Wish list item - docs for Tech Writers

[Daniel_Friedman]

Hi everyone on the LibreOffice Documentation team,

My name is Daniel Friedman, I am a student in Technical Communication at Seneca College in Toronto. I am interested in contributing to one of the items on your wish-list, user documentation geared toward technical writers, as part of a class project. I am working with two teammates on the project towards the goal of creating a 15-20 page document by November 17.

For this particular document I envision a hard-boiled user guide which shows tech writers where to find the features that are most useful to them (styles, supported file formats, track changes, working with templates, tables of content, references, etc.) along with a short description of how they're used. Of course, to proceed with this project, we would need your consent and what you think are the requirements for this project. If this work sounds like something you'd be interested, please email me back so we can discuss next steps.

Sincerely,
Daniel Friedman

[jeanweber]

Hey, Daniel, that's great! Welcome to our group.

Actually you don't need our consent to write about LibO, but if your
instructor wants our agreement for your project, you've got it.

Requirements: well, at the moment we're all making this up as we go
along. Here are my thoughts.

I put together a draft template for the user guides, but it isn't
"official" (yet), there is no requirement to use it for the sort of
short document you have described, and it might not be the best choice
for your doc anyway.
http://www.oooauthors.org/english/libreoffice3/resources/LO3_chapter_template.ott/view

Your document should have a license (copyright) compatible with the
project; CC-BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)
is probably best. It should be made available in ODT format as well as
any other formats you may wish to provide (PDF?).

FYI, here is my wish list for topics to cover for techwriters:
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Documentation/Dashboard/Tutorials/Targeted#Topics_to_cover_for_technical_writers

Obviously that is too long a list for your project, but the subset you
have suggested sounds like a good starting point.

Over to you...

--Jean