A bit about me

Some of you know me, but newcomers probably don't. I have been
writing/editing/publishing user docs for LibreOffice, and before that
for OpenOffice, since around 2004. I am a retired technical
editor/writer. I acted as docs team leader at both OO and LO for some
years but was very happy to turn the coordinator role over to Olivier.
I also run the organisation (Friends of OpenDocument) that publishes
the print versions of the user guides written by this group, as well
as books written by other people. I have a sadly-neglected blog about
LO at http://www.taming-libreoffice.com/

Regards, Jean

Addendum: I live in Queensland, Australia, so my time is out of sync with
most of you. That’s why I don’t attend team meetings. - Jean

Hi Jean,
puuh. As I saw your thread this morning my first thought was that you
want to retire from us and say good bye.
But that doesn't happen: Yeah.
I, personally, am glad that you are in this team and I say thank you to
your huge, great and brilliant contributions.
We often forget to say this to our contributors.

She is certainly modest. I'm thinking her work with OpenOffice.org (OOo) began a little earlier than 2004. In any case, she became active with the Documentation team at OOo and was not satisfied with how that group was being run. So, she asked for volunteers writers to become part of a new independent group to produce user manuals for the fledgling OOo. This became ODFAuthors. To help with our work, ODFAuthors.org was created, and she provided much of the instructional work. This website was modified as time went on until it was recently been moved recently to the Nextcloud.

She was our mentor in so many ways insisting everything needed to be done in the right way and on time as much as possible. The transition from OOo 1.14 to 2.0 was one of those times. There was a major change in all parts of OOo at that time. Prior to this, OOo's format was changed from that used by Star Office, from which it had come, to the new ODT format. This required a major rewrite of all of the user guides. In addition, Base went from being a flat database using dBase to a relational database database using HSQLDB. She wanted the guides ready by the time that OOo 2.0 was released. To get this done, the writers had to use daily builds in the beginning. (These are unstable to say the least, but she got the writers to do use them.)

In another way, she got those who volunteered for this project to go outside of their comfort zone, to learn new things, new ways. She also served as the final authority as to what got published. She even reviewed chapters when no one else could.

In time, OOo recognized our work and us as writers; a merger with the OOo document team occurred. The changes she had insisted on from the very beginning came with us.

Dan

Wow that's a quite a legacy! Thanks for the intro Jean, and thank you for
all you've helped with regarding OO/LO. I'm glad to join in and help when
and however I can.

I think it worth to note that Jean has some important publications on
technical writing:

http://www.jeanweber.com/books/ITHH_Ebook.pdf

http://www.lulu.com/shop/jean-hollis-weber/self-publishing-using-libreoffice-writer/paperback/product-21744098.html

Olivier

The second book Olivier mentions is somewhat obsolete, being for LO v3.6.
Somewhere I have a free PDF, which I can make available to team members.
Updating that book has been on my to-do list for several years, but I may
never get around to it.

Jean