Improving the usage of help.libreoffice.org site

[Zeki]

Hi,

As we all know LibreOffice help is served in two ways; the locally
installed help package and online help at help.libreoffice.org. I
think we all accept that this huge help content is not used/preferred
by users. Personally i think that a huge percent of users even don't
know these resources.

Like ordinary computer users, we always start searching help from
Google. That should be accepted the usual and normal habit.

I think we can improve the usage of the help with improving the
existence of help and changing the habits of the users.

Currently online help wiki hosts 21 languages, which have almost
completed help translations. But i think it is not enough for all this
localization effort.

LibreOffice gives great importance on localization, and why we serve
less than this? There are 39 languages translated the help over %70.
This means a lot, and more for the users of this language. 18 language
will bring thousand of opportunities to get help, and fight discourage
about LibreOffice.

Not all of our local communities has a network, forum or other
platforms to serve and share the knowledge. Help content is a golden
mine for us. For example, we established our Turkish forum and we have
only a little info there, so Google cannot serve the answers from us,
but if our help content was uploaded, everything will be different.

I have some ideas to make the help content more efficient by changing
the habits of the users.

- Adding more languages to the wiki (over %70 completion or %50 will be better)
- Adding sharing widgets to wiki pages, which we may share useful
stuff in social media. There are usefull widgets for wikimedia
http://www.mediawikiwidgets.org/Widgets_Catalog * Personnally i am
thinking pick usefull info and share as tip of day in my twitter and
Google+ as the tip of day etc regularly when our language is added to
the site.
- Adding an info bar to http://ask.libreoffice.org/ and inform users
about the help site, which is the first source of self learning and
solving problems
- Blogging about both online help site and embed help to increase the
awareness about this sites in our own language.
- When helping people, kindly notify them that they may have abundant
info from this help
- Improve the landing pages from the users which have not yet
installed the help package
- A little polish (We had some in our Turkish wiki:
http://wiki.libreoffice.org.tr/Ana_sayfa)

Sharing, blogging and giving links to help site will also improve the
Google Pagerank(currently 5 while MS office help site has 8) and that
will result better search resources.

We spent hours for creating and translating this help, whatever it is
thought to be very very outdated(i don't agree) as i said it has all
the stuff and it is a gold mine. We may serve and use it better i
think.

Best regards,
Zeki

PS: Michael, thats my ping for Kendy

[Tom_Davies]

Hi

From what i can make out there has been almost no-one updating the in-built help in the last 8 years or so!

The requirement to understand Xml means that people whose skills are in producing good quality documentation are unable to understand or work on the in-built help.  So if anyone has been updating the in-built help then it's been people that understand coding well but not necessarily grok the nuances of non-technical-human communication.

Any translation teams that have done straight translations into their own languages now have very out-dated in-built help packages.  In the past that has not been too much of a problem.  Sun aimed for stability and tried to suppress innovation and new-feature development.  With LibreOffice it is becoming a big problem.  Hopefully translators have been usign their own skills as producers of good quality work to modify and add to the in-built help.  In which case we need a translation back into English in order to update what we have.

On the English User Support lists we have had lots of people grumble that they couldn't get LibreOffice to work and that the in-built help was useless, inadequate or even blatantly wrong or missing crucial features.  Many complained that it was typical of OpenSource that it had such bad documentation and was a reason they would prefer to go back to MS.  Once pointed to the published Guides they turned around completely, even ending up paying for guides published by the printing service at Lulu and becoming advocates encouraging others to use LibreOffice.

Wiki's are great but quickly become quite difficult to find your way around even for longer-term users.  Also since they are often written by normal users instead of people skilled in producing good quality documentation we again run into difficulties.  Also it requires that people understand wiki-editing more than they understand how to write well.

So i think that if we want good quality documentation then the focus for translators really needs to be on the published Guides.

Notice that those published guides are generating a small profit for the documentation team.  Even though the guides are available for free from many sources people have still made a big effort to buy the professionally printed guides from the store at Lulu.  That happens enough that the docs team can more than cover the costs of getting the guides into other stores and a bit more for contingencies and other sundry costs.

More importantly people see attractively and professionally printed guides in various place and that spreads the word about LibreOffice more.

So i think it's important to stop placing such high priority on translating the in-built (outdated) help and make more of a push into translating the published guides.

Regards from
Tom

[filmsi]

Tom, I do not agree with you.

Slovenian team will not throw away the translated help nor will it
allow to throw away its translated help. We do not have a translated
user guide, but are working on it. And let me tell you, even the user
guide is not completely up-to-date.

Lp, m.

[Rimas_Kudelis]

Hi Martin,

I didn't see a suggestion to "throw away" anything in Tom's post. I think the suggestion was to simply focus on the user guide if you have a choice.
And I don't know how Slovenian team works, maybe you are committed to maintaining and updating the Help yourselves, but if not (that is, if you only correct minor mistakes and sync our translation with English original, which, according to Tom, is outdated), then with every new major release, that help content becomes less and less covering, in which case, it might become worth throwing away (or, more likely, reworking it into something better and perhaps easier to maintain) at some point.

Rimas

2013.02.14 11:55, Martin Srebotnjak wrote:

[sophi]

Hi all,

Hi Martin,

I didn't see a suggestion to "throw away" anything in Tom's post. I
think the suggestion was to simply focus on the user guide if you have a
choice.
And I don't know how Slovenian team works, maybe you are committed to
maintaining and updating the Help yourselves, but if not (that is, if
you only correct minor mistakes and sync our translation with English
original, which, according to Tom, is outdated), then with every new
major release, that help content becomes less and less covering, in
which case, it might become worth throwing away (or, more likely,
reworking it into something better and perhaps easier to maintain) at
some point.

The help files and documentation are completely different topics and
can't replace one by another one (even legally for some countries) but
can complete (what I clearly explain to Tom, but it seems he is lobbying
the guides against the help files).
It's not true to say that the help files haven't been updated for 8
years, even if it's clear that it wasn't a priority for our dev currently.
I've retrieved all the necessary tools to work on the help files and we
have a FR team willing to work here. Jean is also interested but she
will be available mid march which is not an issue considering the work.
Andras is also working on simplifying the process, see his blog post on
http://planet.documentfoundation.org/
When you see something that is not perfect, don't throw it away, on the
contrary, try to make it fit your needs.
The work done by Kendy is also to take into consideration for the long
run, it has to be organized and we have to agree on a workflow.
All that to say that the work done to localize the help files, whatever
their state currently, is to be taken into consideration for each team
and don't listen to those who tell you that it's a waste of time, it's
not, it brings a great value to our product and is necessary to deliver
it in some countries regarding the law.
Kind regards
Sophie

[Tom_Davies]

Hi
I'm not saying to throw anything away.  Well i might be but i don't mean to be because throwing stuff away is often a really bad move.

Also i think i definitely am misunderstanding something.  That is my fault because Sophie really has tried to explain it to me several times.  Possibly i am just not close enough to the work to see the differences between a few different things.

The in-built help is enormously helpful even if it is out-dated and even wrong or missing parts.  When we do get around to updating it then we need a good starting point to work from and that makes it even more useful.  It's very convenient for users to just be able to click within their program and instantly get hints&tips relevant to what they are doing.  Even if they have a good internet connection then it can be faster than a google-search or looking it up in a book.

If it's not being updated at all then there is no point in re-translating it for each release.  It's a finished job in most languages already.  Those that are not finished yet should only need to translate it once.  All completed or even incomplete translations should (imo) just feed straight into the next release's version without even having to glance through.

If it is being up-dated but only by geeks (and/or devs) then could we find out which bits are different and then only translate those bits?

If translators have been updating it themselves (and perhaps de-geeking it) then could some of their work be translated back into English so that everyone can have an improved version to work from?  Even bad English might well be a help.

I definitely agree with NOT throwing it away.  "Release early and release often" suggests that even fairly bad releases have the advantage of being seen and hopefully inspiring people to join in with the process of improving it.  If something is not released or doesn't exist (or been deleted) then how would people ever know how much work needs to be done or where they could help?! :)  You might find a number of people all start again from scratch and end up repeating the same work as each other and doing stuff that has already been done anyway, which all sounds like a tfn to me.  So, definitely keep what we do have especially the translations (which might well be better than the original).

Regards from
Tom

[Tom_Davies]

Hi
Oops, yes i have re-read my post.  If you read it in a certain way then it does look like i suggested throwing away the resource but i would definitely disagree with doing that too.

The guides are not perfect and from a few comments recently i kinda gather that they used to be really quite bad.  However, now they excellent and possibly the best out of all the documentation that is available for LibreOffice (some of the How-To videos and other things are nice too).

I think it would be really great if

1.  the various translation teams were able to generate some income for themselves

2.  physical, printed books were seen at stalls and conferences where LibreOffice has a presence.

This would also help show off that LibreOffice really is a global organisation and is available in and supported in many languages.

If sundry costs are required to get the guides onto Lulu or if people in the translations teams have a good reason for needing the printed guides sent to them at cost (not free but just a much lower price) then the English/International Documentation list could easily help, or you could ask Friends of OpenDocument (or whatever they are called) directly.  They can probably help a lot with setting up infrastructure or with other resources that might be required to go this route.

Regards from

Tom

[Zeki]

Hi,

After reading the replies, and remembering the previous arguments, i
want to point the important distinction between which is better
approach and which way we should improve approach.

Previously i said that we should change people's habits to get help,
and all stuff we had discussed are hypothetical base which we stand
on. But i am wondering that do we know people's choices, habits and
their experiences on reaching help info or their thoughts?

User surveys are best for in this conditions to get to know the users
behavior. I can give my example about a user survey about the Pardus
GNU/Linux which i've prepared and had very good results and feedback
from users. It was about the problems on getting help, inclusion on
contribution and their discouragements and plus and minus points.

Maybe we should issue a survey about the general help picture of
LibreOffice. English is not my native language thus it may have
considered a weird language. I've used kwiksurveys before, that was
very simple and has good options, if we have a better platform then it
will be better.

The basic questions can be as follows:

--------------------------&<------------------------------

- Have you ever heard the following help channels of LibreOffice

--- ask.libreoffice.org portal
--- LibreOffice forums
--- LibreOffice user e-mail lists
--- #LibreOffice IRC channel
--- LibreOffice bundled/online help on help.libreoffice.org
--- LibreOffice user guides

- What will you do if you need help on LibreOffice
--- I search the info for the solution on internet
--- Ask to my friends who knows LibreOffice better
--- Ask for help on genereal (non-LibreOffice) forums
--- Ask for help on LibreOffice forums
--- Ask for help on LibreOffice user e-mail lists
--- Search on LibreOffice bundled help
--- Search on LibreOffice Users gide

- If you have used ask.libreoffice.org, could you please rate your
satisfaction (1-10, 1 is worse 10 is very satisfying)
.....
(same question for other channels)

- Have you ever used LibreOffice bundled help, to learn new stuff and
improve your skills to use LibreOffice components?

- Have you ever used LibreOffice Guides, to learn new stuff and
improve your skills to use LibreOffice components?

- What do you feel during your search about getting help on LibreOffice
--- I have no idea how to get help for my problem
--- I am generally hopeless to find help, but i keep on trying
--- I rarely find help
--- I am very disappointed about all my this tries to get help
--- I can usually find help
--- I am a self learner and i love to find my own solutions, thus i am confident
--- I always find help from real life friends
--- I can find help from people on various internet platforms

- What do you think about bundled help (help.libreoffice.org)
-- I have no idea about it
-- Yes i know it but i never used it for help
-- It is crap, it gives me no help
-- Not very good but sometimes useful
-- Very good for self learning
-- It is nice, have plenty of information and info about LibreOffice
functions and tips
-- Very good and satisfying

- What do you think about LibreOffice Guides
-- I have no idea about it
-- Yes i know it but i never used one for help
-- It is crap, it gives me no help
-- Not good but sometimes useful
-- It is nice, have plenty of information and info about LibreOffice
functions and tips
-- Very good and satisfying
-- Teaches me all the stuff i need

- Have you ever tried to learn more about using LibreOffice components
and improve your skills by LibreOffice bundled help? If so, please
rate it (1-10, 1 is worse 10 is very satisfying)

