Would love to help

Hi Folks,

Chiming in from Austin, TX. I have a Bachelor's degree in English from SUNY
Oneonta in upstate New York. I work in a research department at the
University of Texas and am still exploring career options for when I "grow
up." Technology has a huge presence in Austin, and I'm currently
considering technical writing as a profession. I have little experience
thus far, but I love writing and I love technology. At home I have several
computers running various operating systems (Linux, Windows), and I enjoy
toying around with those and especially learning the Linux command line.
I've been longing lately to write more often, and given the opportunities
that exist in the field of technical communications, I'd love to start
building up my resume to help me along that path.

I'm not sure what opportunities exist right now in Documentation
Development but I'd love to help. Please provide me with a user account on
the ODF Authors site if you feel I could be of valuable assistance.

Thanks,

Eric A.

Welcome! We have much to do here, and I'm sure you can find many
things that suit your interests and skills. You could join the group
updating the user guides to the latest version of LO, but there are
plenty of other possibilities, some of which might fit better into
developing a portfolio of your work.

One suggestion of a place to start: we've long wanted to have some
how-tos and tutorials, especially giving specific examples of using LO
to do common real-world tasks that people in business, publishing,
academia, science and other fields need to do. These how-tos,
tutorials and examples would supplement the existing user guides,
showing people not just how to use the software but why, what for, and
in what circumstances. We have almost nothing along these lines, so
you can probably pick any topic that interests you and run with it. Or
if you prefer, I'm happy to make some specific suggestions.

One place to start finding out what we're doing (and how) is
https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Documentation/Development

It's not fully up to date, unfortunately, but I'm working on it.

Regards, Jean
P.S. As requested, I have set up an account for you on the ODFAuthors
website. You should receive an email with a link to set your password.

Perhaps someone else on this list could make some suggestions on good
topics for how-tos? For example, things that get asked on the users
list or on Ask LibreOffice: the sort of question where the answer
isn't difficult but it isn't obvious either. Often, though certainly
not always, this is because people are coming from MSO or some other
program (or no background on the subject at all) and the terminology
or logic of a technique is different in LO.

(My favourite example has nothing to do with LO; it's to do with
graphics. I wanted to put a line around a box using Gimp, but I had no
idea the term I needed to look up was "stroke". Once I learned the
magic word, I could find it in the Help for Gimp. I learned that term
from a how-to that someone had written, which did not assume the
reader knew the term and so used other terms as well, which made the
article findable.)

--Jean

Sometimes there are answers (on the users list or on Ask LibreOffice)
that can be turned into publishable how-tos with only a bit of work.
And in some cases people have written how-tos that we could at least
link to on the wiki and put into the Docs blog. Most of you have
probably forgotten, if you even knew, that we have a blog. Would be
nice if we had more items to post to it.

--Jean

Hi :slight_smile:
On the Users List we often have a question that recurrs quite a lot for a short period of time but then vanishes with the next release or after a couple of releases.  Some do recurr later on down the road but not often.

I'm trying to think of questions that do keep recurring for years but i suspect it might be best to just ask their mailing list.  I know there is at least 1 thing but that is more of an on-going bug-report and hardly anyone seem really bothered by it.  Errr, i can't remember what it is and asking the Users List may bring up other ones too. 
Regards from
Tom :slight_smile: