Re: [libreoffice-users] Cannot use help

Hi :)  
Generally i think most people agree that despite the heroic efforts of all too few people the 
built-in help is a bit of an out-dated pita.  

Editing it is a pain because it requires a good understanding of Xml and IDs and stuff that most 
good documenter's don't want to know about and most people that do know it are a little too geeky 
to be good documenters.  Despite that we have had some great contributions from people but it's not 
been enough to turn around Sun's misguided attempt to 'upgrade' from the previous help system.  

On the other hand the full Guides are fairly awesome and very pretty so it's worth downloading a 
few or even buying the printed versions from Lulu.  Here's the wiki showing all the guides and (at 
the moment) still various old edition
https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Documentation/Publications
but the official site 
http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/documentation/
is probably easier for people to understand because it selects the ones from the wiki that are the 
most recent fully completed and doesn't list the ultra-new individual chapters nor the old archived 
ones.  


Could someone write an Faq about how to get the inbuilt help working on those rare times when it 
goes wonky and add it to the wiki?
https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Faq


The archives are painful.  The search seemed completely useless to me.  I got 33 results with none 
of them being even vaguely relevant.  Searching the archives never seems to get good results for 
me.  I put quotes around parts of it
"built-in help" - "how to activate it"
and that seemed to get results that were slightly more relevant but none of them seemed to solve 
the problem.  

The Ask LO bot is a good attempt to improve on the problems with the archives but the forums might 
be more helpful because they are more familiar interfaces for people.  

Regards from
Tom :)  





> ________________________________
> From: Graham Luffrum <grhmlffrm@gmail.com>
> To: Ken Heard <kenslists@teksavvy.com> 
> Cc: LibreOffice Users <users@global.libreoffice.org> 
> Sent: Sunday, 13 January 2013, 7:02
> Subject: Re: [libreoffice-users] Cannot use help
>
> Ken
>
> Go to
>
> https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/nabble-mailing-list-interface/
>
> and search for
>
> "built-in help - how to activate it"
>
> You are not the first to have this problem!
>
> Graham
>
>
> On 12 January 2013 20:56, Ken Heard <kenslists@teksavvy.com> wrote:
>
> > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> > Hash: SHA1
> >
> > Key F1, which is supposed to bring up help does nothing, even though I
> > have installed Debian Squeeze package libreoffice-help-en-gb.
> >
> > The "Help" option in the top title bar is a link to online help, which
> > is of limited usefulness because of its complexity and the length of
> > time it takes to download anything, compounded by the necessity to look
> > at several references before finding a useful one, if the process has
> > not timed out before finding one.
> >
> >
> > Is there any way to set up key F1 to provide contextual help from
> > package libreoffice-help-en-gb?
> >
> > Regards, Ken Heard
> > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
> > Version: GnuPG v2.0.14 (GNU/Linux)
> > Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/
> >
> > iEYEARECAAYFAlDxv9EACgkQlNlJzOkJmTevXgCdGRVGBYV2r/kdb27UHBjtTzGX
> > aegAn3kKPatWV7Lx5OdYanH/iPbN16RQ
> > =qHFc
> > -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
> >
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