Writer Guide status / my role

Hi :slight_smile:

I agree with Hal. I think we need to get the job finished fast now that LO has
been officially released. There will be plenty of time later to re-visit and do
some finesses ready for a re-release but we have to get our first finished
version out there fast now.

Regards from
Tom :slight_smile:

Hi Hal, :slight_smile:

The one thing I am definitely NOT doing is changing the borders and the row
colours in tables of data. Now that the OOo books have their tables in
black, white, and gray, I can't see the need for taking the time to change
them to a slightly different pattern of black, white, and gray.

IMHO, you're absolutely right. Surely it's not an important branding
issue. I don't think we have to get pedantic about things, especially
when it involves a lot of work of secondary priority.

This coming week, I'll start helping you out, and will post at that
time to liaise with you about where I should jump in.

David Nelson

I'm working on Chapter 4, Formatting Pages. I thought I'd be done by now,
but I've found what I think is a feature that's not in OOo: Format > Title
Page, and I want to write it up.

Hal

Actually there are a bunch of time-consuming changes to be made, which I
don't think are worth the effort at this point, but since they've been done
in at least half the Writer Guide chapters (as well as all of the Getting
Started guide), I can't really see avoiding doing them. And perhaps there
are ways to automate (or semi-automate) more of the changes, using macros or
table autoformats or something, which I haven't spent time figuring out.

We could discuss whether to spend the time on those items when working on
the first version of the other books, but OTOH debating stuff takes time
that could be spent getting real work done.

Note: I don't have any objection to the changes as such, just the timing of
them.

Hal

Things like that, of substance, seem to me worth doing now, unlike some of
the cosmetic stuff.

But if others think I should skip it for now, that's okay with me. David,
what do you think?

Hal

It is your choice. I was only trying to give you an option. The best way to
handle it is do as you want :wink:

Regards from
Tom :slight_smile:

Hi Hal, Tom, :slight_smile:

I am not paying much attention to terminological consistency, as I think
that's a "nice to have" that can wait until the next release of the book and
I'm not great at that level of detail anyway. I am trying to do all the
rebranding things, but no doubt I'll miss something that someone will pick
up on the next pass.

I think you're right about the terminology consistency. The most
important thing is that instructions should be *understandable* for
the audiences we target. In my own professional work, when I know I'm
addressing people with a certain level of understanding of a subject,
I sometimes use different terms for the same thing to arrive at a
nice, natural writing style - you don't want to sound too wooden.

Provided that it doesn't create a source of confusion for your
readership, I think it's OK.

My 2 cents.

Anyway, we give it our best shot, and then the proofreader can always
make adjustments. :wink:

I'll be there to help out just as soon as I've sent my current job
back to the client (deadline on Monday). :wink:

David Nelson

Well, I've done that particular topic now, and I'll be uploading the chapter
soon and moving on to another one.

Hal

And I still totally HATE HATE HATE the way Alfresco keeps logging me off.
Grrr, snarl.

Hal

You are fast. It's great :slight_smile:
Regards from
Tom :slight_smile:

Hal,

I stayed logged in to 1 page overnight! I fell asleep before making changes and
it would have let me edit about 10hours later! I closed it and clicked on the
email link and it didn't ask me to re-login again!

My web-browser is SeaMonkey which uses the same engine as Firefox (gecko) but i
don't generally save passwords. I had not changed any setting in my profile at
Alfresco so everything is just on defaults i think.

I like it this way. Very easy and convenient for me!
Good luck in getting this sorted sometime! Perhaps try a different
web-browser??

Regards from
Tom :slight_smile:

Are you talking about the *website* or about Alfresco?

I haven't used the website enough to know if it will allow me to stay logged
in, but Alfresco (and the wiki) keep kicking me off.

Hal

Alfresco keeps me logged in so i can edit without having to do the login process
??

Weird but nice :slight_smile:
Regards from
Tom :slight_smile:

But, but... we don't edit within Alfresco online; we download the ODT files
and edit there.

Sounds to me like you're talking about Silverstripe, the website editor,
where we DO edit online.

Hal

Oh no! You're kidding! Yes i have been using SilverStripe :frowning:

I just tried to publish the localisation page as it looked ready.
https://www.libreoffice.org/get-involved/localizers/?stage=live
Ahh, great. Now i can see my correction :slight_smile: The page does look done&dusted to
me.

Have i been bad?
Regards from
Tom :slight_smile:

That explains why some of our recent exchanges have seemed to me to be a bit
"in different universes".

Doesn't sound like you've been bad. David asked for help with the website,
and you're helping. Silverstripe is what you/we use for editing the website.

Alfresco is where the user docs (and a few other things) are produced.

BTW, the CMS messages are coming from Silverstripe, and not Alfresco. And
you are probably getting emails from the website list as well as this
(documentation) list, and possibly others that you've subscribed to... hence
the "hundreds of emails" you referred to earlier.

Hal

Ahhh, that does explain things.

Yes, the emails link's take me to SilverStripe. "Hundreds" was an
exaggeration. It has been enough to be annoying but nothing like that many!

So, with Alfresco you get to see proper document-mark-up of some kind so you can
edit links and stuff presumably. I was just about to ask about how to do that.
What mark-up language is used? Do you use gedit? If so which setting do you
choose; plain-text, html or docbook or something else?

Many thanks for helping me there! It's a relief!
Thanks and regards from
Tom :slight_smile:

We are not using Alfresco to work on web pages. It can do that, but we're
not using it that way.

We are using Alfresco to store .odt files and track our work on them. To
edit one, you check it out, download it, edit it in LibreOffice offline,
then upload it and check it in again. Jeremy has written a very helpful
"bootcamp" document about the details.

Hal

What I've found is that the only step that takes significant amounts of time is checking the figures -- I get through all the other stuff in less than half an hour, and the majority of that is changing the > signs to arrows in OOoComputerCode. So the changing of the tables, using context menu and menu bar, and so on is basically in the noise. I think we have to consider online users and not just printed copy users; the

You're right, the whole Title Page thing is new. There seem to be some things missing, too -- I've submitted a couple of bugs, which turned up when I was trying to verify figures.