Published chapters of Getting Started and Writer Guide

I've published those few chapters of Getting Started and Writer Guide
for LO v3.4 that have been reviewed by both Hazel and me, and I have
put them on the wiki.
https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Documentation/Publications

They are not yet linked from the website; I haven't had time. I'm also
a bit dubious about putting incomplete lists of chapters on the
website, even though I'm happy to have them on the wiki. What do you
think?

--Jean

By "on the website" I mean this page:
http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/documentation/

Hi :slight_smile:
I think it might be confusing to add them to the website. I carefully set-up tables on the wiki to make it clear about which chapter belongs to the guide for which branch but that sort of thing would just be confusing on the website.
Regards from
Tom :slight_smile:

+1

--Dan

At some point we'll have a full v3.4 book of chapters that will need to be
linked from the website along with the v3.3 chapters, so we'll need to
decide how best to show the two streams. I'm thinking about possibilities
but haven't come to any conclusions yet.

It's not clear to me whether your objection is to having the two streams or
having the second stream be incomplete.

--Jean

Hi :slight_smile:
I think it might be confusing to add them to the website. I carefully

set-up tables on the wiki to make it clear about which chapter belongs to
the guide for which branch but that sort of thing would just be confusing
on the website.

Regards from
Tom :slight_smile:

From: Jean Weber <jeanweber@gmail.com>
Subject: [libreoffice-documentation] Re: Published chapters of Getting

Started and Writer Guide

Hi :slight_smile:
It's not an objection. I was just agreeing with the way things currently are.  The aim was to reduce thinking time and reduce the amount of work, not add to it!  Sorry it's not worked out that way :frowning:

Once we have a full guide ready for the official website then it will look good and make sense there.  Having an odd few chapters might be confusing.  Until then the 3.4.x chapters can be available on the wiki.  Possibly after we have 1 completed guide for the 3.4.x branch then odd chapters for the other guides might make some sense but right now it might just look messy.

Regards from
Tom :slight_smile:

Hi :slight_smile:
Errr, it's just occurred to me that the website probably uses html coding?  If so then could i edit it?  Html makes a lot more sense to me than wiki-mark-up and i could make tables that would be easier to add to.  Plus, my boss would still see me doing html coding and might not notice it's not for him. 
Regards from
Tom :slight_smile:

Hi
I've just looked through the LibreOffice Writer Guide, Chapter 3 for 3.4.x branch on the site and have a few observations.

  * In the pdf version viewed using Adobe Reader 9.4.6, the screenshots
    for Figures 3, 4, and 5 are missing.
  * The screenshot between figures 36 and 37 is not labelled i.e. no
    Figure number allocated.
  * The second Table, on page 11 is not captioned. Table 1 is captioned.

The latter two observations also apply to the ODT version.

Regards
John Smith

Thanks, John. I'll fix the missing screenshots. I don't know why they
sometimes disappear, and usually I check before publishing the PDFs...
but obviously I didn't this time.

We don't give figure numbers to all figures or table numbers to all
tables. Somewhere in our info for contributors I've got a writeup on
the rationale of when numbers are needed and when they are optional.
Obviously opinions differ on this topic.

--Jean

Hi
Looking through the Introducing Writer Chapter 1 (https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Documentation/Publications) I have a few observations.

On page 8, Figure 9. The screenshot is wrong in as much as the Unsaved Changes icon is wrong. The figure shows an /unmodified since last save icon/.
Text is missing from the Insert Mode area of the Status Bar. It should have *INSRT* or*OVER* within the box.
The illustrative icons are now missing from the text of the *Unsaved changes* and *Digital signature* paragraphs. As a newbie and low-level user of Writer it was useful to know what these looked like.

I would like to reiterate my suggestion from some while back about the *Starting a new document* paragraph; i.e.

I suggest the second bullet point in /*Starting a new document */is altered to read “From the Quickstarter, if enabled in *Tools - Options – LibreOffice – Memory, *which is found in ...”.

