How to force Qt Assistant use Qt WebKit or Qt WebEngine if it possible

Maxim Skvortsov

I am using Qt Assistant to show my custom help. I have Qt 5.7 installed. And there are 2 way to run assistant: from usr/bin and from Qt 5.7 bin directory. In 1st case assitant's "About" says they browser is Qt WebKit 5.6.1 in 2nd case the browser is QTextBrowser. But it is for me. I heard that Qt WebKit was removed. Was it in 5.7? And is there any other browser for assistant now(5.7-5.11)? The reason why i want to use Qt WebKit or WebEngine is that i am converting my help files from Markdown to HTML5 using pandoc with css. QTextBrowser just ignoring my css :(

SGaist

Hi,

QtWebkit was deprecated in 5.6 and removed in 5.7 however you can still build it. Note that there's @Konstantin-Tokarev reboot that will be of interest.

In any case, you will have to rebuild Designer yourself to use QtWebkit.

vanegas

@SGaist What is the current status of Qt Assistant's browser?

I opened Qt assistant in Qt 5.13 and it is still using QTextBrowser and not providing HTML5 support for my documentation.

Is there an update in Qt 5.14 or Qt 5.15? I would expect Qt WebEngine to be enabled in Qt Assistant by now.

Thank you for sharing your Qt knowledge. :)

SGaist

AFAIK, Assistant is pre-built using QTextBrowser so it's lighter weight.

~~If you want to use webengine as backend you need to rebuild assistant yourself and ensure you have the QtWebEngine module available.~~

I misread the .pro file, the detection is done on the webkitwidgets module. So no support currently for webengine.

Bonnie

@vanegas
From the source (qttools/src/assistant/assistant/assistant.pro) of 5.15.0

qtHaveModule(webkitwidgets):!contains(QT_CONFIG, static) {
    BROWSER = qtwebkit
} else {
    BROWSER = qtextbrowser
}

You can see that the assistant still doesn't support WebEngine.

SGaist

@Bonnie said in How to force Qt Assistant use Qt WebKit or Qt WebEngine if it possible:

@vanegas
From the source (qttools/src/assistant/assistant/assistant.pro) of 5.15.0
qtHaveModule(webkitwidgets):!contains(QT_CONFIG, static) {
    BROWSER = qtwebkit
} else {
    BROWSER = qtextbrowser
}
You can see that the assistant still doesn't support WebEngine.

Right ! I misread the .pro file.