<para>The &kde; help system is designed to make accessing the common &UNIX; help systems (<application>man</application> and <application>info</application>) simple, as well as the native &kde; documentation (&XML;). </para>
<para>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 <email>lauri@kde.org</email> for information. No experience is required, just enthusiasm and patience. </para>
<para>If you would like to help translating &kde; documentation to your native language, the Translation coordinator is Thomas Diehl, <email>thd@kde.org</email>, and he would also welcome the help. More information, including the coordinators for each language team, can be found on the <ulink url="http://i18n.kde.org">Internationalisation web site</ulink>, and in the <link linkend="contact">Contact</link> section of this document. </para>
<para>&khelpcenter; is an integral part of the &kde; Base installation, and is installed with every copy of &kde;. It can be found in the tdebase package, and is available from the &kde-ftp;, or will be found in your operating system tdebase package. </para>
<para>&khelpcenter; can be called in several ways: </para>
<variablelist>
<varlistentry>
<term>From the <guimenu>Help</guimenu> menu</term>
<listitem>
<para>The most common will probably be from within an application. Choose <menuchoice><guimenu>Help</guimenu> <guimenuitem>Contents</guimenuitem></menuchoice> to open that application's help file, at the contents page. </para>
<para>Choose the big <guiicon>K</guiicon> in your panel, and select <guimenuitem>Help</guimenuitem> to open &khelpcenter;, starting at the default welcome page. </para>
<para>&khelpcenter; may be started using a &URL; to display a file. &URL;s have been added for <command>info</command> and <command>man</command> pages also. You can use them as follows: </para>
<para>The &khelpcenter; interface consists of two panes of information. </para>
<para>The toolbar and menus are explained further in <xref linkend="menu-and-toolbar-ref"/>. </para>
<para>Documents contain their own navigation tools, enabling you to move either sequentially through a document, using <guilabel>Next</guilabel>, <guilabel>Previous</guilabel>, and <guilabel>Home</guilabel> links, or to move around in a less structured manner, using hyperlinks. </para>
<para>Links can take you to other parts of the same document, or to a different document, and you can use the <guiicon>Back</guiicon> (Left pointing arrow) or <guiicon>Forward</guiicon> (Right pointing arrow) icons on the toolbar to move through the documents you have viewed in this session. </para>
<para>The two panes display the contents of the help system, and the help files themselves, on the left and right respectively. </para>
<para>The <guilabel>Contents</guilabel> 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. </para>
<para>The <guilabel>Contents</guilabel> pane is further divided into two tabs, one containing a <link linkend="contents-menu">menu</link> showing all the help information &khelpcenter; is aware of, and the other contains the &kde; <link linkend="kde-glossary">glossary</link> of terms. </para>
<para>Native &kde; application documentation. All &kde; applications have documentation in &XML; format, which are converted to <acronym>HTML</acronym> when you view them. This section lists all the &kde; applications with a brief description and a link to the full application documentation. </para>
<para>The applications are displayed in a tree structure that echoes the default structure of the <guimenu>K</guimenu> menu, making it easy to find the application you are looking for. </para>
<para>&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. </para>
<para>TeXinfo documentation is used by many &GNU; applications, including <command>gcc</command> (the C/C++ compiler), <command>emacs</command>, and many others. </para>
<para>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 <quote>RTFM</quote>, the Manual they are referring to is very often the man page.</para>
<para>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.</para>
<para>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.</para>
<para>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.</para>
<title>Navigating inside the <application>Info</application> pages</title>
<para>Info documents are arranged hierarchically with each page called a node. All info documents have a <guilabel>Top</guilabel> node, &ie; the opening page. You can return to the <guilabel>Top</guilabel> of an info document by pressing <guilabel>Top</guilabel>.</para>
<para><guibutton>Prev</guibutton> & <guibutton>Next</guibutton> are used to move to the previous/next page at the current level of the hierarchy.</para>
<para>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 <guibutton>Up</guibutton>.</para>
<para>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.</para>
<para>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. </para>
<para>In the left hand pane you will see a tree view, with two choices: <guilabel>Alphabetically</guilabel> or <guilabel>By topic</guilabel>. Both contain the same entries, sorted differently, to allow you to quickly find the item of interest. </para>
<para>&khelpcenter; has a very minimal interface, allowing you to concentrate on getting help rather than learning how to use the help browser. </para>
<para>Change the encoding of the current page. Normally, the default setting of <guimenuitem>Auto</guimenuitem> 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. </para>
<para>At the bottom of the <guimenu>Go</guimenu> 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.</para>
