Preface

Table of Contents
What You Should Know
Feedback
Colophon

This manual introduces you to using Qt Designer, a unique tool that makes designing and implementing user interfaces a lot easier. With Qt Designer, you will learn how to create your own dialogs and how to arrange the user interface elements in the dialogs so that the dialogs look both nice and natural and can accommodate various environments, like different languages and user settings.

This manual consists of two parts. The first one starts with a gentle tutorial-style introduction to Qt Designer that leads you through creating some dialogs for a simple application. You will learn how to use the user interface compiler, uic, to create source code from the user interface description files that Qt Designer saves and how to integrate these files into your application. Further steps show you how to modify an already existing dialog, how to use layout management to develop more flexible and powerful dialogs, and how to customize dialogs created with Qt Designer by creating a subclass.

The second part of this manual is a reference-style description of Qt Designer. It explains each menu entry and each dialog in detail. If you are unsure about what to insert in one of the configuration dialogs of Qt Designer and the online help is not enough, this is the place to look for help.

What You Should Know

This manual assumes that you have some knowledge of writing Qt programs and, consequently, of C++ programming. If you feel unsure about your Qt knowledge, you might want to consult the Qt Tutorial that ships with Qt or the book Programming with Qt, by Matthias Kalle Dalheimer, published by O'Reilly & Associates. Or you can just try to follow the examples in this manual and then read more about any Qt features that you are uncertain about.