- Have you ever tried to learn more about using LibreOffice components
and improve your skills by LibreOffice Guides? If so, please rate it
(1-10, 1 is worse 10 is very satisfying)

- What do you think about ask.libreoffice.org
-- I have no idea about it
-- Ooo, the ghost cowboy town you mean?
-- People are rude and they don't help me
-- Finding answers could be late but it works
-- Nice though
-- Very good, the first place i ask for help and get it
-- Thank god for it!
(irc and e-mail list questions may be added similarly)

- Did you ever got help from using social media (facebook, twitter,
linkedin etc)
-- Never tried, does it works?
-- No, i am not a geek nor my network!
-- Asked some but no one helped me
-- Yes i had some
-- My network is cool, and it is the fastest way to get help

- Have you ever used Microsoft Office bundled help or help portal, if
so, please share your thoughts
(free format answers)

--------------------------&<------------------------------

If we could understand people's behavior better, we should focus on
the minuses and improve them.

But i should say that, getting help is about willing to get help and
about self learning and willing to learn more. Which is the key point
that we can promote it by our help resources.

Best regards,
Zeki

[Tom_Davies]

Hi
I like the questions and sub-questions.  I think the only thing that was missing were sub-questions about how confident people are about using the results of help they get from each method.

Do people trust all the answers they get from google-searches (or other internet search), or from the guides, or in-built, or Ask, or mailing lists.

2nd addition might be "Do you check answers before implementing them?" with a sub-sub-question "Do you feel the system has a method of checking itself"

Perhaps ask if people already have or would prefer to have 'traditional' telephone support?  Either as a Yes/no tick-box type or as an open-ended question for people to type in comments (or give space for both)

I know a lot of people that are only familiar with MS products and other proprietary systems who are a bit scared of trying LibreOffice because there is no 'professional' telephone support.  Such people tend to distrust user-led support from "well meaning people that don't really have a clue" because they have only experienced forums such as the Yahoo one.

My own experience (and probably the experience of anyone that really has used proper forums/mailing-lists) is that telephone support is entirely dependant on whoever you happen to get when you call.  If their idea was rubbish then no-one steps in to give a better approach.  By contrast in forums and mailing-lists if you manage to get any answer at all you tend to get several different view-points and approaches.  Any inaccuracies in a forum tends to make other people jump in with warnings.  Also their answers are easy to copy&paste into google although people tend to give clickable links (I've never had a clickable link from a telephone call!).  Also i tend to find most answers from most people on mailing lists are a much higher standard than answers from telephone support.  People really seem to care about getting a good result and in helping access official documentation or wikis.

With published books and the in-built help i tend to trust that it's gone through several stages of proof-reading and verification before being published.  Generally i find in-built help difficult to navigate but often it pops-up with something directly relevant to what is on-screen so that usually makes it easier if that is what my question is about.  However, in-built help usually looks like some bad Win 95  thing and in many apps gives the impression of being very out-of-date.

With wiki's i've heard people grumble that they don't trust the motivations of people writing them and hence worry that the knowledge may be biased, misleading or even dangerously wrong.  Errrr, i am a wiki-editor btw lol.  My answer is that pages tend to settle down once more people add to them as biases tend to get"get ironed out".  (So i tend to avoid maintaining pages where i am the only one editing the page unless its just the first week or so).  Also it's fairly easy to check the history and compare changes.  Also it's easy to check external and other references.  I trust properly published guides more but find wikis easier to use quickly.

Regards from
Tom

[filmsi]

Hi,

the only survey that would answer how good or bad current help content
and current organization of help topics as well as need for help by
the users would be to add a survey system into the LO UI, that would
report back to a server - where/when do users press F1, what topics
they look for etc. Upon installation of LO user would be asked if she
allows LO to report back anonymously about the use of help system.

Hopefully that could be done in a simple way, I just hope that help
content calls are small parts of data that could be easily tracked
back to actual situations.

Such a query should run for a few months and then the data should be
mined through to get meaningful results.

Then one can start talking about other kinds of help etc.

Lp, m.

