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# Qt Designer

Qt Designer is Trolltech's tool for designing and building graphical user interfaces (GUIs) from Qt components. It allows you to design and build widgets and dialogs using on-screen forms. Components created with Qt Designer can also take advantage of Qt's signals and slots, and they can be previewed so that you can ensure that they will look and feel exactly as you intended.

To use Qt Designer with Qt Jambi (from the command line), you must ensure that the Qt Jambi language and custom widget plugins (located in `path/to/qt/jambi/designer-integration`) are compiled and installed, and that the directory in which they reside is added to the `QT_PLUGIN_PATH` environment variable. Note that this is automatically taken care of when using the Eclipse integration or the `designer.bat` and `designer.sh` files.

In addition to the many standard widgets found in the Qt Designer widget box, you can also add your own custom widgets and use them in your application. Currently you must do this manually, i.e., you must write an XML file explicitly specifying the class and group of the widgets (see `path/to/qt/jambi/plugins/qtjambi/qtjambi_examples.xml` for an example), and locate this file in a plugins directory like `path/to/qt/jambi/plugins/qtjambi`.

For more details on how to use Qt Designer, please see the Qt Designer Manual. This manual covers the fundamental steps that most users will take when creating graphical user interfaces with Qt Designer. Note that this manual is written for C++, e.g., the screenshots may differ from what you will see when running Qt Designer with Qt Jambi.

Screenshots of Qt Designer using Qt Jambi