Developing Qt Documentation

Qt documentation is written by a small global team of technical writers and developers working at Digia Plc, 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 expertize in those areas are typically co-located with those developers. For example, much of the documentation for Qt Creator and the Qt SDK is written in Berlin.

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

Contributing to Qt Documentation

Prerequisites

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.

QDoc and Style Guidelines

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.

• QDoc Manual

To get started, the QDoc Guide explains how QDoc generates documentation from QDoc comments.

QDoc Regression Testing

• QDocRegressionTesting

Writing Guidelines

• QtWritingGuidelines

Submitting a Patch

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

Approvers and Editors

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

• Leena Miettinen (Qt Creator documentation maintainer)
• Jerome Pasion
• Venugopal Shivashankar
• Martin Smith
• Nico Vertriest
• Topi Reinio (Documentation maintainer)
• Sze Howe Koh

For language reviews (particularly for non-native English speakers) only, you may also add any of the following individuals:

• Mitch Curtis
• Lorn Potter

For documentation help, join the #qt-documentation channel in Freenode.

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.

The latest documentation snapshots are at doc-snapshots.qt.io

Qt 5 Documentation

The organization and development of Qt 5 documentation is covered in another wiki: Qt5DocumentationProject

Documentation Structure

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