qt5base-lts/doc
Paul Wicking 2f35879649 Doc: Add \examplecategory macro
Examples in Qt's codebase must be tagged with specific categories
such that Qt Creator can group them thematically. This can be done
by way of using the `\meta category` construct in QDoc.

At the same time, we want the generated documentation to group the
examples by the same logic as in Qt Creator. Hence, QDoc was modified
to implicitly add a group for each category that is used in a
`meta category` invocation.

By design, QDoc exposes ways to list groups to users, but no way to list
the \meta command invocations. Letting QDoc implicitly add a group for
categories passed to the \meta command as a side-effect, therefore breaks
with the principle of least surprise and the single responsibility
principle.

An alternative solution makes use of QDoc's existing support for code
generation through macros. This patch introduces the macro
`\examplecategory` as a global macro throughout Qt to achieve the same
effect as the aforementioned change to QDoc. The macro takes an argument
enclosed in curly braces. This argument is the example category name. It's
used as meta information in the manifest files consumed by Qt Creator, and
added as the category group name for the QDoc side at the same time.

The introduction of this macro allows reverting the change to QDoc
itself, while maintaining feature parity for both Qt Creator and the
generated content.

Task-number: QTBUG-111891
Pick-to: 6.5
Change-Id: I311b98168253b45ac456ff3c1824db3d835191a9
Reviewed-by: Luca Di Sera <luca.disera@qt.io>
2023-04-03 21:37:12 +02:00
..
config Doc: fix example repo URL 2022-09-01 12:23:55 +08:00
global Doc: Add \examplecategory macro 2023-04-03 21:37:12 +02:00
src Remove the 'sdi' example 2023-03-02 12:08:11 +01:00
CMakeLists.txt Change the license of all CMakeLists.txt and *.cmake files to BSD 2022-08-23 23:58:42 +02:00
README

Qt 5 Documentation
==================

New in Qt 5.0, each module has its own documentation package. The documentation
resides in the module sources as well as the configuration files needed to build
the module documentation. The main Qt 5.0 Reference Documentation resides in the
qtdoc repository.

There are two ways to build Qt documentation:
* run "make docs" in qt5/ or in the repositories
* run the QDoc tool for each module


Running "make docs"
===================

To build the documentation using Makefiles, qtbase needs to be compiled and
installed.

Running qmake will create make targets to build the documentation:
* html_docs - builds only the HTML documentation
* qch_docs - packages the HTML documentation into QCH files for Qt Creator and
             Qt Assistant.
* docs - runs html_docs and qch_docs

Note: qch_docs needs qhelpgenerator to package the documentation. qhelpgenerator
is in the qttools repository.

These make targets use qmake's QT_INSTALL_DOCS variable as the output directory.
Running "qmake -query" will list the directory set to QT_INSTALL_DOCS.

To create all of the modules' documentation, run "make docs" in the
qt5 directory:
    $> make docs            # builds the bundled modules' documentation

It is also possible to build only a small subset of the documentation by using
make:
    $> cd qtbase
    $> make docs            # builds the documentation for modules in qtbase

    $> cd qtbase/src/sql
    $> make docs            # builds only the Qt SQL documentation


Running QDoc
============

QDoc is the tool for generating Qt documentation and is located in qtbase.
The simplest way to compile QDoc is to compile qtbase or only the tools in
qtbase.

    $> cd qtbase/src
    $> make sub-tools # compiles QDoc

Each module has a QDoc configuration file (.qdocconf). To build a module's
documentation, run the "qdoc" binary and pass the qdocconf file as a parameter.
A mandatory "outputdir" must be specified.

    $> qdoc doc/config/qtdoc.qdocconf -outputdir html

    Note that QDoc will delete the contents of the "html" output directory.

Packaging the Documentation
===========================

To package the documentation, the HTML files must be compiled
into a QCH file (.qch).

Required binaries:
    * assistant - found in qttools
    * qhelpgenerator - found in qttools

To compile the qch file for each module, first enter the output directory that
contains the .qhp file and generate the QCH file.

    $> cd qtbase/doc/qtdoc              #the default path for QT_INSTALL_DOCS for qtdoc
    $> qhelpgenerator qtdoc.qhp         #creates the QCH file called qtdoc.qch

The QCH file can then be loaded in Qt Assistant or Qt Creator. For Qt Assistant,
the QCH file can be registered to automatically load it.

    $> assistant -register qtdoc.qch    #to automatically load the documentation


Global Files
============

The qtbase/doc/global directory contains various files used by the modules to
build the documentation. These include macros, stylesheets, and images for
displaying documentation.

To include these files in a qdocconf, add the following to a qdocconf file:

    include($QT_INSTALL_DOCS/global/qt-module-defaults.qdocconf)


Documentation Structure
=======================
For a typical module, the documentation will reside in the source directory.
The examples and the example documentation are in the "examples" directory.

    qtbase/src/sql/doc/src              #Qt SQL's documentation
    qtbase/examples/sql                 #Qt SQL's examples

More Information
================

For more information about Qt 5's documentation, refer to the Qt Project wiki:
http://wiki.qt.io/Qt5DocumentationProject