Currently most of the help content referring to menus is incorrect and
has been for years. One reason for this sad situation is that due to
ancient structural decisions, it is outrageously difficult to adapt the
content to changes.
Here is the story in a nutshell:
1. The help system is architected. Repetition in content related to menu
items is avoided by clever structuring (hooray! the savings!)
2. Content is added, references to menus spread far and wide
3. Menu item locations are changed in a massive redesign operation,
making the help content obsolete
The pain is mostly caused by assumptions that certain menus of certain
modules are identical. Impress and Draw are the most problematic in this
regard.
Then we have the "how to access" pages with increasingly mixed content.
Consider the one for Edit menu, which now contains wonderful entries
like "Choose Edit - ImageMap in Writer and Calc or Tools - ImageMap in
Impress and Draw" or entries referring to a completely different menu
like "Choose Tools - Bibliography Database" and "Choose View - Navigator".
https://helponline.libreoffice.org/6.3/en-US/text/shared/00/edit_menu.html
We need a system, where the help content concerning the location of menu
items is automatically generated from the menu bar definition files. If
shared information on menus is desired, it needs to be produced
automatically.
The reason I add l10n list in Cc is that I want to raise awareness of
the current situation. Having incorrect information translated into
nearly 200 languages just multiplies the number of negative experiences.
Translators cannot fix this on the level of strings, it needs to be
dealt with structurally. It would be great, if members from the stronger
translation teams (de, fr, id...) would participate in the current
manual effort on fixing the menu help information.
Here are a few patches from me that show, how the changes can be done:
https://gerrit.libreoffice.org/#/c/68830/
https://gerrit.libreoffice.org/#/c/71436/
https://gerrit.libreoffice.org/#/c/71703/
If people get interested, I can offer assistance.
Ilmari
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- [libreoffice-l10n] Broken assumptions about menu structure in help content · Ilmari Lauhakangas
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