I've noticed that the phrase "allow to" or "allows to" appears a lot in the
API documentation, and also in some of the help files. AS a native UK
English speaker, I feel that I should point out that this is incorrect
grammar (I think it's also incorrect in US English). "Allow" must take an
object (except in the phrase "allow for"). There's a good discussion of this
in
http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/85069/is-the-construction-it-allows-to-proper-english
which implies that it's a translation problem (maybe a German speaker here
would like to comment).
For example "If the current entry in the Settings listbox allows to edit a
value, you can click the Edit button." needs editing to something like "If
the current entry in the Settings listbox is set to allow editing of a
value, you can click the Edit button."
There is also the question of whether "allows" is the correct word in many
cases. "<This parameter> allows to <change a value>" is, strictly speaking,
ambiguous. Does it mean that the parameter sets/clears a switch which makes
the change of possible (the strict meaning of "allows"), or that the
parameter changes the the value directly, in which case "allows to change"
can be replaced by "changes"? In many cases, I suspect that the latter is
intended.
There's an example below taken from
https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/HelpContent#Make_Images_Appear which
shows the problem: three of these paras use "allows to", three don't, but I
think they all have the same meaning!
Create help file: creates a new .xhp file based on the template. If the
template is not found, the file can't be created and an error message is
displayed.
About: displays the version number of the extension
Set Document Root: allows to select the document as root file
Edit meta data: allows to give a title to the help file and to leave a
comment. The Indexing button allows to include or ignore the file when
running a search
Validate this help file: allows to run some checks on the xml structure
of the file
Toggle l10n: sets the localize attribute on false: