Expertise needed for Writer Guide updates

The Writer Guide needs more input from people who understand the new features. I am often at a loss, and I suspect that new members of the team would be even more so, unless they happen to have expertise in some of the topics.

Many of the new features in Writer 7.5 (and some earlier versions) appear to be aimed at specialist users and/or MSWord compatibility. In many cases I do not understand these features and so I cannot write much about them. Blog posts by the developers sometimes give a clue but usually not enough context for me to understand the topic. When the Help for these features becomes available (usually one or more releases later), I can usually then figure them out and write something that I hope makes sense. But that is not timely for a guide that we’d like to be up to date and informative.

Because of this problem (my lack of expertise and the lack of suitable expert review and input), I have been unable to meet my own minimal standards for correct and useful content. Therefore, I am reluctant to continue to update this book.

I took a look at some 7.5 release notes. There first two looked took be related to Collabora. Then it was on to things related to non English languages.

My head hurts and I think the foreign language stuff requires someone who knows… Arabic maybe…

Wow.

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I am with you @jeanweber as I often write Help pages and extended tips for the new release.

I think that the best is to call for a heads-up here.

In all modules, the new features requires extensive and time consuming tests to understand the purpose and sometimes imagine the use case it was designed to fit.

And as mentioned by @pitonyak, how can we address RTL-specific features in an English book? Does it makes sense (I can’t test non-western features as I can’t read RTL or CJK languages).

Regards
Olivier

PS: I’m fighting to write some tutorial on digital signatures and security. I believe it deserves a full chapter in one of our book. Document signature, PDF signature, Document classification, BAF, BAIL, X509, OpenPGP, paragraph signature and more are delicacies for connoisseurs.