Re: HelpAuthoring.oxt: An easy way to edit help files

Hi Regina,

Regina Henschel píše v So 04. 07. 2015 v 17:13 +0200:

> > Olivier recently resurrected the HelpAuthoring.oxt extension that makes
> > it much easier to edit help files, and I've pushed that to git now:
> >
> > http://cgit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice/contrib/dev-tools/tree/helpauthoring
>
> I do not share your euphoria. If you do not already know, how the help 
> is organized, it will not make it "much easier". And for correcting 
> single words and typos, it is not necessary. But I agree, if you know, 
> how the help is organized, it helps you inserting all the tags and 
> attributes.

Yes - let's see how it becomes used.  The good thing about having it in
the git now is that we can fix whatever needs fixing there :-)

Having said that, the filter to load / save .xhp is implemented in xslt;
which is a nightmare; I hope we'll convert it to Python at some stage to
be able to fix stuff there much more effectively - but let's see.

> Removing some old stuff, like the history-element or the "l10n" and 
> "oldref" attributes is nice too.
>
> > I don't want to announce it too widely yet, tough; it has a bug that
> > from some reason, the new edits appear in bold when saved (they appear
> > enclosed in <emph> / </emph>).
>
> Unfortunately no solution for that problem. I first thought inserting 
> would create a span element, but saving as odt has no such element.
>
> But another error: The tool removes the indexer-attribute from the topic 
> element. The value is sometimes intentionally set to "exclude", for to 
> make the file invisible to the full text search. That is necessary, 
> because some files have only content, that is to be embedded in other 
> files. Such files are very confusing to users and should be hidden. When 
> you select "exclude" when you use "Edit Meta Data", this attribute is 
> not set.

Nasty :-(

> Further problems:
>
> The template has unsuitable fonts, for example a "Droid Sans".
>
> The page margins of the template are far to large. In help viewer the 
> margins will be about 5mm left and right and 10mm top. Perhaps open the 
> file in Web-view?
>
> The browse-button for file name search in "Embed Section" does not 
> recognize the path, that has been set in "Set Document Root" and 
> therefore inserts an absolute path.
>
> The dialog for selecting a section to be embedded does not use unicode 
> in the selection window and therefore the preview is wrong.
>
> Feature request: Provide a preview of the help, as it would be shown in 
> the help viewer, I mean without the yellow fields.

Thank you for collecting the list - worth looking at that!

All the best,
Kendy