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This document introduces Qt Assistant, a tool for presenting on-line documentation. The document is divided into the following sections:
Table of contents:
Under Windows, Qt Assistant is available as a menu option on the Qt menu. On Unix, run assistant from an xterm.
When you start up Qt Assistant, you will be presented with a standard main-window style application, with a menu bar and toolbar. Below these, on the left hand side are navigation windows called Index, Contents and Bookmarks, as well on the right, taking up most of the space, is the Documentation window. By default, the Qt Assistant documentation is shown in the Documentation window.
To be able to start using the Qt Assistant you have to setup one or more documentation sets. This could be done by navigating to the Edit|Preferences dialog and install a documentation set by either download or install from your local hard drive. See The Preferences Dialog for how to do this.
Qt Assistant works in a similar way to a web browser. If you click underlined text (which signifies a cross-reference), the Documentation window will present the relevant page. You can bookmark pages of particular interest and you can click the Previous and Next toolbar buttons to navigate within the pages you've visited.
Although Qt Assistant can be used just like a web browser to navigate through the Qt documentation set, Qt Assistant offers a powerful means of navigation that web browsers don't provide. Qt Assistant uses an advanced full text search engine to index all the pages in the documentation sets that it presents so that you can search for particular words and phrases.
To perform an index search, click the Index tab on the Sidebar (or click Ctrl+I). In the 'Look For' line edit enter a word, e.g. 'homedirpath'. As you type, words are found and highlighted in a list beneath the line edit. If the highlighted text matches what you're looking for, double click it, (or press Enter) and the Documentation window will display the relevant page. You rarely have to type in the whole word before Qt Assistant finds a match. Note that for some words there may be more than one possible page that is relevant.
Qt Assistant also provides full text searching for finding specific words in the documentation. Documents with the highest occurrences of the word that you are looking for appear first, and every occurrence of the word within the documentation is highlighted.
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The toolwindows provide four ways of navigating documentation:
If you want the Documentation window to use as much space as possible, you can easily group, move or hide the toolwindows. To group the windows drag one on the other and release the mouse. If one or all toolwindows are not shown, press Ctrl+T, Ctrl+I or Ctrl+O to show the individual window.
The toolwindows are dock windows, so you can drag them to the top, left, right or bottom of Qt Assistant's window, or you can drag it outside Qt Assistant to float it.
The Documentation window offers a feature for viewing documentation by enabling you to create tabs for each documentation page that you view. Click the Add Tab button and a new tab will appear with the page name as the tab's caption. This makes it convenient to switch between pages when you are working with different documentation. You can delete a tab by clicking the Close Tab button located on the right side of the Documentation window.
The toolbar provides fast access to the most common actions.
The address toolbar will be the fast way to enter a specific url for a documentation file.
This dialog is platform-specific. It gives access to various printer options and can be used to print the current page.
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The Filters page offers a feature for setting documentation filters for each documentation set that is installed. Click the Add button to add new filter and specify the attributes on what documentation set the filter should work. You can delete a filter by clicking the Remove button.
The Documentation page will provide you a way to install and remove documentation sets. Click the Install button and choose if you would like to install your set from the local hard drive by specifing a path or if you would like to download the set from the Help Server. To delete a documentation set select a documentation in the list and click Remove.
This Control is used to find text in the current page. Enter the text you want to find in the Find line edit. If you check the 'Whole words only' checkbox, the search will only consider whole words, i.e. if you search for 'spin' with this checkbox checked it will not match 'spinbox', but will match 'spin'. If you check the 'Case sensitive' check box then, for example, 'spin' will match 'spin' but not 'Spin'. You can search Forward or Backward from your current position in the page by clicking one of the Direction radio buttons. Click the Find button to search (or search again), and click the Close button to finish.
Qt Assistant provides a powerful full text search engine. To search for certain words or text, click the 'Search' tab in the Documentation window. Then enter the text you want to look for and press Enter or click Search. The search is not case sensitive, so Foo, fOo and FOO are all treated as the same. The following are examples of common search patterns:
It is also possible to use the Advanced search to get more flexibility. You can specify some words so that hits containing these are excluded from the result or search for an exact phrase of words. Search for similar words will look like this:
All options can be combined to enhance your search options.
The list of documents found is ordered according to the number of occurrences of the search text they contain, therefore those with the highest number of occurrences appearing first. Simply click any document in the list to display it in the document window.
If the documentation has changed, i.e. if documents have been added or removed, Qt Assistant will reindex.
Qt Assistant can be customized by using different command line options passed on startup. In addition, Qt Assistant introduces also some special help collection tags, which enables its properties to change, for example the default startup page, the about dialog text or the general look.
Note that all Qt Assistant settings are stored in the used help collection file and Qt Assistant operates entirely on this collection. That means while changing or removing the current help collection, Qt Assistant will behave totally different according to the used collection file and it's stored settings.
Different help collections can be shown by simply passing the help collection path to Qt Assistant. For example:
1: > assistant -collectionFile file
Other available options the can be passed on the command line.
Help collection tags enable Qt Assistant to act as a specialized help tool for displaying documentation for any application. With help of these tags, the documentation writer can change properties such as Qt Assistant's title, application icons, 'about' dialog text and others. Qt Assistant can be customized by specifying the following tags:
An example of a help collection file that uses all the available tags is shown below:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<QHelpCollectionProject version="1.0">
<assistant>
<title>My Application Help</title>
<startPage>qthelp://mycompany.com.1_0_0/doc/index.html</startPage>
<currentFilter>myfilter</currentFilter>
<applicationIcon>application.png</applicationIcon>
<enableFilterFunctionality>false</enableFilterFunctionality>
<enableDocumentationManager>false</enableDocumentationManager>
<enableAddressBar visible="true">true</enableAddressBar>
<aboutMenuText>
<text>About My Application</text>
<text language="de">ÃÂber meine Applikation...</text>
</aboutMenuText>
<aboutDialog>
<file>about.txt</file>
<file language="de">ueber.txt</file>
<icon>about.png</icon>
</aboutDialog>
</assistant>
<docFiles>
<generate>
<file>
<input>myapplication.qhp</input>
<output>myapplication.qch</output>
</file>
</generate>
<register>
<file>myapplication.qch</file>
</register>
</docFiles>
</QHelpCollectionProject>
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