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The 1 Minute Guide to Using Qt Assistant

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 is a navigation window called the Sidebar, and on the right, taking up most of the space, is the documentation window. By default, the Qt Reference Documentation's home page is shown in the documentation window.

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 intelligent algorithm to index all the pages in the documentation sets that it presents so that you can search for particular words and phrases. Qt Assistant also provides full text searching for finding specific words in documentation. Documents with the highest occurrences of the word you are looking for appear first and every occurrence of the word within the documentation is highlighted.

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 can be customized by creating profiles, a collection of documentation. Profiles can be created for your own use, or for an application you will distribute. With profiles, you can select which documentation you want the end user of your application to be able to view.

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