What happened to the glorious Qt documentation?

koahnig

At least with Qt 4.x documentation there was a functionality in the right panel allowing to search for specific classes.

At top in the right panel there has been and there still is the tag field. This has been confused with a class search for long and added a lot of stupid tags to the initial page. I think in the past Alexandra had to clean up once in a while.

However, further down was a lineedit where you could start to type the class and it brought up fast different choices. The actual version was selectable through a combobox. The functionality was still there about a week ago, but the return was a more general google search on devnet. You had to be careful to pick something from the correct version. Unfortunately the newest versions were not always on first page.

Now even this is gone.
There is an extension from Volker to Chrome. it was not happy about the transition to Qt5 either, but somewhat usable. It did not work anymore properly in the last week.

@JKSH Is your extension of chrome available somewhere?

andre

I totally agree: the docs on the website are really hard to navigate, even though the content is good. That is a pitty. Fortunately, you can still access the docs offline as well, and the search there works great. It only misses the doc notes...

SGaist

Agreed too, I wonder what can be done to make the situation better ? Is it a publication problem ? The new documentation format that causes trouble online ?

koahnig

It might be more an issue of the Nokia->Digia transition aftermath. Too many changes in responsibilities for devnet.
I wonder if there is somebody really responsible at all at the moment. Only occasionally that you see someone from Digia posting and if they do, they seem to do on own initiative.

JKSH

[quote author="JKSH" date="1386950044"]...the docs are now at www.qt-project.org/doc/qt-5/ Unfortunately, Google's algorithms see "site:qt-project.org/doc/qt-5/" and return results for qt-5.1 and qt-5.0 too. :(
[/quote]Found a workaround! Just need to explicitly tell Google to exclude qt-5.1 and qt-5.0. That's a pain to do by hand though.

[quote author="koahnig" date="1386952677"]At top in the right panel there has been and there still is the tag field. This has been confused with a class search for long and added a lot of stupid tags to the initial page. I think in the past Alexandra had to clean up once in a while. [/quote]So THAT'S why strage tags keep appearing on the index page! I've cleaned up that page a few times, thinking that it was the work of some trigger-happy tagger.

[quote author="koahnig" date="1386952677"]There is an extension from Volker to Chrome. it was not happy about the transition to Qt5 either, but somewhat usable. It did not work anymore properly in the last week.

@JKSH Is your extension of chrome available somewhere? [/quote][quote author="Andre" date="1386959849"]Fortunately, you can still access the docs offline as well, and the search there works great. It only misses the doc notes...[/quote]I found Volker's extension and tried it out. It looks like it can start working properly again if the qt-project.org API implementation was brought in line with the Qt 5.x released.

I polished mine and published it at https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/qt-doc-search/gfigdpnkjnilcielpnmfmdnnbloabjoh/ (I'll announce it the the rest of the forum later). It uses Google Web Search instead of the Qt Project API. It focuses on version-specific searching of the documentation, and can find doc notes if the notes were published for the selected version. It doesn't look for videos/FAQs/etc. however.

koahnig

Thanks for information on your extension.
I gave it a shot and it is helpful. Apparently, one should switch off Volker's extension first. At least it did not work right away and after switching off Volker's it worked.
The only I have noticed is that the auto-completion is not working, but that is clear, that was coming from the possible API access.

Anyway, very nice job!!!

In my opinion already worth to announce to all.

SGaist

Interesting and very useful indeed !

Any chance of a safari version (or maybe a possibility to contribute to it) ? Could be handy when using a VM :)

koahnig

Volker's tools has the "Mark as read" option which is handy. Therefore, I had started it again. As it looks, it does cooperate with JKSH's tool.

andre

Very handy tool, thanks!
I would like it Volkers tool would gain a "Mark page as read" option, but otherwise I'm all set... Thanks for this improvement of the online doc experience!

koahnig

You are right that would be the optimum.
However, as noted in my previous post. Apparently, you may run both tools in parallel.

JKSH

Thanks guys; I'm glad you find it useful :)

@SGaist: No plans for a Safari version, but I've released the source code (it's very small). Details at the "official announcement":http://qt-project.org/forums/viewthread/36199/.