Re: [libreoffice-l10n] Need for a solid help content

Olivier,

What you wrote makes sense but seems to talk more about the online help 
rather than the inbuilt help. I can think of several commercial and OS 
tools off the top of my head which do not carry inbuilt help these days. 
Going to Help in Trados for example these days redirects you to the 
online Help whereas in the old days, there used to be inbuilt Help. 
Adobe also redirects to F1 user to online Help. MS Office only has 
vestiges of Help left ("Basic Help" in Word for example about using the 
Ribbon). Anything else you need to hit the Microsoft website for.

It may be that inbuilt Help was once the norm but I do not think it's 
going to be the norm for much longer and for obvious reasons 
(maintaining it seems to be a bit of a nightmare, in contrast to things 
like wikis).

Don't get me wrong, I'm not suggesting that we need no form of 
documentation. It's just the inbuilt stuff which I personally feel is 
becoming more of a liability than a useful tool in LO. Perhaps 
other/most users *like* inbuilt Help, I don't know, I do not consider 
myself the arbiter of such things, which is why I said it would be nice 
if some research was done. But I get the feeling Help is shifting onto 
the web more and more and if that is the case and if there are good 
reasons, LO should contemplate this.

Michael

Sgrìobh Olivier Hallot na leanas 13/12/2015 aig 19:05:
> There is a dimension where documentation get critical, and this is in 
> the enterprise and in the development. A software that does not carry 
> proper documentation is subject to several drawbacks. First, the help 
> desk of the enterprise need to get trained into the issues of 
> LibreOffice in the same way they need to addres MSOffice issues. For 
> that they need to know how the software works to assist the users. 
> Docs and references are crucial, together with proper professional 
> support. Second, the help desk is often charged per call. Enterprises 
> where user cannot find proper doc in their own language is facing a 
> higher TCO, because users call HD to get what they don't have at hand. 
> Third, in the way open source is developed and LibreOffice in 
> particular, there are no specs written in the canonical form a priori 
> before implementation (as it was in the OpenOffice.org times under 
> SUN/Oracle) and this is a choice LibreOffice made to offload all 
> hassle of development and rush into coding improvements long due. The 
> trade-off is a bunch of nice features very few know how to work and 
> the curious take much long time to figure it. Forth, by writing the 
> help pages we have a minimum of a reference guide to address bugs and 
> regressions. Without a reference, a regression is allway harder to 
> understand for the developer and the QA guys. Think about shortcut 
> ABC, that suddenty does not work anymore... how can the developer be 
> sure the sortcut was inded supposed to do what ABC was designed 
> originally.... So, users may not like the help content as we have 
> today and don't like to press F1, but it is our pursuit of quality 
> software to give them the best we can do in terms of documentation. 
> Admitedly our help system is not a piece of literature easy to read 
> (nor is MS Office too), but it must fullfill the mission to establish 
> the landmark of the sofware behaviour. Yes, "RTFM" comes to my mind 
> actually, but there must be an M somewhere. Finaly, other 
> documentation tools like public forums, books, wikis and even Google 
> are all stars of a documentation constellation but almost never figure 
> in a help desk SLA. As more litterature we produce on LibreOffice, the 
> best, because one of the steepest entry barrier we have to propagate 
> LibreOffice is its lack of culture in the office suite marketplace, 
> something MS already achieved long ago and is extremely hard to 
> displace. Of course, there is room for improvement. The nice part of 
> this is that it is well suited for the non-code-developer community of 
> LibreOffice. Give Help a chance. Kind regards 


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