HelpAuthoring.oxt: An easy way to edit help files

[Regina Henschel]

Hi Jan,

Jan Holesovsky schrieb:
> Hi,
>
> Olivier recently resurrected the HelpAuthoring.oxt extension that makes
> it much easier to edit help files, and I've pushed that to git now:
>
> http://cgit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice/contrib/dev-tools/tree/helpauthoring

I do not share your euphoria. If you do not already know, how the help 
is organized, it will not make it "much easier". And for correcting 
single words and typos, it is not necessary. But I agree, if you know, 
how the help is organized, it helps you inserting all the tags and 
attributes.

Removing some old stuff, like the history-element or the "l10n" and 
"oldref" attributes is nice too.

>
> I don't want to announce it too widely yet, tough; it has a bug that
> from some reason, the new edits appear in bold when saved (they appear
> enclosed in <emph> / </emph>).

Unfortunately no solution for that problem. I first thought inserting 
would create a span element, but saving as odt has no such element.

But another error: The tool removes the indexer-attribute from the topic 
element. The value is sometimes intentionally set to "exclude", for to 
make the file invisible to the full text search. That is necessary, 
because some files have only content, that is to be embedded in other 
files. Such files are very confusing to users and should be hidden. When 
you select "exclude" when you use "Edit Meta Data", this attribute is 
not set.

Further problems:

The template has unsuitable fonts, for example a "Droid Sans".

The page margins of the template are far to large. In help viewer the 
margins will be about 5mm left and right and 10mm top. Perhaps open the 
file in Web-view?

The browse-button for file name search in "Embed Section" does not 
recognize the path, that has been set in "Set Document Root" and 
therefore inserts an absolute path.

The dialog for selecting a section to be embedded does not use unicode 
in the selection window and therefore the preview is wrong.

Feature request: Provide a preview of the help, as it would be shown in 
the help viewer, I mean without the yellow fields.

Kind regards
Regina