The reason is that not all installations are set to load LibreOffice at start-up, so there is no Quickstarter to use. :slight_smile:

The observations below also refer to the wiki site documents.

Regards
John Smith

Thanks, John. I'll follow up on your observations and suggestions and
fix those chapters. (Many eyes help immensely in finding error and
omissions... of which there are often many, since I do most of the
writing in a rush.)

--Jean

Hi :slight_smile:
It feels like a team again. Good work John, Jean (always) and everyone :)  Is there anyone in this team that doesn't feel like c#@% after 1 or 2 things have gone slightly wrong even tho they have done an awesome job on a ton of other things and got their result out there?

Regards from
Tom :slight_smile:

Once we have a full guide ready for the official website then it will look good and make sense there.  Having an odd few chapters might be confusing.  Until then the 3.4.x chapters can be available on the wiki.  Possibly after we have 1 completed guide for the 3.4.x branch then odd chapters for the other guides might make some sense but right now it might just look messy.

Perhaps what I should do is add one line to the list at the top of the
website page, telling people that chapters for v3.4 are being added to
the wiki as they are being produced (with a link to the wiki page).

Errr, it's just occurred to me that the website probably uses html coding? If so then could i edit it? Html makes a lot more sense to me than wiki-mark-up and i could make tables that would be easier to add to.

It is HTML and I thought of that idea too. Perhaps when there are
enough books & chapters for v3.4 available, we might consider it.
However, the website appears to use fixed-width pages, and when people
like me increase the font size in their browsers, tables can become
quite a mess. Another way to deal with two streams of docs would be to
have separate pages for each stream; that's certainly easier and
cleaner to maintain... and possibly less confusing for visitors.

--Jean

I've just discovered missing screenshots in the PDF for Getting
Started with Writer as well. I'll fix that, and check all the other
chapters that I've published. After lunch...

--Jean

I have replaced the PDF with one that contains the missing
screenshots. They were in the ODT but didn't display. This happens
occasionally; I think it's a memory issue, related to what else I'm
doing at the same time.

--Jean

Hi :slight_smile:
Perhaps.  You know

Tools - Options - Memory

and then ramp up the caches for various things.  Seems to help quite a bit but i'm guessign that is something you have already done ages ago.
Regards from
Tom :slight_smile:

Hi :slight_smile:
I don't really like the idea of adding more and more pages but it does get around the problems that tables have.  The wiki tables tend to be pretty bad so i was hoping i could get the html ones a lot nicer.

Luckily the Portuguese team seem to be quite happy with the modifications i did to their tables and have added to and modified them a bit which is always good to see.
Regards from
Tom :slight_smile:

Hi
Regarding Chapter 5 of the Writer guide for 3.4.x; the screenshots for figures 8 and 9 do not reflect the current display in LO. The screenshots appear to be a hang-over from OOo which didn't display the place-holders in the preview box, for the stamp, addressee's and if selected, the sender's addresses.

I hope these observations are helpful.

Regards
John Smith

Hi :slight_smile:
Mostly those screenshots are from LO 3.3.x branch which is pretty much identical to OOo in many ways.  Anyway, good work with the heads-up again.  I guess you are either not using Ubuntu or you are trying to race through proof-reading to get it done quickly?  Either way is fine so i don't know why i'm asking but its interesting to know about people's methods.
Regards from
Tom :slight_smile:

John, your observations are very helpful. We (I) may not get around to
fixing things quickly, but having them noted is very good.

These are among the sort of things that I ask people to look for when
reviewing the v3.3 versions for things that need to be changed for the
v3.4 books, so if you (or anyone) have the time and interest to go
through some of the chapters that have not yet been updated and point
out the pix that need to be changed, that would be very helpful too.
Finding them after publication is good; finding them before
publication is even better. As you can tell, I often just don't see
things like that; I've been looking at these chapters for too many
years.

--Jean