Building Qt Documentation

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Building Qt Documentation

For information about writing documentation for Qt, see the Writing Qt Documentation page.

For help on troubleshooting documentation builds, see the Troubleshooting Qt Documentation page.

Building Qt 5 Documentation

QDoc (qdoc command in qtbase) builds the documentation and is included in standard Qt 5 installations. The official Qt documentation is built using Linux based machines, requiring libraries needed for building Qt 5 and tested on the supported desktop platforms.

Required reading

• Get the Source Code - download the Qt sources
• Building Qt 5 - build instructions for Qt 5

For the standard installation of the Qt 5 repository (qt5.git), once Qt is built and installed, running make docs in the command line will build QDoc and the Qt 5 documentation set. The output will be located in qt5/qtbase/doc/ or to the directory set to qmake's QT_INSTALL_DOCS variable.

cd qt5/
make docs

In many cases, building Qt 5 and submodules is not necessary. To build the documentation, it is necessary to build QDoc in qtbase and run qmake_all in each repository before running make docs

To do so after the configure step:

cd qt5/qtbase/src
make sub-qdoc #to build the qdoc binary
cd qt5/qttools
make #to build the qhelpgenerator
cd qt5/
make docs

On Windows, you may use the native nmake tool, instead. Note that qhelpgenerator has other dependencies in qtbase, therefore, it is best to compile qtbase before building qttools.

Alternatively, "make html_docs" will only build the HTML files and will not create a qch package.

Shadow builds

For shadow builds, the source directory and install directories are different and the global templates need to be moved to the install directories. To do so, run:

cd qtbase
make install_global_docs

Building the Module Documentation

The Qt modules have their documentation built by running make docs in the command line once Qt 5 is built and installed.

cd qt3d
make docs

Running qdoc Directly

QDoc builds are specified in qdocconf files which tells QDoc where to look and how to set up documentation. To run QDoc, pass the qdocconf file and the output directory as arguments.

qdoc qt3d.qdocconf -outputdir html

Modularized Documentation

The modules have a qdocconf file in the src directory. The Qt_Documentation_Structure page has more information.

Building Qt4 Documentation

Build Qt as normal.

Define environment variables for QT_SOURCE_TREE and for QT_BUILD_TREE appropriately. Make sure the PATH environment variable points to the bin directory containing the qdoc3 executable.

cd path/to/qt
make docs

For the online docs it may be necessary to use

cd path/to/qt
make online_docs

for later versions of Qt.

For Windows™ use the nmake utility instead of make. Some Linux systems will require gmake instead of make.

If you already have Qt compiled (from the SDK, for example) and want to build some special flavour of the doc, you can call directly qdoc3 (QT_SOURCE_TREE, QT_BUILD_TREE, and QTDIR must be set appropriately), here for DITA output:

cd qt-src
bin/qdoc3 tools/qdoc3/test/qt-ditaxml.qdocconf