Kiwix 0.9 User Guide

User Guide
A brief instruction includes information on the application's tools and commands ...
← Back to help page

• Navigation keys and buttons

Browsing Kiwix content is in a similar way on the Internet and you can go from a page (which could be a document or an article) to another page. By click on Home button you'll take to the homepage's of your current ZIM file, e.g. if you've run the English Wikipedia ZIM file, you'll see the Wikipedia entry as its homepage. If you haven't installed any ZIM file yet, you'll see the Help page as the homepage and it means there is no content to display. In that case you should follow the instruction of this page in order to read the content.

Just like your web-browser, you can go to previous page you have visited by clicking on Back arrow icon and to forward page by clicking on Forward arrow icon in the toolbar. You can also use the New Tab page by clicking on button inside the last tab you have opened (under the toolbar), or just use the keyboard shortcuts Ctrl+T and (⌘-T on Mac). To close a tab, use the in the right side of each tab you want to close or keyboard shortcuts Ctrl+W and (⌘-W on Mac).

Increasing and Decreasing the size of the text.

The size of the text is specified by the content package you are using. Because it might not be ideal for your eyes and comfort, you can either increase or decrease the size of the text at any time. To do so, use the Magnify (to increase) and Reduce (to decrease) buttons to change the size of the text. Those commands are also available from the Display menu.

Displaying Kiwix in full-screen.

To gain some extra space on a small display or to remove distractions, you may want to display Kiwix in fullscreen. It will maximize the size of the Kiwix window and hide all other programs including your operating system. The saved space is then used to display more content at once.

Activate and de-activate it using the Full screen button, next to the Reduce one.

Printing and exporting documents.

Just like on the Web, you can print any Kiwix document (including this one) or export it and share. Three options are available:

• Print a document using the Print button (representing a printer).
• Export a document in PDF, using the File ? Print as PDF menu item. It will create a file which can be used to print or read the document later. Note that it will be formatted for priting and will thus remove the links.
• Save the document as an HTML file. It's not ideal for sharing but will keep the same formatting and links.

Bookmarking pages.

You can mark some pages (documents) to access them directly afterwards.

Bookmarks are organised in sets. A set is a list (or group) of bookmarks that live together. Because you can easily import or export (a set is saved as a regular file on your computer) a complete set of bookmarks (using the Import or Create buttons on the bookmarks side-bar), it is easy to share a list of documents ; with your students for example.

The bookmarking feature is reachable by clicking on the Bookmarks button. It will open a panel on the side of the screen. The panel contains, in order:

• The action buttons
  • Create new set: Create an empty set in a new file on your computer. Each time you add or delete a bookmark to the set, the file is updated. Share this file for backup or for someone else to import.
  • Import set: Select a previously saved (or retrieved) Kiwix bookmark file to import a complete set, including notes.
  • Reset Bookmark Set: Deletes all the bookmarks from the current ; should it be the Default Set or another. Use with care as it's not reversible.
  • Mark this page: Add the current page (document) to the current bookmark set.
  • Unmark selected: Removes the selected (on the bookmark list) bookmark from the current set.
• List of opened bookmark sets. Switch from here between your opened (default one and those you imported) sets. Once you close Kiwix, all your sets are closed ; you will need to re-import them next time.
• List of bookmarks in the current set. Each time you mark a document, it is added to that list. Just click on an item to be sent to the corresponding document.
• Notes text input field for the selected bookmark.

Saving personnal notes on bookmarks.

You can comment or write notes on each page (document) you bookmark. Notes are included in the bookmark set file ; this way, your comments are shared with your bookmarks.

You can only write comments on pages you have bookmarked.

To add a note, mark the current page and click on the Notes text box on the bookmark side-panel. The text is saved as you type. Search inside pages.

You can find specific words inside a document by searching for them. To do so, access the Find in page Dialog by going to the Edit ? Search in Page menu item.

The dialog allows you to type a word, select some straightforward options and hit Find next to find that exact (minus case) sentence in the current page (document). It's a basic text matching search, not a search engine.

Copy text from pages.

As most applications, Kiwix supports copy-pasting. Select a piece of text using the mouse then click Edit ? Copy and you'll be able to paste that text in any other application ; or on the search engine.

Search across all documents of the content packages.

Kiwix includes a powerful search engine to help you easily access the documents you are looking for.

To use the search engine, you must first enable it by creating the indexes. This steps may have already been done for you.

Check that the search engine is ready by clicking on the large search field located on the toolbar. If you can type text inside, your search engine is ready. If not, Kiwix will ask you whether to launch the index creation process or not. This step is very time consuming and depend on both the size of your content package and the speed of your computer.

Once ready, the search engine is very easy to use: type text into the search field and hit enter. A list of matching results will appear on the side-panel. Click on the documents' name to access them.

Alternatively, you can select document's title in the search field. The popup-list is auto-completed as-you-type. Those are suggestions based on the real names of existing documents. Using them is not a requirement.