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Introduction to the Qt Reference Documentation

The documentation for the Qt library is written in-line in the .cpp files by the developers themselves. The documentation team revises the documentation to ensure that it is accurate and usable, and to provide quality control. The documentation team also writes the larger texts, such as the class descriptions that introduce a class along with the concepts the class uses, as well as introducing the functions and properties that the class provides.

The documentation focuses on the API rather than the internals, since we make great efforts to keep our API consistent and compatible with each new version, but we may change the internals considerably to improve performance and enhance functionality.

The Qt Reference Documentation consists of almost 1,500 HTML pages (over 2,500 US letter-sized pages). The overwhelming majority of pages document Qt classes. Since developers differ in the way they think and work we provide a variety of approaches to navigating the documentation set:

• The All Classes page lists every class in Qt's public API, and consists of several hundred classes.

• The Main Classes page lists the classes you're most likely to use most often, and provides a much shorter and more managable list than the All Classes list.

• The Grouped Classes page presents a list of groups, each of which leads to a list of related classes, for example, the Advanced Widgets list.

• The Inheritance Hierarchy page presents a list of classes in terms of the hierarchy of Qt classes.

• The All Functions page lists all the functions provided by Qt classes, each one with links to the class(es) in which it appears.

No matter where you find yourself in the Qt documentation, you will find extensive cross-referencing. Even snippets of example code contain clickable links, so that for example, if you come across a class declaration in a code example, the class name will be a clickable link to the class's documentation.

In addition to the class documentation some of Qt's modules have extensive descriptions, and there are several overview documents which describe various aspects of the Qt library; all these are linked from the reference documentation home page. There are also numerous example programs in $QTDIR/examples.

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