Re: [libreoffice-l10n] Improving the usage of help.libreoffice.org site

Hi :)
The Published Guides are hosted on the wiki but they are very different from the wiki.  

With the Guides it is easy to see exactly which release of LibreOffice they were written for.  Also 
easy to see how recent (or old) each book is.  Also all the pages in a chapter, or even the entire 
book, are all written for the same version of LIbreOffice so users can extrapolate easily.  

All the other forms of help have a high chance of being inconsistent even within a page.  Also 
words may be used differently or different words used for the same thing.  For example are the 
buttons on the icon-bar buttons or icons or even tools?  How about on the keyboard?  Is there an 
on/off button on your keyboard?  

The documentation team agrees on what terms to use in order to be consistent throughout the guides. 
 For screen-shots they avoid shots done on Windows as there might be possible problems with MS's 
EULA.  Legal experts have advised in both directions so it's easier to be safe than to potentially 
have to deal with a problem later on.  

However they also follow the principles of "Release early and release often" so each release may 
not be 100% perfect but they do get closer to it.  

So if i were involved in doing the translations then i would leave updating the screen-shots to the 
2nd release or subsequent version in any particular language.  Of course some teams may find they 
have a person that figures out how to do them quickly and manages to race through the whole lot 
quite quickly.  Similarly with the quality of the translations.  As the bulk of the guides remain 
much the same from one release to the next it's possible to just gradually increase the quality 
over the course of a few new releases.  

Regards from
Tom :)  





> ________________________________
> From: Christian Lohmaier <lohmaier+ooofuture@googlemail.com>
> To: Donald Rogers <donr2648@clear.net.nz> 
> Cc: LibreOffice-l10n <l10n@global.libreoffice.org>; website+help@global.libreoffice.org 
> Sent: Sunday, 17 February 2013, 12:15
> Subject: Re: [libreoffice-l10n] Improving the usage of help.libreoffice.org site
>
> Hi Donald,
>
> On Sun, Feb 17, 2013 at 7:15 AM, Donald Rogers <donr2648@clear.net.nz> wrote:
> > It seems to me that there is a lot of duplication of effort and fragmentation of the help. We 
> > have at least the following:
> >
> > LO Help from the Help menu
> > help.libreoffice.org
>
> Those are identical. That's the whole point of help.libreoffice.org
>
> > wiki.documentfoundation.org
>
> this is more developer / active contributer oriented and less for
> endusers, although stuff is published there. But there's another
> discussion (or actually in this thread, I lost track) about not
> "abusing" wiki to publish large files, etc.
>
> > the guides
> > FAQ
>
> How can these be extra points when these are hosted on the mentioned sites?
>
> > ask.libreoffice.org
>
> A user-helps-user platform, no static documentation, but
> answeres/solutions for specific problems. You cannot cover every
> cornercase in regular documentation.
>
> > accessibility info
> > features
>
> See above, not really belong here as separate points, as they are
> found on sites. Otherwise you could just make separate bulletpoints
> for whetever you like.
> But the new-features page surely is also a marketing tool.
>
> > installation instructions
>
> Nobody reads those anyway :-) But what is wrong with having those?
>
> > mailing lists
>
> similar to ask.libreoffice.org, but most mailinglists are for
> coordination of active contributors. And while ask.libreoffice.org is
> fine for easy problems, more complex ones are better off on the maiing
> list.
>
> > Nabble
>
> That's just an interface to the mailinglists. Not everybody likes
> using their mailclient. And you forgot gmane/newsgroup interface, that
> also is an additional way to access/participate in the mailing lists.
>
> > IRC
>
> (near) real-time discussion - so again a different scope, useful for
> different stuff than the other ways to get help.
>
> You did happily mix passive sources of information with interactive stuff...
>
> > The guides are very good but to localize them requires not just translation and adaption, but 
> > also all the screen shots and other pictures need to be redone for each language. This would be 
> > a huge task. There are no guides yet for version 4.0.
>
> The principles of usage are the same, so no big deal really... And
> whether you do the screen shots or not is also a matter of taste...
> But doing screenshots of dialogs is getting easier and easier thanks
> to the "gladification" of the UI.
>
> > If we are to continue to have both the Help menu help and help.libreoffice.org help, can someone 
> > write some code to generate the help.libreoffice.org help from the same .po files that are used 
> > for the Help menu help?
>
> That was already answered help.libreoffice.org is what is in the help-module.
>
> > What sort of help is meant to be in the wiki?
>
> See above. I see it mainly as a source for information for active
> contributors/developers, less so for the enduser.
>
> > Is there any possible synergy between the FAQ and ask.libreoffice.org? Are they to be localized 
> > too?
>
> well, apart from people monitoring what kind of questions get asked
> the most on ask.libreoffice.org, there is no synergy. Questions are
> too widespread/too special in most cases.
>
> > LO apparently doesn't have the people power to keep even the English helps up to date, let alone 
> > all the other languages. Some of the localization teams are very small and can't keep up with 
> > even one of the help systems.
>
>
> Please explain / give an example what you are talking about here. I
> hate statements like that.
>
> > The Wiki is easier to work with than the CMS.
>
> What CMS please. There are tons of them.
>
> ciao
> Christian
>
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