Meeting Minutes of the documentation team 5/29/2019

[ohallot]

Wednesday May 29th 2019, at 18:00 UTC

Presents: Drew Jensen, Dave Barton, Cathy Crumbley, LibreOfficiant,
Olivier Hallot, Caroline

Fall back chat:
https://irc.documentfoundation.org/?settings=#libreoffice-doc

Telegram group
https://t.me/joinchat/ALeRuUFCxyZY0wzoddldWQ

TDF Jitsi room
https://jitsi.documentfoundation.org/tdfdocteam

Agenda + Discussion

+ Contributors guide:
https://nextcloud.documentfoundation.org/s/xikgjGYgGTjr2ni
    + Quite old (Dave)
    + Need rewrite, update on terminology (Dave)
    + Consistency is important (all)
    + Use the cloud nature of the tool and update directly / add
comments (Drew)
    + Comments are hard to use/see in NextCloud (Dave)
    + Move Contributor Guide to wiki (Consensus)

+ Chart Chapter
    + buggy !!! (Cathy)
    + so many different directions on how to do
        + Guide: whe should go for menus (?)
            + menus has everithing (Dave)
        + several methods to describe (Cathy)
        + Menus and notebook bars, worsen things (drew)
        + The side bar is always the same (drew)
        + Sidebar is partial (drew)

+ References to toolbars icons shold be de-emphasized
    + icon theme issues
    + hard to insert icon in text
    + breaks paragraph layout smoothness
    + depends on toobar customization
    + Mention toolbar with no icon specific
    + mention context menu
        + Context menu is a set of commands available to the selected
object

+ Graphics:
    + Drawings in Draw are objects when embedded in Writer
    + Convert OLE object into image
        + Use PNG format. JPEG has quality trade-off.

+ Inserting images
    + frame resizing issue (dave)

Warm Welcome to Caroline:
"hi team - I am a professional Tech Writer in the USA with 5 years of
Tech Writing experience & 20 years of business experience - I do
this OL volunteer stuff on the side (part-time) - a lot of the same
issues happen in the corporate world as we discuss in this forum - big
fan of the database tool as I loathe Access - have a happy healthy week"

Next meeting Wednesday June 12th 2019, at 18:00 UTC

[LukeJKendall]

Is this just in reference to a specific guide? It's surely not a general recommendation, I hope?

In Draw you have the full object description. Often the drawing will be vector art, or largely vector art. So preserving that information instead of throwing it away is critically important for the use case of wanting to produce a printed book, or just a print.

Any bitmap format is lossy WRT the original vector graphics.

May I request, since Writer supports SVG, you save the object as an SVG image? That way the vector parts can stay vector, the image parts as image, and it supports transparency too. (I would have said EPS until I remembered it doesn't support transparency in its compositing model.)

Forcing it to a bitmap image type introduces the question of what resolution to choose, and then of course the problem that you need a high-res if it might be needed for printing but a low-res is all that's needed if it never will be.

(I'm assuming in all this that the OLE object - which would allow round-tripping with Draw, presumably - is for some reason a problem?)

Regards,

luke

PS:

Office supports its "Windows Enhanced Metafile" image format for exactly the reason that it preserves linework, and so you can enlarge or print with good quality.

[daveb]

Luke, you are reading the meeting notes shorthand entirely out of
context. This was a side discussion to help one person with one possible
solution to an issue they were experiencing. It had absolutely nothing
to do with anything being written into any LO documentation.

[ohallot]

Hi Luke

You are right in principle, if we stay in the LibreOffice editing
environment.

The issue raises when you export to other formats such as mediawiki,
XHTML or EPUB, then the OLE objects are not rendered or requires further
work.

So OLE objects must be kept in their source format for update /
maintenance but converted to images when inserted in a document aimed to
be exported to alien formats.

regards

[LukeJKendall]

+ Graphics:
     + Drawings in Draw are objects when embedded in Writer
     + Convert OLE object into image
         + Use PNG format. JPEG has quality trade-off.

Is this just in reference to a specific guide?  It's surely not a
general recommendation, I hope?

In Draw you have the full object description. Often the drawing will be
vector art, or largely vector art.  So preserving that information
instead of throwing it away is critically important for the use case of
wanting to produce a printed book, or just a print.

Any bitmap format is lossy WRT the original vector graphics.

May I request, since Writer supports SVG, you save the object as an SVG
image?  That way the vector parts can stay vector, the image parts as
image, and it supports transparency too.  (I would have said EPS until I
remembered it doesn't support transparency in its compositing model.)

Forcing it to a bitmap image type introduces the question of what
resolution to choose, and then of course the problem that you need a
high-res if it might be needed for printing but a low-res is all that's
needed if it never will be.

(I'm assuming in all this that the OLE object - which would allow
round-tripping with Draw, presumably - is for some reason a problem?)

Regards,

luke

PS:

Office supports its "Windows Enhanced Metafile" image format for exactly
the reason that it preserves linework, and so you can enlarge or print
with good quality.

I'm glad to hear that it was a narrow topic and I misunderstood the context. But...

Hi Luke

You are right in principle, if we stay in the LibreOffice editing
environment.

The issue raises when you export to other formats such as mediawiki,
XHTML or EPUB, then the OLE objects are not rendered or requires further
work.

So OLE objects must be kept in their source format for update /
maintenance but converted to images when inserted in a document aimed to
be exported to alien formats.

regards

True, but exporting in SVG is supported by epub and xhtml and preserves the benefits. EPS would best match PDF. For the others, yes, of course you'd need to convert to image.

I just realised LO offers the user no control of the image formats chosen during export. I don't know whether it automatically picks the best match to the target capabilities, or the simplest (convert to JPEG or PNG). Is that covered in one of the documents?

If someone went to the trouble of embedding SVG (or EPS) images to ensure lines stayed crisp - would export to an HTML format (or PDF) preserve that, or convert to images? I'd say I'm now way off topic and straying into the feature request area.

Sorry.

luke