[Zeki]

Hi,

Hi Martin,

the only survey that would answer how good or bad current help content
and current organization of help topics as well as need for help by
the users would be to add a survey system into the LO UI, that would
report back to a server - where/when do users press F1, what topics
they look for etc. Upon installation of LO user would be asked if she
allows LO to report back anonymously about the use of help system.
Hopefully that could be done in a simple way, I just hope that help
content calls are small parts of data that could be easily tracked
back to actual situations.
Such a query should run for a few months and then the data should be
mined through to get meaningful results.

I don't think this kind of tracking would give sufficient information.
First there is a technical restriction, this kind of tracking will not
include users which are staying the last stable version. And it is not
a community sense approach, the info will be data only and it will be
accumulated slowly and it will be very hard to comment of the output.
Also many people will ignore such notification. It is a machine way
and gives no space for the people's social behaviour and alternatives.

We should see the help channels together in a complex picture, They
must be taken complementary of each other

Then one can start talking about other kinds of help etc.

As i said, we shouldn't separate them or put them in order. Help is
needed an it is served in multiple ways, the problem is awareness and
promoting people to use them in any way which suits their needs.

Starting with a simple and friendly survey will be a first step, also
we all know that LibreOffice has a restricted manpower and other
critical priorities. This kind of implementation may never come into
life, or may irritate people to collect their information.

I want to quote David Watson's words, sometimes "you don't have to do
it right, you just need to do something", or an old Turkish word
"Caravan train is merged on the road" We cannot be perfect at the
beginning but we have to start.

I think such survey will also help to make people aware of
LibreOffice's help channels at least which can be considered as a big
gain imho.

Best regards,
Zeki

[Donald_Rogers]

It seems to me that there is a lot of duplication of effort and fragmentation of the help. We have at least the following:

LO Help from the Help menu
help.libreoffice.org
wiki.documentfoundation.org
the guides
FAQ
ask.libreoffice.org
accessibility info
features
installation instructions
mailing lists
Nabble
IRC

The guides are very good but to localize them requires not just translation and adaption, but also all the screen shots and other pictures need to be redone for each language. This would be a huge task. There are no guides yet for version 4.0.

If we are to continue to have both the Help menu help and help.libreoffice.org help, can someone write some code to generate the help.libreoffice.org help from the same .po files that are used for the Help menu help?

What sort of help is meant to be in the wiki?
Is there any possible synergy between the FAQ and ask.libreoffice.org? Are they to be localized too?

Short extract from Zeki's email:

Then one can start talking about other kinds of help etc.

As i said, we shouldn't separate them or put them in order. Help is
needed an it is served in multiple ways, the problem is awareness and
promoting people to use them in any way which suits their needs.

...we all know that LibreOffice has a restricted manpower and other
critical priorities. This kind of implementation may never come into
life,...

LO apparently doesn't have the people power to keep even the English helps up to date, let alone all the other languages. Some of the localization teams are very small and can't keep up with even one of the help systems.

The Wiki is easier to work with than the CMS.

Up 'til now I have mainly used the Help menu help, and the separate sources for installation etc.

Regards
Donald

[fito]

I thought we already do exactly *that*?

And I don't understand why you see having many support channels as a problem.

[Christian_Lohmaier]

Hi Donald,

It seems to me that there is a lot of duplication of effort and fragmentation of the help. We have at least the following:

LO Help from the Help menu
help.libreoffice.org

Those are identical. That's the whole point of help.libreoffice.org

wiki.documentfoundation.org

this is more developer / active contributer oriented and less for
endusers, although stuff is published there. But there's another
discussion (or actually in this thread, I lost track) about not
"abusing" wiki to publish large files, etc.

the guides
FAQ

How can these be extra points when these are hosted on the mentioned sites?

ask.libreoffice.org

A user-helps-user platform, no static documentation, but
answeres/solutions for specific problems. You cannot cover every
cornercase in regular documentation.

accessibility info
features

See above, not really belong here as separate points, as they are
found on sites. Otherwise you could just make separate bulletpoints
for whetever you like.
But the new-features page surely is also a marketing tool.

installation instructions

Nobody reads those anyway But what is wrong with having those?

mailing lists

similar to ask.libreoffice.org, but most mailinglists are for
coordination of active contributors. And while ask.libreoffice.org is
fine for easy problems, more complex ones are better off on the maiing
list.

