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# Qt Assistant Manual

[Next: Qt Assistant in More Detail]

This document introduces Qt Assistant, a tool for presenting on-line documentation. The document is divided into the following sections:

Table of contents:

- The One-Minute Guide to Using Qt Assistant
- Qt Assistant in More Detail
- Using Qt Assistant as a Custom Help Viewer

## The One-Minute Guide to Using Qt Assistant

Once you have installed Qt, Qt Assistant should be ready to run:

- On Windows, Qt Assistant is available as a menu option on the Qt menu.
- On Mac OS X, Qt Assistant is installed in the /Developer/Applications/Qt directory.
- On Unix/Linux, open a terminal, type `assistant` and press Enter.

When you start up Qt Assistant, you will be presented with a standard main window application, with a menu bar and toolbar. Below these, on the left hand side are navigation windows called Contents, Index and Bookmarks. On the right, taking up most of the space, is the Documentation window. By default, Qt Assistant loads the Qt reference documentation along with the manuals of other Qt tools, like Qt Designer or Qt Linguist.

Qt Assistant works in a similar way to a Web browser. If you click hyperlinks (cross-references), 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 have visited.

Although Qt Assistant can be used just like a Web browser to navigate through the documentation, Qt Assistant offers a powerful means of navigation that Web browsers do not provide. Qt Assistant uses an advanced full text search engine to index all the pages in each compressed help file so that you can search for particular words and phrases.

To perform an index search, click the Index tab on the Sidebar (or press Alt+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. To activate the full text search, either press (Alt+S) or click on the Search tab in the Documentation window. Then enter the term you're looking for and hit the Search button. All documents containing the specified term will then be listed in the list box below.