Use of Qt documentation

troubalex

I was wondering if you use our documentation offline. Do you use Assistant? Print it? Prefer a book?

Or do you hardly ever work while being offline?

giesbert

During work, I use the help integration in MSDN as we work there with MSVS.

At home I normally use the inline help from QtCreator, as it is much easier to press F1 then going to the web and search.

For writing answers here, I use online help, as I sometimes need a link.

I nearly never use assistant.

And Books, I prefer for reading, but not as documentation source. There online help is much more useful.

vsorokin

I'm use assistant almost always, because It almost always opened on my Desktop. For adding links to documentation on DevNet I'm use "doc.qt.nokia.com":http://doc.qt.nokia.com/. Paper books I like reading in bed, and not use it as manual.

goetz

I mostly use Qt Assistant. Help mode of Qt Creator is handy sometimes, but having Creator on one screen and Assistant on the other one makes my live easier :-) No printing here - save the trees :-) And of course it works too in trains and the like, where it is likely that the internet connection drops from time to time.

I use the online help only for answering questions on DevNet in order to put some helpful links to the API docs. doc.qt.nokia.com is not quite useful for searching, in my opinion. It is far less comfortable than Assistant.

No Qt related books here. Like Gerolf, I prefer books for learning things (Introductions, presenting concepts and the like). Also, books tend to be a bit outdated once they are off press, IT things move to quick :-)

andre

Assistant is king here. If I use a dual screen setup, one screen is Assistant, the other Qt Creator. The online docs have degraded their usability to the point of being virtually useless. The search function doesn't work (comes up with irrelevant option only, irrevant options first, or nothing at all), the index layout for the class list sucks, and the difference between method descriptions is virtually non-existant so it becomes very hard to quickly scan for the the method you need.

It would be cool however, if you could get an online link from Assistant so you can easily refer people to the online docs for use this forum, IRC, the mailinglists or any of the other channels. I created "a Jira issue for that":http://bugreports.qt.nokia.com/browse/QTBUG-14417 a while ago. Votes are appreciated :-)

I have never printed Qt documentation. Books are nice for introductions into new technologies and the likes, but not for reference documentation.

tobias.hunger

Volker: You are aware that you can detach the help mode in Qt Creator? It is in Tools->Options->Help, set "On context help" to external and you have a separate help window.

goetz

[quote author="Tobias Hunger" date="1294764753"]Volker: You are aware that you can detach the help mode in Qt Creator? It is in Tools->Options->Help, set "On context help" to external and you have a separate help window.[/quote]

No, I wasn't. Thanks Tobias! Nonetheless I will continue using Assistant, as it has nice support for multiple tabs :-)

andre

Tobias: true, that's possible, but personally I like Qt Assistant's tabs more than I like QtCreators way of dealing with multiple pages and the way you need two mouseclicks to switch from the index to the contents or the bookmarks.

tobias.hunger

I just use Qt Creaotr with the default help setup and use F1 or "Ctrl-K" to open the locator and then type "? QSomething" to search what I need to know. No mouse required at all:-)

BlackDante

I'm too almost always use Qt Assistant :) and I like reading books, but only a paper books, I don't like books in pdf unlees pdf is opened in another monitor and I don't have to switch windows to reading and coding :)

DenisKormalev

For most part of time I'm using Assistant (as individual app or inside QtCreator). But sometimes while I'm google for some complicated problem I find myself somewhere inside online docs :)

ucomesdag

Never used Assistant, I always used the online docs until Qt Creator :)

Wolf P.

When working in Creator, I use the offline version. When googling the online docs.

BTW: If there were links to the online version embedded in the offline docs, this would help much.

goetz

Hm, I can't imagine how this could work properly. All the links in Assistant are for internal content...

Wolf P.

The link shoud explicitely marked as online, something "linkable URL to the online version of this page" - from my point of view, the offline docs are equivalent to the online ones, aren't they?

Zlatomir

Well i use mostly the online documentation, but i don't know how the build-in search works because i use google to search topics and then the documentation is pretty well organized (has links to inherited_by-inherits classes and other goodies)

Also another reason i use google to search for online documentation/content is that it finds the documentation site and, in most of the cases, it also can find discussions on QtDN or "qtcentre":http://www.qtcentre.org (i learned a lot about Qt from there).

Panke

I'm using the help in Qt Creator. When Konqueror is open and I want to know something about a particular class, qt <classname-here> does it as well.

sfilippidis

I mainly use the online documentation.

DenisKormalev

Oh, forgot also about krunner in kde. It is helpful sometimes.

parancibia

My first option is F1 on Qt Creator, for everything else Qt Assistant