Slick Help

I have added more features to the markdown parser I wrote the other day. I added tables, and the ability to set column widths. So it isn't really a standard Markdown. The tables feature ended up working better than I thought it was going to.

I added the ability to link to other topics within the help system. This task was actually pretty tricky. Every time a help system is compiled the topics get new GUIDs, so I couldn't rely on those - and even if I could, how would the author know what the GUIDs are? I decided to add an alias property to the topics in the DB. This property can be used to link to other topics - and - display a 'back' link if a second alias is in the markdown. It worked smoothly.

Next I tackled images. I created two types of image definitions, one that uses a relative path to an Images directory, and the other a full URL. It is limited, but the idea of Markdown is to quickly define a readable document, formatting syntax should be fairly unobtrusive. I may allow for centered or text wrapped images though. It would be good to at least allow that much formatting.

I'm surprised at how fun and powerful this help engine is, now that I added markdown ability to the authoring of topics!