[Qt-creator] Which engine is used to display HTML?

[Eike Ziller]

> On Sep 11, 2017, at 18:25, Nils Jeisecke via Qt-creator <qt-creator at qt-project.org> wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> I'm currently discussing a patch enhancing Qt's richtext table model
> with cell border styling.
> 
> https://codereview.qt-project.org/#/c/177256/
> 
> During this discussion I tried to check whether QtCreator uses
> QTextBrowser for viewing HTML stuff and could therefore benefit from
> such a change.
> 
> Having a quick look at the sources it looks like there are three
> implementations for the viewer:
> 
> - WebEngine
> - QTextBrowser
> - Mac specific WebView Wrapper
> 
> The selection of the engine seems to depend on the available Qt modules
> at compile time. Is that correct?

Sort of. It compiles all possible engines depending on platform + modules.
The order for selecting the default engine is
QtWebEngine > QTextBrowser
The native/WebKit one on macOS is only selected when setting QTC_HELPVIEWER_BACKEND=native.

> Which implementation is used on
> Mac/Win/X11 with the pre-built QtCreator download versions?

Since WebKit was removed from Qt 5.6 it is QTextBrowser.

> Is QTextBrowser good enough to present a usable rendering of the
> generated Qt docs at all?

The Qt documentation was adapted, so that Qt 5.6 and later documentation looks ok(-ish), and some things in QTextBrowser were fixed such that previous documentation should at least be bearable/readable.

Br, Eike

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Eike Ziller
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