Mike
McBride
Jost
Schenck
2002-10-17
3.1
KDE
KControl
Help Index
Index

## Help Index

At the time of writing, for most installations of &kde; the entire search engine function in &khelpcenter; is disabled, and settings made in this &kcontrol; module will have no effect. We hope to have it back in a future release.

&kde; comes with a lot of documentation for applications and components. While it is possible to just browse the manuals until you find that piece of information you're looking for, this may be a very time-consuming task. To make this easier for you, &kde; offers fulltext search using a program called ht://dig. It works quite similar to search engines on the web, in fact some search engines you now might even use it. Just click on the Search tab in the &khelpcenter;, enter the word you are looking for, click Search and enjoy!

However, to make use of this feature, ht://dig has to be installed on your system and &kde; has to be configured to make us of it. This control module tries to help you doing the latter. If you haven't installed ht://dig and it wasn't shipped with your operating system you have to get ht://dig yourself. Have a look at the ht://dig homepage on how to download and install it.

When you first start, you are in display mode only. To modify your settings, click on Administrator Mode. If you are logged in as root, you will go straight to the change dialog. If not, &kde; will ask for a superuser password.

### Use

There are two important things to tell &kde; so it can make use of the fulltext search engine:

- where to find the ht://dig programs KDE uses for fulltext search

- where to search

#### The ht://dig Programs

There are three programs &kde; needs that come with ht://dig: `htdig`, `htsearch` and `htmerge`. For each program you have to provide the full path including the program name, for example: `/usr/bin/htdig`.

Where exactly these programs are installed depends on your operating system or your distribution. However, there are some good guesses you might want to try:

- `htdig` and `htmerge` are often found in `/usr/bin/` or in something like `/usr/local/www/htdig/bin/`.

- the `htsearch` command is often found in a sub directory called `cgi-bin`, for example `/usr/local/httpd/cgi-bin/`.

To find out where for example `htdig` is installed you can always type `whereis htdig` on the console. `whereis` will look for the specified command in the standard execution path directories. However, directories like `cgi-bin` are often not in the standard execution path.

#### Scope and Search Paths

In this section you can choose which help resources should be indexed, &ie; made available to the search engine.

In the Scope frame you can select some typical resources you want to be indexed, &ie; the &kde; help files, and the information offered by the `man` and `info` commands. Note that some of those may still be disabled, which means that support for them has not been added yet.

Maybe you have additional files you want to access using the &khelpcenter; fulltext search feature. For example, you might have an HTML reference installed in `/home/jdoe/docs/selfhtml`. By adding this path to the list of additional search paths you make this documentation available to &khelpcenter;'s fulltext search, too. Just click on the Add button and a file dialog will ask you for an additional search directory. Select `/home/jdoe/docs/selfhtml` and click OK. To remove an additional search path, just select it and click Delete.

Your changes to the scope and additional search paths will not take effect if you don't click on the Build index button.

### Section Author

This section written by: Jost Schenck jost@schenck.de

Minor update by: Mike McBride mpmcbride7@yahoo.com