliminate a step for most of us lowly third parties making docs for our software. A built-in browser would be nice, or just opening the doc straight away in a compatible viewer would be fine.

Loading the NI website's page for the help doc takes ages. This could also be a way to locally host vi docs and have a built-in browser-like display of help files.

I frequently find the context help information not detailed enough and get frustrated waiting for the website to load. If it was a one-stop shop markup-based doc, that's meaningful time saved.

[fefepeto_kb]

Similar ideas came up quite a few times in the past. Just after a quick search here are a few examples which all aim to improve the context help edit and display features:

More HTML tags in VI Description - NI Community which was determined to be a duplicate of:

Improve text editing in the VI Properties Documentation Window. - NI Community

Text formatting in VI description dialog - NI Community

VI documentation Upgrade - NI Community

And also, a topic where the display could be addressed by markup language:

Option for compact data type description in Context Help - NI Community

I think it would be useful, on the other hand I cannot estimate the impact on the IDE performance, so I think we would like to hear a bit more about this from the LabVIEW dev team.

[otto__]

Thanks for digging up those similar requests. I'm of the opinion that if the tool were present and easy to use (e.g. just markdown), it would be a bonus to people writing rich context help. Plus I have visions of a much richer context help display, but that's not this thread.

Fully acknowledged that this is butting up against the IDE, and while similar to prior submissions this is maybe a more general request and remains on my wish list. I could make a similar request that we get a tabbed window IDE at some point for most of those non-user facing .vi's (hi hello NXG), but I won't hold my breath.

When I can easily add plantUML or asciidocs to VSCode, I find myself grasping for something similar from LabVIEW but living with the current reality. I'm okay being told to document my code with a different tool, but still see this as an opportunity for future versions of LV.

[wiebe@CARYA]

>get a tabbed window IDE at some point for most of those non-user facing .vi's (hi hello NXG), but I won't hold my breath.

We got a single window LV IDE in LV8.0. Not many liked it and it was turn off by default in the release. Not sure if the code is still in current versions.

It was my least favorite NXG feature. At least make it optional.