Creating Your Own Documentation
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Creating Your Own Documentation

Robert Nickel

Probably the most notable additions to Quanta Plus for the general user will be the addition of documentation for the markup or scripting language that you like best. To that end, this chapter will explain how I create the PHP documentation tree for my personal use.

Before starting on creating your own documentation, you may wish to check out the Quanta Plus repository to see if someone else has already done this set.

There are two parts to this process. First, you must obtain the existing documentation for the markup/scripting/etc. language that you are after. Second, you have to create the docrc file. The first is up to you, the second is what we will cover here.

The general form of the docrc file is as follows:

#KDE Config File [Tree] Doc dir=path, relative to this file, of the documentation html files for example, php42/ #top level elements Top Element=Your description for these documentation for example, PHP 4.2 documentation Section 1=Section1.html Section 2=#Sec2.1,#Sec2.2,#Sec2.3 Sec2.1=Sec2.1.html Sec2.2=Sec2.2.html Sec2.3=Sec2.3.html ... [Context] ContextList=func1,func2,tag1,tag2,tag3 func1=func1.html func2=func2.html tag1=tag1.html tag2=tag2.html tag3=tag3.html

The docrc is broken down into two sections: Tree and Context.

The Tree section defines the presentation aspect of the documentation in the documentation tab. For example, you will see that in the PHP documentation you have something akin to this:



Relating this to the above, my PHP docrc looks like this:

#KDE Config File [Tree] Doc dir=php42/ #top level elements Top Element=PHP 4.2 documentation PHP 4.2 documentation=Table of Contents,#Getting Started,#Language Reference Table of Contents=index.html Getting Started=Introduction, ... Introduction=introduction.html ... Language Reference=Basic syntax, ... Basic syntax=language.basic-syntax.html ...

Notice the # in front of “Getting Started” and “Language Reference”. This indicates that these are sub containers in the tree and have content of their own. I do not believe that there is a set limit to the depth here (other than that driven by sanity) — use your judgment.

For the Table of Contents, you will notice that it is referenced directly to a file (and consequently shows up at the bottom of the tree view — folders first!).

Important

Spaces do not adversely affect anything, but watch out for & and < characters. These should likely be replaced by &amp; and &lt; respectively in all of the XML based Quanta Plus resource files.

The Context section is the section of the docrc file that is used to facilitate context sensitive help. For example, you are writing a PHP script and you would like to see the documentation for the mysql_fetch_array function. You simply highlight the function and then press Ctrl+H for context help. The documentation on mysql_fetch_array will immediately display. There are only two entry types here: the ContextList and the file association lines.

ContextList

Really simple, this is just a comma separated list of the context items you wish to have available (for PHP, these are the functions for PHP).

File association lines

These are of the form context item=html doc page. for example, acos=function.acos.html

A pared down version of my docrc Context section is as follows:

#Keywords for context help [Context] ContextList=abs,acos,acosh,addcslashes,addslashes,... abs=function.abs.html acos=function.acos.html acosh=function.acosh.html addcslashes=function.addcslashes.html addslashes=function.addslashes.html ...

Now you can just save your docrc file, save it in $HOME/.trinity/share/apps/quanta/doc or $TDEDIR/share/apps/quanta/doc for local or global use respectively. Then create a folder (the one specified in your docrc file) in the same folder as your docrc file and copy your HTML pages in there.

You will need to restart Quanta Plus to see your documentation.

Once you are sure that they are good and worth sharing, send the docrc file along with a description of any pertinent information on what documentation you used to the Quanta Plus repository for use by the Quanta Plus community. You will not get rich, but you will feel great knowing that you contributed to the best web development platform around.

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