Nabble

That's just an interface to the mailinglists. Not everybody likes
using their mailclient. And you forgot gmane/newsgroup interface, that
also is an additional way to access/participate in the mailing lists.

IRC

(near) real-time discussion - so again a different scope, useful for
different stuff than the other ways to get help.

You did happily mix passive sources of information with interactive stuff...

The guides are very good but to localize them requires not just translation and adaption, but also all the screen shots and other pictures need to be redone for each language. This would be a huge task. There are no guides yet for version 4.0.

The principles of usage are the same, so no big deal really... And
whether you do the screen shots or not is also a matter of taste...
But doing screenshots of dialogs is getting easier and easier thanks
to the "gladification" of the UI.

If we are to continue to have both the Help menu help and help.libreoffice.org help, can someone write some code to generate the help.libreoffice.org help from the same .po files that are used for the Help menu help?

That was already answered help.libreoffice.org is what is in the help-module.

What sort of help is meant to be in the wiki?

See above. I see it mainly as a source for information for active
contributors/developers, less so for the enduser.

Is there any possible synergy between the FAQ and ask.libreoffice.org? Are they to be localized too?

well, apart from people monitoring what kind of questions get asked
the most on ask.libreoffice.org, there is no synergy. Questions are
too widespread/too special in most cases.

LO apparently doesn't have the people power to keep even the English helps up to date, let alone all the other languages. Some of the localization teams are very small and can't keep up with even one of the help systems.

Please explain / give an example what you are talking about here. I
hate statements like that.

The Wiki is easier to work with than the CMS.

What CMS please. There are tons of them.

ciao
Christian

[Tom_Davies]

Hi
The Published Guides are hosted on the wiki but they are very different from the wiki.

With the Guides it is easy to see exactly which release of LibreOffice they were written for.  Also easy to see how recent (or old) each book is.  Also all the pages in a chapter, or even the entire book, are all written for the same version of LIbreOffice so users can extrapolate easily.

All the other forms of help have a high chance of being inconsistent even within a page.  Also words may be used differently or different words used for the same thing.  For example are the buttons on the icon-bar buttons or icons or even tools?  How about on the keyboard?  Is there an on/off button on your keyboard?

The documentation team agrees on what terms to use in order to be consistent throughout the guides.  For screen-shots they avoid shots done on Windows as there might be possible problems with MS's EULA.  Legal experts have advised in both directions so it's easier to be safe than to potentially have to deal with a problem later on.

However they also follow the principles of "Release early and release often" so each release may not be 100% perfect but they do get closer to it.

So if i were involved in doing the translations then i would leave updating the screen-shots to the 2nd release or subsequent version in any particular language.  Of course some teams may find they have a person that figures out how to do them quickly and manages to race through the whole lot quite quickly.  Similarly with the quality of the translations.  As the bulk of the guides remain much the same from one release to the next it's possible to just gradually increase the quality over the course of a few new releases.

Regards from
Tom

[Tom_Davies]

Hi
The Published Guides are hosted on the wiki but they are very different from the wiki.

With the Guides it is easy to see exactly which release of LibreOffice they were written for.  Also easy to see how recent (or old) each book is.  Also all the pages in a chapter, or even the entire book, are all written for the same version of LIbreOffice so users can extrapolate easily.

All the other forms of help have a high chance of being inconsistent even within a page.  Also words may be used differently or different words used for the same thing.  For example are the buttons on the icon-bar buttons or icons or even tools?  How about on the keyboard?  Is there an on/off button on your keyboard?

The documentation team agrees on what terms to use in order to be consistent throughout the guides.  For screen-shots they avoid shots done on Windows as there might be possible problems with MS's EULA.  Legal experts have advised in both directions so it's easier to be safe than to potentially have to deal with a problem later on.

However they also follow the principles of "Release early and release often" so each release may not be 100% perfect but they do get closer to it.

So if i were involved in doing the translations then i would leave updating the screen-shots to the 2nd release or subsequent version in any particular language.  Of course some teams may find they have a person that figures out how to do them quickly and manages to race through the whole lot quite quickly.  Similarly with the quality of the translations.  As the bulk of the guides remain much the same from one release to the next it's possible to just gradually increase the quality over the course of a few new releases.

