# The &appname; Handbook

## Introduction

### &appname;

&appname; is a program for managing collections. It began as a simple book collection manager, and has expanded to include default collection templates for bibliographies, comic books, videos, music, coins, stamps, trading cards, video games, wines, board games, and file listings. In addition, custom collections can be built for any other type of collectibles.

#### What &appname; Is

&appname; keeps track of the items in a collection, and offers an easy way to enter data for each entry. It provides several field types, and allows for an unlimited number of user-defined fields. The entries in a collection may be grouped by any field for easy organization, and customizable views show as much or as little information as you like.

Loans may be tracked, with optional integration with &korganizer;. Collections may be imported or exported using a variety of formats, to allow for easy exchange or publication of data.

#### What &appname; Is Not

&appname; is not an audio or video player. It does not provide facilities for reading or modifying multimedia files. It also does not provide any image-editing functionality. Although &appname; has some functionality for managing bibliography lists, it is not a full-blown bibliographic reference manager. &appname; also does not pretend to have all the capabilities of a full-fledged relational database,

As somewhat of a disclaimer, &appname; is a hobby for the author, and no guarantees are made about its functionality, usefullness, or otherwise. It's very far from being a professional software package. More information is included in the license declaration.

### Terminology

#### Collections

In &appname;, a collection is the document. Only one collection exists in each &appname; file. A collection contains any number of fields and entries. &appname; supports 12 specific collection types by default: books, bibliographic entries, comic books, videos, music, trading cards, coins, stamps, video games, wines, board games, and file listings. In addition, an empty generic collection template is available for any other type of collectibles or lists.

#### Collection Fields

Each collection may have an unlimited number of fields. &appname; supports eleven types of fields, which allow for a range of different data. The fields can be edited with the &fields-dialog; and are explained further in the Field Types section.

#### Collection Entries

An entry is the basic record in &appname;. Each entry contains a single value for each field in the collection. A collection may have an unlimited number of entries, in theory, although since the whole collection is always resident in memory, too many entries could slow down the application.

&appname; has been tested with a collection of 10,000 entries, and the speed was satisfactory. However, if many large images are included in the collection, the loading and processing time does slow down greatly. Performance can be improved by having &appname; store images separate from the data file itself, either in the application-specific directory or a directory relative to the data file. More information can be found in the configuration section.

&fundamentals-chapter; &details-chapter; &importing-exporting-chapter; &advanced-chapter; &configuration-chapter; &hacking-chapter; &faqs-chapter; &menus-chapter;

## Credits and License

&appname;

Program copyright 2001-2008 &robby; &email;

&underGPL;

Documentation copyright 2001-2008 &robby; &email;

This documentation is licensed under the terms of the &GNU; Free Documentation License (GFDL).

The author of this documentation has also granted you permission to use the content under the terms of the FreeBSD Documentation License, if you so choose. If you wish to allow use of your version of this content only under the terms of the FreeBSD Documentation License, and not to allow others to use your version of this file under the terms of the GFDL, indicate your decision by deleting the GFDL notice and and replacing it with the notice and other provisions required by the FreeBSD Documentation License. If you do not delete the GFDL notice above, a recipient may use your version of this file under the terms of either the GFDL or the FreeBSD Documentation License.

## Installation

### How to obtain &appname;

The &appname; home page can be found at &homepage;. Updates and news can be found there.

### Requirements

In order to successfully use &appname;, you need &kde; 3.3.1. &appname; uses about 5 megabytes of memory to run, but this may vary depending on your platform, configuration, and most of all, your collection size.

&kde; can be found at the &kde; home page.

You can find a list of changes at &homepage;.

### Compilation and Installation

In order to compile and install &appname; on your system, type the following in the base folder of the archive, where the third step must be done as root if you are installing in a system folder:

    % ./configure --enable-final --disable-debug
    % make
    % make install

Since &appname; uses autoconf and automake you should not have any trouble compiling it. Should you run into problems please report them to the the author at &email;.

#### Compiling With OpenOffice.org

&appname; uses a special plugin for communicating with OpenOffice.org, which is not compiled by default. The Software Development Kit, available from http://www.openoffice.org/dev_docs/source/sdk/, is required.

    % ./configure --enable-ooo --with-ooo-dir=/usr/lib/openoffice --with-ooo-sdk-dir=/usr/lib/openoffice/SDK

You'll need to use the correct locations of the OpenOffice.org libraries and SDK, of course.

In addition, some distributions may require you to modify the `/etc/ld.so.conf` file or add a configuration file to the `/etc/ld.so.conf.d` directory. Check to see if the OpenOffice.org plugin works without any changes first. If it doesn't, try editing `/etc/ld.so.conf` and adding the location of the OpenOffice.org libraries, the same as you used for the `configure` script. For additional help, use the &appname; Mailing List

&documentation.index;