Extended tips and the "What's This?" menu option

Documentation General
#1

Good morning Olivier,

Before I joined the project, I understand that these options did something useful. (I can't define exactly what or when!)

As reported in bug 120538, they have not worked for some time, since the Help system was upgraded.

In Calc, the Help > What's This? option on the Menu bar appears to be available (not greyed out) but doesn't appear to do anything. Similarly the Tools > Options > LibreOffice > General > Help > Extended tips option isn't greyed out but doesn't appear to do anything.

In the latest Calc Guide, the text implies that these options will do something useful. The 6.0 Writer Guide gives the same impression and I haven't checked others. I am uncomfortable ignoring the fact that these options don't anything and running the risk of confusing readers.

Do we have an agreement about how cases like this should be addressed in the guides?

Regards,

Steve

#2

If they aren't functional, should they be removed?
Gordon Bates
berrykevin321@gmaill.com
github.com/jdoes

#3

The extended tips are not solved yet in the Help for LibreOffice.

It may be removed in the Guide, but it will return when we fix the issue.

https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=118148

Olivier

#4

Thanks Olivier,

Have you any opinion on a likely time-scale for fixing the problem? Is this something that the developers are actively working on?

Regards,

Steve

<stevemfanning.wh@gmail.com>

#5

Hi Steve, all,

I just verified that I was wrong. The technical part of the problem is
actually solved. Some dialogs already have the Extended tips
implemented. For example

Tools > Options > LibreOffice Calc > Calculate > Wildcards.

(enable extended tips in Tools > Options > LibreOffice > General)

But it seems to be an exception. I foresee a very extensive work ahead
to populate the dialogs with the Extended tooltips (ET) of each dialog
widget. The contents of each ET already exist in the <ahelp> tag of the
corresponding Help page. I guess 60 to 80% of the ETs are there, but
copying them to the dialog files will add translation workload, so it is
better do it slowly.

There is about 2253 dialogs (ui files) in LibreOffice and 2463 Help
pages (xhp), so...

Kind regards
Olivier

#6

I think we should mention in the guides (where the Help and the
Options dialog are descrived) that those features are not working in
this release, to save people thinking they are doing something wrong.
Jean

#7

All,

I realise that there is a tension here - while we want to avoid confusing our users and readers, we would also prefer not to advertise our problems.

In the context of extended tips and the What's This? function, what do people think of including a simple note that reads as follows:
"The What's This? facility and extended tips are currently being improved and so in LibreOffice 7.0 they are not fully functional."

Regards,

Steve

#8

Hi Steve, All

I am ok to inform that we are working on the issue.

Olivier

#9

Can you put "(BETA)" in the menu, and people will understand that it is
still under development? Do you thing the general public understands that
BETA means something might not be fully functional?

Gordon Bates
berrykevin321@gmaill.com
github.com/jdoes

#10

Since the time of this thread, we managed to move a lot of extended tips to the appropriate dialogs, preserving transtations.

But not all extended tip was moved, some were quite hard to catch in scripts we used or were in some corner case.

Also some are related to menus and we not yet solved the issue.

So I wrote a wiki page to assist people that want to challenge themselves in LibreOffice development addressing a rather easy hack:

https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Documentation/ExtendedTips

kind regards
Olivier

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