After my post a few days ago I recieved an email from Thomas Strehl at Trolltech who kindly explained a few points about the new assistant to me. It seems it's already more powerful than I thought. Instead of having to manually load the 'help collection' into assistant, one can pass a command line argument and load a specific help collection, you can then specify in that help collection the window icon, window title etc. and this way it would be very easy to create a "KDE API browser". It's as simple as doing

assistant -collectionfile kdelibs.qhc

from the directory where kdelibs.qhc is located. Given the currently lacking documentation, I'm not sure how to set the icon etc. but it WILL be possible.

Thomas also hinted that Trolltech are working on a generator to create QHelp binaries directly from Doxygen output, making pretty much everyone's life easier. I guess the next step is to try to get docbook files loading :)

If we can get all that working nicely, it might be worthwhile looking into porting/rewriting KHelpCenter to use the QHelp library. Does anyone know the current status of KHelpCenter? The last I remember, after my post a while back PhilRod and co. were working on it. Does it need a breath of fresh air?

The other benefit of using QHelp would be that once docbook files are loaded in, it would be possible to query the database from within applications and display help in 'WhatsThis' hints, which, as I remember was one of the big points that we mentioned at the doc meeting a few months back. Another use-case would be KDevelop displaying apidocs for functions more easily.

I think that QHelp will provide us with an excellent opportunity to revamp our documentation system thanks to Trolltech once again thinking about what their users want and doing the dirty work in writing the library.