Another "little" LO Documentation task I set for myself over the weekend
was to draft a proposal for a template for the 6.x series guides, which
I have now completed and uploaded to:
https://nextcloud.documentfoundation.org/f/81381
Basically my draft is only an adaptation of Jean's original LO6.0
template. My draft is liberally scattered with comments, some in
response to Jean's original comments.
So what changes are proposed? The main points are:
* The question of image anchoring within a frame remains open. It may
be that we have a need for 2 different anchors for electronically
published chapters/guides and another for (Lulu) paper printed guides.
* Wherever possible I have used "Document Properties" and other fields
to automate the updating of documents.
* In 2 of Jean's original comments, she makes valid recommendations to
have additional character styles (LOMenu Path and LOKeystroke) for
the possible requirement of style changes in future guides. I
propose removing these additional styles because our documentation
revision time frame does not really justify these extra styles and
they only serve to complicate guide style formatting and confuse
contributors as to when and which style to use. For a little
simplification, I am proposing these character styles be removed and
the identical default "*Strong Emphasis*" and "/Emphasis/" styles be
used instead.
* Our current guides give little information to the reader about the
content/layout of the chapter/guide, So I have inserted a new
section, which includes macOS/other OS key equivalents, moving it
fro the "Copyright" page. Here I leave it to contributors to decide
what Information might be most useful to readers in understanding
what the chapter content/layout provides, although it might be that
we could create some kind of boilerplate outline to be used.
* For the benefit of seriously color vision impaired people (like
myself) I have changed the background and text color of the
"Caution" heading. To you color vision perfect folks who find this
change glaringly obnoxious, I say do what I have to do every day,
"/live with it/".
* Jean's original comment proposed increasing the Numbering styles
beyond 3 levels. Checking through previous guides I can find no
evidence of where we have needed or used numbering levels beyond
level 3. My proposal is not to add more levels.
* Jean's original comment proposed that we describe various levels for
"Mixed Lists". Again, after checking through previous guides I can
find no evidence of where we have needed or used mixed lists. My
proposal is to not define any "Mixed Lists" styles.
* I have added a comment in reply to Jean's original comment regarding
"Simple Lists" which should be self evident.
* Likewise, the "Text Body Intro" style might have some value if the
the paragraph above or below spacing were substantially different
from the default "Text Body" style. My proposal is to remove the style.
Here I feel it necessary to make it absolutely clear that if any of the
above might seem that I am attacking Jean's work on this template, I am
definitely NOT. I have the greatest respect for Jean's many years of
contributing to this project and for creating the core of this template,
which I seriously doubt I could have done myself from scratch.
I know that some members of the Doc's Team are keen to give this
template's styles a "LO" or similar prefix, but I have opted to stay, as
much as possible, with default styles, because giving what are
essentially default styles new names does not automatically update the
styles used in a document the template is applied to, which in turn
requires more editing.
Would those of you having access to Nextcloud please take a look at the
draft template and discus this at the next docs meeting or post back to
the list if you think anything should be changed or done differently.
Thanks & Regards
Dave