LibreOffice WikiHelp

I think the biggest issue is the offline editing; and I think here we
can use the Wiki Publisher
(http://extensions.services.openoffice.org/project/wikipublisher) to
edit the pages in LibreOffice.

  Ooh - that is an interesting idea :slight_smile:

  I did not test it yet, but if the
extension misses the functionality to merge the changes done in the
wiki, it will be easy to plug it to LibreOffice document merge feature.

  Sure; but I suspect there are issues around dictionaries, and other
helpful tooling that make translators lives easy :slight_smile:

  Anyhow - it'd be great to collect the ideas for flows into the wiki
page; quite possibly there are several flows possible, and we can choose
per language. eg. if there is already a near-perfect translation, I can
understand people might not want it 'vandalised' by others changing
it :slight_smile: On the other hand, if there is simply no translation at all
currently for a language, almost anything might look better than nothing
- so perhaps an in-wiki-editing policy might make sense.

  Either way, I for one am excited by the idea of having something that
is easier to edit and improve in English, although clearly the more, and
higher quality help in English we have, the harder the (already huge)
help translation problem becomes I guess.

  HTH,

    Michael.

> I think the biggest issue is the offline editing; and I think here we
> can use the Wiki Publisher
> (http://extensions.services.openoffice.org/project/wikipublisher) to
> edit the pages in LibreOffice.

        Ooh - that is an interesting idea :slight_smile:

I believe that is not a good idea. It will reformat the content and make
changes tracking a nightmare. Also, translating from changed US wiki to
other languages will be a nightmare.

> I did not test it yet, but if the
> extension misses the functionality to merge the changes done in the
> wiki, it will be easy to plug it to LibreOffice document merge feature.

        Sure; but I suspect there are issues around dictionaries, and other
helpful tooling that make translators lives easy :slight_smile:

       Anyhow - it'd be great to collect the ideas for flows into the wiki
page; quite possibly there are several flows possible, and we can choose
per language. eg. if there is already a near-perfect translation, I can
understand people might not want it 'vandalised' by others changing
it :slight_smile: On the other hand, if there is simply no translation at all
currently for a language, almost anything might look better than nothing
- so perhaps an in-wiki-editing policy might make sense.

       Either way, I for one am excited by the idea of having something
that
is easier to edit and improve in English, although clearly the more, and
higher quality help in English we have, the harder the (already huge)
help translation problem becomes I guess.

I don't have time to go to wiki and edit it, please someone do it if you
deem my thoughts worth published there.

I guess from all the discussion here we see that the LO developers and
documentation team wish to get help onto a new platform, where it will be
easier to maintain.

On the other hand the localization teams who have invested big resources
into translating the huge help system wish to continue working like before
in a Pootle or similar environment.

I propose you develop a system to have English help editable on wiki but
fully transportable back to the po/xliff system (interchangeable).
All the translations would start from the English po/xliff help files and
decide whether to
a) strictly translate English help (like we Slovenians decided) and keep
working with po/xliff files; the online help would be updated from these
files at least with every minor and major release;
or
b) develop their own help in the wiki and never go back again;

Before I go on I need an answer to a question. I tried the help in RC1 and
it seems that help items do not get passed to wiki i.e. the default module
help page opens even if you press F1 in a certain dialog (the previous
bundled help showed that definite topic in the help). Is this how the wiki
help is envisioned? If it is, one need a lot of searching to even get to a
certain topic and this makes the help totally unusable. If this is the case
the wiki help should only be a web version of the bundled help, just a copy
made after every release from the release translations.

Lp, m.

Hi Martin,

> > I think the biggest issue is the offline editing; and I think here we
> > can use the Wiki Publisher
> > (http://extensions.services.openoffice.org/project/wikipublisher) to
> > edit the pages in LibreOffice.

[...]

I believe that is not a good idea. It will reformat the content and make
changes tracking a nightmare. Also, translating from changed US wiki to
other languages will be a nightmare.

Let's see - as I said, so far I haven't done any testing, to see how
good it is; I can imagine it works just well, and of course, even the
opposite scenario :slight_smile:

I propose you develop a system to have English help editable on wiki but
fully transportable back to the po/xliff system (interchangeable).
All the translations would start from the English po/xliff help files and
decide whether to
a) strictly translate English help (like we Slovenians decided) and keep
working with po/xliff files; the online help would be updated from these
files at least with every minor and major release;
or
b) develop their own help in the wiki and never go back again;

Yes, this seems so far working for most :slight_smile: I'll make sure that all the
work you've done on the the help translation so far is not lost.

Before I go on I need an answer to a question. I tried the help in RC1 and
it seems that help items do not get passed to wiki i.e. the default module
help page opens even if you press F1 in a certain dialog (the previous
bundled help showed that definite topic in the help).

This is a blocker bug, already reported as:

https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=32338

It works in some of the scenarios (eg. in the menus), but not in the
dialogs. I am working on it, this is of course not intended.

Regards,
Kendy

Hi Michael,

> - after 3.3, I'll start to work on tooling to convert it back to offline
> help

Just out of interest, is there any chance that the tooling you create
can incorporate small images into the offline help or is not not
possible under the current help infrastructure?

Hard to say at the moment, without actually having started this; but of
course I'll try to retain as much information as possible - including
the images.

Regards,
Kendy

Hi Kendy, *,

Jan Holesovsky wrote (13-12-10 14:33)

Maybe I am entering a thin ice here, but do not think we have a good
help as of now. There is so few information there, in many times in the
form "'Insert Picture' functionality inserts a picture from a file." :wink:
[...]

Some parts are (very) good, some not, or just useless (as you show with the example).

We need to grow the family of the documentation writers, and we cannot
do that by using the current tools. Authoring the .xhp files as we have
[...]
So we need to do the work easier not only for the translators, but for
the help authors, or the documentation team in general, too. And I
believe that with wiki, this has the biggest potential to scale.

I think it is important and well worth trying, and from what I have seen in this thread (read a bit just this evening), there is good intention to communicate, understand the needs and work on a good solution :slight_smile:

Also this evening, I saw that others try to help us with extra tips [1] which of course is very friendly :wink:

Best,
Cor

1] http://documentation.openoffice.org/servlets/ReadMsg?list=dev&msgNo=6558