2002-02-03
0.08.00

# &kde; Help System User Manual

## &kde; Help System

The &kde; help system is designed to make accessing the common &UNIX; help systems (man and info) simple, as well as the native &kde; documentation (&XML;).

All base &kde; applications come fully documented, thanks to the efforts of the Documentation team. If you would like to help, please write to the Documentation coordinator, Lauri Watts, at lauri@kde.org for information. No experience is required, just enthusiasm and patience.

If you would like to help translating &kde; documentation to your native language, the Translation coordinator is Thomas Diehl, thd@kde.org, and he would also welcome the help. More information, including the coordinators for each language team, can be found on the Internationalization web site, and in the Contact section of this document.

### Installation

&khelpcenter; is an integral part of the &kde; Base installation, and is installed with every copy of &kde;. It can be found in the kdebase package, and is available from the &kde-ftp;, or will be found in your operating system kdebase package.

## Invoking Help

&khelpcenter; can be called in several ways:

From the Help menu

  The most common will probably be from within an application. Choose Help Contents to open that application's help file, at the contents page.

From the K menu

  Choose the big K in your panel, and select Help to open &khelpcenter;, starting at the default welcome page.

From the panel

  By default, the &kicker; panel contains an icon to call &khelpcenter;. Again, the default welcome page is displayed.

From the command line

  &khelpcenter; may be started using a &URL; to display a file. &URL;s have been added for `info` and `man` pages also. You can use them as follows:

  An application help file

    `khelpcenter` `help:/kedit`

    Opens the &kedit; help file, at the contents page.

  A local &URL;

    `khelpcenter` `file:/ usr/local/src/qt/html/index.html`

  A Man page

    `khelpcenter` `man:/strcpy`

  An Info page

    `khelpcenter` `info:/gcc`

  Invoking `khelpcenter` with no parameters opens the default welcome page.

## The &khelpcenter; interface

The &khelpcenter; interface consists of two panes of information.

The toolbar and menus are explained further in .

Documents contain their own navigation tools, enabling you to move either sequentially through a document, using Next, Previous, and Home links, or to move around in a less structured manner, using hyperlinks.

Links can take you to other parts of the same document, or to a different document, and you can use the Back (Left pointing arrow) or Forward (Right pointing arrow) icons on the toolbar to move through the documents you have viewed in this session.

The two panes display the contents of the help system, and the help files themselves, on the left and right respectively.

### The Contents pane

The Contents pane in &khelpcenter; is displayed on the left hand side of the window. As you might expect, you can move the splitter bar, to make sure you can comfortably read the contents of either pane.

The Contents pane is further divided into two tabs, one containing a menu showing all the help information &khelpcenter; is aware of, and the other contains the &kde; glossary of terms.

#### The Contents Menu

The Contents contains the following default entries:

Introduction

  Welcome to &kde; - an introduction to the K Desktop Environment.

Introduction to &kde;

  The &kde; Quickstart guide. Contains a tour of the &kde; Interface and specific help and tips on how to work smarter with &kde;.

&kde; User's manual

  The &kde; User's manual is an in-depth exploration of &kde;, including installation, configuration and customization, and use.

Application manuals

  Native &kde; application documentation. All &kde; applications have documentation in &XML; format, which are converted to HTML when you view them. This section lists all the &kde; applications with a brief description and a link to the full application documentation.

  The applications are displayed in a tree structure that echoes the default structure of the K menu, making it easy to find the application you are looking for.

&UNIX; manual pages

  &UNIX; man pages are the traditional on-line documentation format for &UNIX; systems. Most programs on your system will have a man page. In addition, man pages exist for programming functions and file formats.

Browse info pages

  TeXinfo documentation is used by many &GNU; applications, including `gcc` (the C/C++ compiler), `emacs`, and many others.

Tutorials

  Short, task based or informational tutorials.

The &kde; FAQ

  Frequently asked questions about &kde;, and their answers.

&kde; on the web

  Links to &kde; on the web, both the official &kde; website, and other useful sites.

Contact Information

  Information on how to contact &kde; developers, and how to join the &kde; mailing lists.

Supporting &kde;

  How to help, and how to get involved.

### The Man and Info sections

Man pages are the standard &UNIX; manual pages, and have been in use for many years on many operating systems. They are extremely thorough, and are the very best place to get information about most &UNIX; commands and applications. When people say RTFM, the Manual they are referring to is very often the man page.

The man pages are not perfect. They tend to be in depth, but also extremely technical, often written by developers, and for developers. In some cases this makes them somewhat unfriendly, if not downright impossible for many users to understand. They are, however, the best source of solid information on most command line applications, and very often the only source.

If you've ever wondered what the number is when people write things like man(1) it means which section of the manual the item is in. You will see &khelpcenter; uses the numbers to divide the very many man pages into their own sections, making it easier for you to find the information you're looking for, if you're just browsing.

Also available are the Info pages, intended to be a replacement for the man pages. The maintainer of some applications no longer update the man pages, so if there is both a man page and an info page available, the info page is probably the most recent. Most applications have one or the other though. If the application you are looking for help on is a &GNU; utility, you will most likely find it has an info page, not a man page.

#### Navigating inside the Info pages

Info documents are arranged hierarchically with each page called a node. All info documents have a Top node, i.e. the opening page. You can return to the Top of an info document by pressing Top.

Prev & Next are used to move to the previous/next page at the current level of the hierarchy.

Clicking on a menu item within a document moves you to a lower level in the hierarchy. You may move up the hierarchy by pressing Up.

Man is treated similarly to info, with the section index being the Top node and each man page on the level below. Man entries are one page long.

### The &kde; glossary

The glossary provides a quick reference point, where you can look up the definitions of words that may be unfamiliar to you. These range from &kde; specific applications and technologies, through to general &UNIX; computing terms.

In the left hand pane you will see a tree view, with two choices: Alphabetically or By topic. Both contain the same entries, sorted differently, to allow you to quickly find the item of interest.

Navigate down the tree views to the left, and items you select will be displayed on the right.

### The menus and toolbar

&khelpcenter; has a very minimal interface, allowing you to concentrate on getting help rather than learning how to use the help browser.

The icons available to you in the toolbar are as follows:

#### Toolbar Icons

Back

  Go to the previous page you viewed.

Forward

  Go forward one page. This icon is only active if you have already used the Back icon.

Print

  Print the contents of the currently visible page.

Find

  Find a word or words within the currently visible page.

Increase Font

  Increase the size of the text in the viewer pane.

Decrease Font

  Decrease the size of the text in the viewer pane. This icon is only enabled if you have previously enlarged the text.

The menus contain the following entries:

File
  File Print...

    Print the contents of the currently visible page.

  Ctrl Q File Quit

    Close and exit &khelpcenter;

Edit
  Ctrl A Edit Select All

    Select all the text in the current page.

  Ctrl F Edit Find...

    Find a word or words in the currently visible page.

View
  View View Document Source

    View the HTML source of the page you are currently viewing.

  View Set Encoding

    Change the encoding of the current page. Normally, the default setting of Auto should be sufficient, but if you are having problems viewing pages written in languages other than English, you may need to choose a specific encoding in this menu.

Go Back

  Go back to the previous page you were viewing.

Go Forward

  If you have previously moved back with the back icon or menu entry, you can work your way forward again with this menu entry.

Go ...

  At the bottom of the Go menu, you will find a history list, of the last few pages you have looked at. Selecting one will take you directly back to that page.

## Credits and Licenses

&khelpcenter;

Originally developed by Matthias Elter me@kde.org

Current maintainer Matthias Hoelzer-Kluepfel mhk@kde.org

&underFDL; &underGPL;