&tde-release-date; &tde-release-version; The &tde; help system is designed to make accessing the common &UNIX; help systems (man and info) simple, as well as the native &tde; documentation (&XML;). All base &tde; applications come fully documented, thanks to the efforts of many people. If you would like to help, please contact members of the Trinity development team at devels@trinitydesktop.org for information. Experience is not required, just enthusiasm and patience. If you would like to help translate &tde; documentation to your native language,please contact members of the Trinity development team at devels@trinitydesktop.org for information. &khelpcenter; is an integral part of the &tde; base installation and is installed with every copy of &tde;. It can be found in the tdebase package or will be found in your operating system tdebase package. &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 TDE menu Choose the big T 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 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 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 includes three tabs, the Contents tab selects the Contents pane, the Glossary tab opens the &tde; glossary of terms, and the Search Options tab allows searching all help handbooks. The Contents contains the following default entries: Welcome to &tde; An introduction to the Trinity Desktop Environment. A Visual Guide to &tde; A visual summary of Trinity widgets. The Quickstart Guide Contains a tour of the &tde; Interface and specific help and tips on how to work smarter with &tde;. &tde; User Guide An in-depth exploration of &tde;, including installation, configuration and customization, and use. &tde; Administrator Guide A reference guide to &tde; features, structure, framework and configurations useful to administrators. The information also is useful to single-user systems. Application Manuals Native &tde; application documentation. &tde; applications have documentation in &XML; format, which are converted to HTML when you view them. This section lists all the &tde; 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 TDE menu, making it easy to find the application you are looking for. Applet Manuals Similar to Application Manuals but for applets that run in the &tde; panel. Unix manual pages 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. The &tde; FAQ Frequently asked questions about &tde; and answers. Contact Information Information about contacting &tde; developers, and how to join the &tde; mailing lists. &tde; on the Web Links to &tde; on the web, both the official &tde; website, and other useful sites. Supporting &tde; How to help, and how to get involved. 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 &tde; 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. &tde; comes with a lot of documentation for applications and components. While 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, &tde; offers full text search using a program called ht://dig. It works quite similar to search engines on the web and some search engines might even use ht://dig. To use ht://dig, select the Search Options tab in the &khelpcenter; Contents pane, enter the word you are looking for, then select the Search. However, to use this feature, ht://dig must be installed on your system. If you haven't installed ht://dig and the package wasn't shipped with your operating system you have to get ht://dig yourself. Use your package manager to search for the package. To build the search index, at the bottom of the Contents pane, select the Build Search Index button. 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. Info documents are arranged hierarchically with each page called a node. All info documents have a Top node, &ie; 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. &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: 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. &khelpcenter; Originally developed by &Matthias.Elter; &Matthias.Elter.mail; Maintained for many years by &Cornelius.Schumacher; &Cornelius.Schumacher.mail; Currently maintained by the Trinity Development Team. &underFDL; &underGPL;