Offline Reference from cplusplus.com

This project allows to generate offline help file with C++ reference from the site cplusplus.com.

See the releases section for built packages.

It includes:

• full site in HTML
• full site in QCH
• reference section in HTML
• reference section in QCH

The _site package includes linked HTML pages corresponding to the full site except Forum or only Reference block of the site. It can be viewed in any browser.

The QCH files are in the Qt Help format ready to use with the Qt Assistant tool from the Qt Installation.

Build info

The main.py script can be used to build Qt help project file to then generate QCH help file.

OS: Windows x64
Tools: wget, Python 3.5, Qt 5.3.1

Steps performed to build the available packages:

• Download the pages with wget:

  wget -rpk -nc -np -P cplusplus_reference -o cpp_log.txt http://www.cplusplus.com/reference/
  

  it's enough to download only the reference section to have all reference pages and the majority of links, but it's better to download the whole site (maybe with some restrictions on URLs) and then work only with reference folder.

  In the latter case all the internal links in the reference will be more stable/offline. I had to launch the wget command multiple times to get all the pages because the downloads are sometimes skipped due to some connection problems.

• Fix some page reference problems: first my local pages didn't load images/icons so I downloaded them manually. These were: v321/bg.png, v321/bgh.png, v321/bgv.png.

• Adjust variables in the main.py script. These are: ref_path that points to local root path of the downloaded site (the folder with the reference subfolder) and full_site (True or False) to generate a help file with full content or only reference section.

• Run the script

  python main.py
  

• Wait some time (it was about 1 min in my case) and check the qch-proj.xml file in the site root. It has the Qt Help project data needed to generate the .qch file. It should contain section which will go to the Index panel of the Qt Assistant tool with relative links to the pages for each keyword. And section with all the files (HTML pages and resources) that will be packed to the help file.

• Generate the .qch file with Qt running the command:

  [QT_HOME]\bin\qhelpgenerator "qch-proj.xml" -o "cpp-ref.qch"
  

  the file should be about 15 MB

Load QCH in Qt Assistant

• First open Qt Assistant from the [QT_HOME]\bin\assistant.exe

• Navigate to the Edit -> Preferences menu, Documentation tab and Add the file to the list.

• After that you should see the Standard C++ Library reference entry in the Content panel (or cplusplus.com menu in the case of full site). Click there and navigate the reference. The Index panel can be used to search for the most important keywords and the tool also allows to Search the content of all the pages.

Notes

I didn't add full Table of contents to the .qch file because the site itself has already its navigation panel.

If you want to regenerate Qt Help files you may use prebuilt project files: qch-proj-cpp-ref.xml and qch-proj-cpp-full.xml inside the _site packages in the releases. Run the qhelpgenerator command mentioned above to get the .qch help file.