Regards from
Tom

[Donald_Rogers]

Hi Christian

Thank you and Adolfo for your replies. My main point was simply the huge amount of work and that small teams are trying to do. (EO team in my case). Obviously we have to prioritize our tasks. I am trying to get a better feel for what is most important. We have the UI done, but the help is at about 40% done. I have stopped working on it because I found that some of the menus have changed in LO 4.0 and I personally don't want to translate stuff now and have to do it again when the help has been updated for v 4.0.

Hi Donald,

It seems to me that there is a lot of duplication of effort and fragmentation of the help. We have at least the following:

LO Help from the Help menu
help.libreoffice.org

Those are identical. That's the whole point of help.libreoffice.org

That's good. (I mostly use the menu help)

wiki.documentfoundation.org

this is more developer / active contributer oriented and less for
endusers, although stuff is published there. But there's another
discussion (or actually in this thread, I lost track) about not
"abusing" wiki to publish large files, etc.

the guides
FAQ

How can these be extra points when these are hosted on the mentioned sites?

They all add to the work that could be done.

ask.libreoffice.org

A user-helps-user platform, no static documentation, but
answeres/solutions for specific problems. You cannot cover every
cornercase in regular documentation.

accessibility info
features

See above, not really belong here as separate points, as they are
found on sites. Otherwise you could just make separate bulletpoints
for whetever you like.
But the new-features page surely is also a marketing tool.

installation instructions

Nobody reads those anyway But what is wrong with having those?

I am not saying there is anything wrong with having them. They have to be accessible before installing LO, so obviously aren't part of the menu help.

mailing lists

similar to ask.libreoffice.org, but most mailinglists are for
coordination of active contributors. And while ask.libreoffice.org is
fine for easy problems, more complex ones are better off on the maiing
list.

Nabble

That's just an interface to the mailinglists. Not everybody likes
using their mailclient. And you forgot gmane/newsgroup interface, that
also is an additional way to access/participate in the mailing lists.

IRC

(near) real-time discussion - so again a different scope, useful for
different stuff than the other ways to get help.

You did happily mix passive sources of information with interactive stuff...

Each has a separate focus, as I see it.

The guides are very good but to localize them requires not just translation and adaption, but also all the screen shots and other pictures need to be redone for each language. This would be a huge task. There are no guides yet for version 4.0.

I just checked. EN has guides for 3.4, 3.5, 3.6 or 4.0, and ID has the full set of about 80 documents for LO 3.3, 3.4 or 3.5. FR has 36 (by my count) for LO 3.5 or 3.6. All other languages apparently have none. (I looked on wiki.documentfoundation.org/Documentation/Publications/fr and equivalent pages.)

The principles of usage are the same, so no big deal really... And
whether you do the screen shots or not is also a matter of taste...
But doing screenshots of dialogs is getting easier and easier thanks
to the "gladification" of the UI.

What is "gladification"?

If we are to continue to have both the Help menu help and help.libreoffice.org help, can someone write some code to generate the help.libreoffice.org help from the same .po files that are used for the Help menu help?

That was already answered help.libreoffice.org is what is in the help-module.

What sort of help is meant to be in the wiki?

See above. I see it mainly as a source for information for active
contributors/developers, less so for the enduser.

Is there any possible synergy between the FAQ and ask.libreoffice.org? Are they to be localized too?

well, apart from people monitoring what kind of questions get asked
the most on ask.libreoffice.org, there is no synergy. Questions are
too widespread/too special in most cases.

LO apparently doesn't have the people power to keep even the English helps up to date, let alone all the other languages. Some of the localization teams are very small and can't keep up with even one of the help systems.

Please explain / give an example what you are talking about here. I
hate statements like that.

LO is about to publish version 4.0.1 but we have not yet finished the help for 4.0.0.

The Wiki is easier to work with than the CMS.

What CMS please. There are tons of them.

