Building help separately from LibreOffice

The instructions I found for building help pages are on this wiki page - How
to verify changes
<https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Documentation/Help#How_to_verify_changes>.
But they force me to build LibreOffice to produce the help, which takes a
long time. My first build hasn't finished yet. Furthermore, I see it clones
the help repository when I build with -with-help=html/online option, so I
guess I need to push my changes before I can test them. Is there a way to
build the help separately, so I can make changes to my local repo and test
them before I push the changes to Gerrit?

Thanks,
Travis

Hello Travis

Thanks for your efforts in the Help. The current Help development cycle
requires indeed a full build. I have nevertheless some shortcuts to offer.

A XHP editor is available to test and edit a Help file and render the
page. It is still work in progress but IMHO (false modesty) it serves
quite well to address small to medium changes in the XML.

The instructions are in the page

https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/DocumentationHelpEditor

Since you cloned the Help repo, you can open a cloned Help file from the
editor File menu and edit it, then save it.

Another way to edit Help files is by editing/patching the Help file
directly in Gerrit (a friendly service on top of git), as explained in
the page

https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Documentation/GerritEditing

Now with these 2 tools you can do a patch and play with the 2 together:

You can edit a Help file in the XHP editor and do all checks
(<-Important!). On another tab of your browser you can open the same
file in gerrit editor (this time the file is in the repository). The
good thing is that you can copy&paste from XHP editor to gerrit (and
vice versa) as they are pure text and both services use the same editor
(codemirror). This way you don't have to do command-line git wizardry
and you can submit the patch from gerrit.

I advise to read carefully the instructions of the wiki page, including
the references to the XHP tags.

Kind regards
Olivier

Alright, that workflow sounds good. Despite studying the XHP tags and
document structure, I know I'll still make mistakes and the lack of
validation or preview in Gerrit worried me. I didn't want to directly edit
files in Gerrit and submit a bunch of error ridden help pages by mistake.
So I was looking for a way to locally edit and test them to ensure nothing
was wrong. Instead, I will keep my local repository up to date, preview and
validate edits in the help editor, and then add the patches directly in
Gerrit.

I will take a look at the open bugs tomorrow and try this out.

Travis

HI Travis

Don't worry on making mistakes under gerrit. Your Help patch will be
reviewed by a peer developer before merging. If the patch does not fit
our expected quality/accuracy it will be down-voted until you fix it to
make us happy.

Our development process relies on technical merits of the work
submitted, there will a time in future where you will be granted rights
to merge patches yourself based on your contributions and skills.

Kind regards
Olivier