Contributing to LibreOffice documentation

Hello there,

My name is Matthew An and I am a recent graduate of the Rhetoric and
Professional Writing program at the University of Waterloo. I was hoping to
contribute to the LibreOffice documentation as a Writer or Reviewer. I have
previous experience at IBM as a technical writer as well as a small startup
company in New Jersey. At the moment, I am in the process of entering
graduate school in the fall, so I thought I could use my free time to hone
my tech writing skills.

Please let me know if you would like a copy of my resume. I hope that I can
give back to the software that I developed most of my writing skills with!

Thanks for your time,

Matthew

Welcome Matthew

Your skills in LibreOffice are indeed important to our community and you
will find a lot to do.

We have a set of guides that need to be updated. These guides are edited
in Writer with our best practices (e.g. styles, master documents, etc...)

We can start in 2 directions

one, is to update our introductory text "Getting Started" from version
5.2 (almost done) to version 5.3 (easy to medium difficulty).

The second is to take one of our module guide (e.g. spreadsheet book)
and update to version 5.3, requiring quite deep knowledge in the module
software (medium to hard difficulty).

To get the guides and have a glimpse on how they actually look like
please get any of them in the documentation website at

http://documentation.libreoffice.org/en/

and let me know your prefered project.

Kind regards

Olivier

Hi Olivier,

Thank you for your response. Are the docs mainly situated in the books on
the documentation page? I think I would prefer to handle the Getting
Started pages first, and then progressing from there to other projects.
That being said, is there any rudimentary work that I can do to get
familiar with your protocols? I downloaded the doc template off of the
website, but I was wondering if there was some proofreading work or basic
writing work that I could practice on before handling a larger project.

Thanks,

Matthew

Matthew,

Welcome to the team!

More info on our processes is here:
https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Documentation/Development

Some of that is a bit out of date, but you should get the idea.

If Olivier hasn't already done so, I'll create an account for you on
ODFAuthors, which is where we store the working files of the chapters of
the various books.

As for something to get you started, I'm updating the Writer Guide from
v4.2 to 5.2, which is a big jump and needs to include a lot of changes. I
would appreciate a careful and thorough review of the chapters I've done,
which are here:
http://www.odfauthors.org/libreoffice/english/writer-guide/drafts-v5.2
Or here:
http://www.odfauthors.org/libreoffice/english/writer-guide/feedback-5.2

Note 1: you'll need to be logged in to see these.
Note 2: I am making some changes in the organisation of this book. You can
see the chapter structure listed here:
https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Documentation/Development/UserGuideTasks#Writer_Guide

--Jean
(Former Team Leader, LibreOffice Documentation)

Thank you for the information Jean. I'll take a further look through the
documentation in the morning. Also, I don't seem to have an ODFAuthors
account yet, so I haven't been able to review the links you sent me.

Thanks for letting me know about the processes though, I look forward to
contributing to the project in the near future!

Regards,

Matthew

Matthew,
You should have received an email in the last half hour or hour with a
link to set your ODFAuthors password. Sorry for the delay; I had some
minor hardware dramas this morning, resolved now.

I forgot to mention that you can create your own wiki account, if you
don't already have one.

Regards, Jean

Thank you for your help Jean, I just finalized my account on ODFAuthors.
However, both the feedback 5.2 and drafts 5.2 folders are empty for me, do
I need additional privileges to fully access them?

Hi Matthew,

It sounds like you have not logged in to your authors account. Do you
see your name in the top right hand corner of the window, or the words
"Log In"? If you see "Log In", click that link and use the credentials
Jean arranged for you.

For GS52 the are no files in the "Drafts" folder (not surprising), but
there are ~15 files in the "Feedback" folder.

HTH

Dave

Thanks for the help Dave! You're right-it looks like I wasn't logged into
my account, my mistake.

@Jean: I now have access to the docs as well as a wiki account, and I will
try my best to look through the docs for the next little while.

Regards,

Matthew