Category:Developing Qt::Documentation: Difference between revisions

Qt documentation is written by a small global team of technical writers and developers working at The Qt Company, complemented by a number of contributors from other parts of the Qt community. Since different parts of Qt are developed in different locations, writers with expertise in a particular area are typically co-located with the developers of that area.

Qt's technical writers are also responsible for many of the examples provided with Qt and related projects. However, the demonstrations provided with these projects are typically created by developers, and these are often not intended to be documented or supported by the Qt documentation team.

The documents in this category aim to cover the many aspects of Qt documentation creation, including the process we use to accept contributions from other community members.

Documentation Snapshots

Currently, Qt documentation is hosted at three sites:

• doc.qt.io: contains official releases
• snapshots: contains unreleased documentation from the Codereview repositories
• archives: contains legacy documentation

Setting Up for Documentation Writing

Qt Project follows a 'docs as code' approach. That is, the documentation is maintained in the form of markup (qdoc), and is maintained alongside the source code of the Qt modules and tools it is describing, using the same version control system and a similar contribution process.

Here are the basic steps to help you get started contributing to the Qt documentation:

1. Familiarize yourself with the development process. In particular, the process of contributing code.
2. Create a Jira account and set up your Gerrit environment.
3. Download the Qt sources.
4. Read the page regarding code reviews.
5. Start by contributing small fixes. Don't hesitate to ask for help!

Qt's documentation tool is QDoc. QDoc scans through the source and generates html pages regarding the classes, enums, QML types, and other parts of the reference documentation. It is possible to create a documentation set for Qt modules and tools.

• QDoc Manual
• QDocRegressionTesting - how to test the Qt documentation set
• Vale is a recommended tool for documentation. See Setting Up Vale.

Writing Guidelines

Qt documentation adheres to the Microsoft Style Guide. The documentation follows American English grammar and spelling.

Language Guidelines

The Language Guidelines page provides further information about idioms and usage, punctuation and grammar issues.

API Documentation

We document Qt APIs in the sources and use QDoc to generate the HTML for the doc.qt.io site and an offline version for Qt Creator. C++ and QML documentation follow a similar style, but there are differences. See the following pages for documenting APIs.

• C++ Documentation Style
• QML Documentation Style

For designing APIs, visit the following pages

• API Design Principles

Examples

Visit the following pages for creating and documenting examples.

• Examples and Tutorials Style
• Integrating Examples
• Qt6/Example-Guideline

Category:Writing Guidelines

• Qt Writing Guidelines

Submitting a Patch and Help with Editing

The process for submitting a documentation patch is the same as for source code. For more information, read the Code Reviews page.

Tip: Use git grep to find the file and line where existing documentation is maintained.

For language reviews, documentation reviews, and technical reviews, you may add any of the relevant maintainers as reviewers as well as the following individuals:

Main Qt Reference Documentation and QDoc changes:

• Andreas Eliasson
• Jerome Pasion
• Luca Di Sera
• Paul Wicking
• Topi Reiniö (QDoc maintainer)
• Venugopal Shivashankar

Qt Tools (Qt Creator, Qt Assistant, and others)

• Leena Miettinen (Qt Creator documentation maintainer)

Qt Products

• Esa Törmänen (Qt for MCU documentation)
• Inkamari Harjula (Boot2Qt documentation)
• Jaishree Vyas (Qt Foundations)
• Johanna Vanhatapio (Qt Design Studio documentation)
• Mats Honkamaa (Qt Design Studio documentation)
• Nicholas Bennet (Platform documentation)
• Pranta Dastider (Qt Design Studio documentation)
• Teea Põldsam (Qt Design Studio and Qt License Server documentation)
• Sze Howe Koh

Also, the following individuals are developers that can help with English reviews:

• Mitch Curtis
• Lorn Potter
• Edward Welbourne

Filing Documentation Issues

Anybody with a Jira account may file a bug. For documentation bugs, please file the issue and enter Documentation AND the relevant library or module in the Component field. The process of fixing code bugs also apply to documentation issues.

Before filing an issue, please check that it has not already been fixed in a later version of the documentation. The latest documentation snapshots are at doc-snapshots.qt.io

Modular Qt Documentation

The organization and development of modular Qt documentation is covered in another wiki: Qt5DocumentationProject

Documentation Structure

The Qt Documentation Structure page provides information about the structure of the documentation.