I refered to the Silverstripe CMS that we use in xx.libreoffice.org. This is not an important point, and I am biased because I have used Wikipedia for editing and I am quite familiar with it, but I have not used Silverstripe much yet.

ciao
Christian

Thanks again.
Donald

[Christian_Lohmaier]

Hi Donald, *,

Thank you and Adolfo for your replies. My main point was simply the huge amount of work and that small teams are trying to do. (EO team in my case).

OK, I misunderstood it somewhat as "all those stuff should be found on
one website".

[...]

But doing screenshots of dialogs is getting easier and easier thanks
to the "gladification" of the UI.

What is "gladification"?

Formerly, dialogs in OpenOffice.org (and thus in LibreOffice) are
using a fixed layout, i.e. they wouldn't resize, they wouldn't adapt
to the actual length of translated strings, etc.

So Caolan made it possible to use glade (a GTK-interface builder) to
design the dialog and use those ui files dynamically. So to take
screenshots, you can just open the dialog definition in glade instead
of finding it in LibreOffice.
http://blogs.linux.ie/caolan/2013/01/24/converting-libreoffice-dialogs-to-ui-format-100-conversions-milestone/
so far 100 dialogs are converted

ciao
Christian

[Tom_Davies]

Hi
I agree it's frustrating.  There is too much to do and so targeting the most useful and productive system is fairly vital.

The documentation team are hoping to work on the in-built help but it's unlikely to be completed any time soon!  The 40% already completed will be useful especially if it's done as strings.  Even if it is translated as an entire document(s) then when the updated version becomes available then "Compare documents" may help minimise the amount of extra work needed to update the 40% already done when/if those updates become available.

For the Guides the most useful one, the one that has the biggest impact and is the most downloaded one is the "Getting Started Guide" and that is already complete for the 4.0.x branch.  The most useful chapters in that guide are; 2, 3 and 4.  Each chapter is fairly self-sufficient and can be published separately.

The Getting Started Guide has 1 chapter for each module/app.  Chapter 4 is the first of those and deals with "Writer" which is the most used app/module in LibreOffice.  Chapter 3 deals with the biggest jump in productivity between MS Office and LibreOffice.  Once people learn how differently "Styles" work in LibreOffice they find it can be much faster to get a far better document by using LibreOffice.  Chapter 2 is about setting up LibreOffice.  Screen-shots are mostly to show position of options, such as where to find things in menus.  So the screen-shots rarely need to be in the right language, it's nicer when they are but it's not a priority.

The Title page and 1st page are fairly generic and much the same for all chapters in all guides.  Then the next page or 2 are the Table of Contents which are generated fairly automatically from the rest of the guide of course.

Since you have already done 40% (nearly half already) i am not complete certain whether it is better to stop
translating the in-built help and start on the guides or just finish it off fairly quickly.  If you carry on with it then perhaps just don't worry so much about quality nor about bringing it up-to-date.  Finishing the remaining 60% might be the fastest way to ensure 1
completed help-system in your language.  If you had done less than 20% the choice might have been easier!

Right now i think the best bet is probably to finish off the in-built help but only because you are already half-way through so your work-flow is probably very efficient.

One other question i am not sure about is whether a previous translation of the in-built help can be used to replace some or all of the in-built help for 4.0.0 and then used completely for 4.0.1 and subsequent releases. 
Regards from
Tom

[Donald_Rogers]

Hi, Tom

Thank you for your extensive explanation. Your comments on the "Getting Started Guide" are very helpful. Our team has never completed the help localization, even in earlier years (OOO) when we had a much bigger team. I doubt that we will ever catch up. 437219 words are a lot of words!

I have had another look at the Documentation page of the Wiki and the ODFAuthors page. It is not clear to me whether these relate only to the English documentation, or whether they include the localization of those documents. Localization seems to be not covered.

You know those items in the help that look like this?
<bookmark_value>formatting styles; styles and templates</bookmark_value>
<bookmark_value>styles; styles and templates</bookmark_value>
<bookmark_value>organizing; templates (guide)</bookmark_value>
<bookmark_value>templates; organizing (guide)</bookmark_value>
I guess that they are used to construct the help index. Is there any documentation on this? We seem to have to guess how the users might enter index terms. If, instead, we could have a full word search, like Google does, we would not need these bookmark_value elements, and that would save us a heap of time!

Regards
Donald