[Libreoffice] LibreOffice WikiHelp

[Jan Holesovsky]

Hi Jean-Baptiste,

On 2010-12-13 at 14:11 +0100, Jean-Baptiste Faure wrote:

> > http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Development/Wikihelp
> >
> Thank you for this wiki page about WikiHelp. I will contribute with
> questions and suggestions.

Great, thank you!

> For now, I am not sure that everybody make a clear distinction between
> help and documentation. For me:
> 
> - help (on-line or off-line) is a reference for the end-users. So it is
> a part of the software, it is not something which may be added after the
> release. From this point of view the help must be the same in all
> languages. For example the help gives the syntax of Calc function; the
> developers of these functions must describe their syntax in English and
> translators must only translate the English reference. Until that is not
> done the software is not complete and cannot be released.

Sure - but who is supposed to write the initial description of the
functionality?  I think the developer of the feature; and I for one do
not want to learn the terrible syntax and tooling around the LibO help
authoring - I just want to provide the text, and be done with that.
Wiki is ideal for that, and if I don't want to waste time with the
markup, I'll just dump the text there, and ask someone to make it
beautiful :-)  This is impossible with the current way of doing things.

> Another example: in LibO UI we have several buttons which allow the user
> to save the current file he is working on. If the English name of these
> buttons are always the same (eg. "save as..."), it is very important
> they are always the same in each localization (eg "Enregistrer sous..."
> in French but never "Sauvegarder sous un autre nom" which is however
> more elegant). If it is not the case you cannot say that you have the
> same software in English and in other languages.
> It important to have tools and validation process to ensure that. And I
> am very skeptic about the capability of a wiki to be an easy-to-use tool
> for such kind of multilingual reference.

With wiki, you can immediately see what you've changed - so currently,
just F1 on the thing in LibreOffice, it will bring you to the page, and
you directly see your changes.  You do not have to depend on builds
provided by somebody, you do not have to learn how to build it yourself.

But of course - can you please provide me with these tools?  I am of
course interested in seeing if/how we can plug them to the wikihelp.

Thank you,
Kendy