Bloggin’ it up

Finally, Qt (in 4.4) has got a new documentation viewer and library. While playing around with it and reading the documentation to try to get the Qt apidocs working, I realised that it wouldn’t be too hard to get the kdelibs (and other modules’) documentation loading in it. After a bit of playing around with KDE’s doxygen scripts, I got something looking a bit like this:

Now, I know it’s not the prettiest layout but it’s early days yet. To try it out yourself, download the patch from http://milliams.com/uploads/qhelpkdelibs.diff.tar.bz2 and apply it to your base kdelibs directory. Then execute the following commands (of course, you need a Qt 4.4 snapshot):

cd doc/api
./doxygen-qhelp.sh ../../
cd kdelibs-apidocs
qcollectiongenerator kdelibs.qhcp -o kdelibs.qhc

Both the doxygen-qhelp.sh and qcollectiongenerator commands will take quite a while to do their stuff, so be patient. You’ll probably also get a load of warnings from qcollectiongenerator since the file list was generated from an oldish checkout. Once the kdelibs.qch file has been created (it will be about 90 MB), open the assistant from Qt 4.4, go to “Edit → Preferences… → Documentation” then “Add → From local file system…” and select the kdelibs.qch file from the doc/api/kdelibs-apidocs directory. You may have to close and open assistant to get the collection to show up in the left-hand menu. But once it is, searching and the rest should mostly work.

Now, the file list was generated by a script but all the rest was hand-written. Ideally, all these files should be fully automated, perhaps by extracting some of the information from the .tag files. Once the system is made better and more automated, perhaps this sort of thing should be available for download from api.kde.org to replace (or augument) the current, static HTML download. I’ll look to getting the rest of the modules working (should be quite easy now) and then I’ll try to get some application handbook docbook files loading in.