# The &khelpcenter;

The &kde; Team
&FDLNotice;
2013-05-22
&kde; 4.11

&kde; is an international technology team that creates Free Software for desktop and portable computing. Among &kde;'s products are a modern desktop system for &Linux; and &UNIX; platforms, comprehensive office productivity and groupware suites and hundreds of software titles in many categories including Internet and web applications, multimedia, entertainment, educational, graphics and software development.

KDE kdebase khelpcenter kdehelp help help center KDE help center

## &kde; Help System Handbook

### &kde; Help System

The &kde; help system is designed to make accessing the common &UNIX; help systems (man and info) simple, as well as the native &kde; documentation (&XML;).

All base &kde; applications come fully documented, thanks to the efforts of the Documentation team. If you are interested in helping with the documentation efforts, join the mailing list and write to the team at kde-doc-english@kde.org. No experience is required, just enthusiasm and patience.

If you would like to help translating &kde; documentation to your native language, review the information, including coordinators for each language team, on the Localization web site.

#### Installation

&khelpcenter; is an integral part of the &kde; Base installation, and is installed with every copy of &kde;. It can be found in the kdebase-runtime package, and is available from the &kde-ftp;, or will be found in your operating system's kdebase-runtime package.

### Invoking Help

&khelpcenter; can be called in several ways:

From the Help menu

  The most common will probably be from within an application. Choose F1 Help Application Handbook to open that application's handbook.

From the Kickoff Application Launcher

  Choose the big K in your panel, and select the Applications tab followed by selecting Help to open &khelpcenter;, which will open up to the default start page.

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:/kwrite`

    Opens the &kwrite; 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 start page.

### The &khelpcenter; interface

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 Contents 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

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 is further divided into two tabs, one containing a tree view showing all the help information &khelpcenter; is aware of, and the other contains the &kde; glossary of terms.

##### The Contents Tab

The Contents tab contains the following default top level entries in the tree view:

&kde; Fundamentals

  The Fundamentals introduce you to the many features of the &kde; Software Collection and describe many common tasks you can perform in all &kde; applications.

Plasma Manual

  The &plasma; Manual is the documentation for the most visible pillar of &kde;, the core interface to the desktop.

Online Help

  A page with links to online help and additional information provided by the &kde; community.

Application Manuals

  Native &kde; application documentation. All &kde; applications have documentation in &XML; format, which are converted to HTML when you view them. This section lists all the &kde; 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 K menu, making it easy to find the application you are looking for.

Control Center Modules

  Provides a list of links to various modules that are located in the &kde; &systemsettings; application.

KInfoCenter Modules

  Contains a list of links to various KInfocenter modules documentation.

Kioslaves

  Contains a list of links to various KIO modules documentation.

&UNIX; manual pages

  &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.

Scrollkeeper

  Additional non-&kde; documentation installed on your system.

Browse Info Pages

  TeXinfo documentation is used by many &GNU; applications, including `gcc` (the C/C++ compiler), `emacs`, and many others.

#### The Man and Info sections

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.

##### Navigating inside the Info pages

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.

#### The &kde; glossary

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.

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.

#### The menus and toolbar

&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:

Toolbar Icons

Table of Contents

  Go to the main start page of &khelpcenter;.

Back

  Go to the previous page you viewed. Click the check mark right to the icon. This displays a list of previously viewed pages. Selecting one will take you directly back to that page.

Forward

  Go forward one page. This icon is only active if you have already used the Back icon.

Copy

  Copy text to the clipboard to be pasted in another application.

Find

  Find a word or words within the currently visible page.

Increase Font Sizes

  Increase the size of the text in the viewer pane.

Decrease Font Sizes

  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
  &Ctrl;P File Print

    Print the contents of the currently visible page. Handbooks in PDF format you find on the &kde; Documentation Server.

  &Ctrl;Q File Quit

    Close and exit &khelpcenter;

Edit
  &Ctrl;C Edit Copy

    Copy the selected text to the clipboard.

  &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 Set Encoding

    Change the encoding of the current page. Normally, the default setting of Default 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
  &Alt;Home Go Table of Contents

    Go to the main start page of &khelpcenter;.

  &Ctrl;PgUp Go Previous Page

    Go to the previous page of the current documentation.

  &Ctrl;PgDown Go Next Page

    Go to the next page of the current documentation.

  &Alt;Left Go Back

    Go back to the previous page you were viewing.

  &Alt;Right 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.

Settings
  Settings Configure Fonts...

    Allows you to configure the font family and size used by &khelpcenter;.

Additionally &khelpcenter; has the common &kde; Settings and Help menu items, for more information read the sections about the Settings Menu and Help Menu of the &kde; Fundamentals.

### Credits and License

&khelpcenter;

Originally developed by &Matthias.Elter; &Matthias.Elter.mail;

The current maintainer is &Cornelius.Schumacher; &Cornelius.Schumacher.mail;

&underFDL; &underGPL;