Every time I look at the lists of things that have changed in LO over
the past few releases, I am reminded that the features lists don't
necessarily give the level of detail that needs to be included in the
books (or don't make it obvious where that detail needs to be
mentioned). So we need people to check the lists *and* go through the
program itself and note where changes are needed. For example, the
details in the Tools > Options dialog pages change in subtle ways.
Often these changes need to be mentioned in more than one book, though
not necessarily in exactly the same way.
We've talked about ways to reuse information, but any method requires
that people actually know about it *and* apply it. With volunteers,
this simply does not happen, for a lot of reasons that are too tedious
to discuss again. The exceptions are PeterS, who maintains two books
(Draw and Impress) that have very similar content, and JohnS, who has
on several occasions updated chapters (such as those on styles and
templates, printing, and graphics) in several books.
Meanwhile, I'm convinced that many changes simply get overlooked and
some topics of importance to users don't get mentioned at all or are
mentioned in ways that are less useful than the might be. Researching
this isn't difficult, but it is time consuming. I don't have time to
do all of it, or even very much of it, much as I would like to. Surely
some of you can do bits of this work? Ideally, you'll both find things
that need updating *and* do the updating, but it would be extremely
helpful if people just found things and made notes on what needs doing
and (preferably) which chapters in which books might be affected.
Those of you with some techwriting background know about this need.
Those of you with aspirations to have a career in techwriting need to
learn this skill if you're not already experienced at it.
--Jean