LibreOffice’s help system needs to evolve and be more effective for users.
LibreOffice’s help system was designed in 2003-2004 and released in 2005. Since then it has not evolved, except for the introduction of an online version hosted in a wiki server (and accessible from LibreOffice when the local help is not installed).
I worked recently to transform our ancient help system into a modern browser-based version. The partial result is available in the (temporary) website at https://helponline.libreoffice.org – please be advised that this is still work in progress.
The XML help pages are transformed into pure, almost static and responsive HTML. This approach has some advantages:
- Works in every browser
- Provides the current functionality of the help system
- Preserves the current development, help authoring, release engineering and translation process as it is
- You can read the help pages in your mobile phone or tablet
- It’s easy to add extra markup for better search engine indexing
The disadvantage is an increase in disk storage on the server.
Transforming XML into HTML for every browser
The help pages were designed when the minimal standard HTML was version 3.2 and, since then, many developments have brought us HTML5 in all major browsers. There is little advantage now to keep the current XML, and all of its designed functionality can be replaced and improved by HTML, CSS and JavaScript, for example, adding better navigation and multimedia contents.
The new Help page layout benefits of many modern technologies
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Back in May we had a Month of LibreOffice, celebrating contributions all across the project, from code and documentation through to translations and bug reports. 304 members of our worldwide community won stickers, and we’ve received some photos of them in action – so here they are!
The first is from Gabriele Ponzo, who is in The Document Foundation’s Membership Committee and already has plenty of LibreOffice stickers:
Next up is Osoitz E who helps to translate and localise LibreOffice into Basque:
Franklin Weng promotes LibreOffice and the Open Document Format in Taiwan, and sent us this photo:
Finally, Buovjaga from our QA community has a novel use for his sticker:
We’ll be repeating the Month of LibreOffice in November, so you’ll have another chance to grab a sticker – but you can get involved with our friendly community at any time.…
This year’s LibreOffice Conference will take place from 11 – 13 October in Rome, Italy. It’s a great opportunity for LibreOffice developers, users, supporters, translators and other members of the community to meet up, share ideas and make plans for future versions of the software.
And you can join us! On our conference website you’ll find a registration form, along with useful practical information.…
Sunday, July 9, is the Day against DRM. The Document Foundation supports the global campaign led by FSF, to raise the awareness of issues related to the so called Digital Rights Management software. As any other proprietary technology, DRM is killing user freedom of choice, and should always be avoided.
LibreOffice users are fighting a similar battle when they are promoting the ODF standard file format against the OOXML pseudo-standard, and they should be amongst the first to support the Day against DRM on social media or by educating their contacts.…
The Document Foundation is very grateful to all contributions to LibreOffice, both in terms of time and money (donations). For the latter, we occasionally receive questions on various topics: the cost of donations, confirmation emails, refunds and rejected credit cards.
Usually we answer these individually, but now we’ve created a dedicated page on this blog with a list of questions and answers:
In addition, it can be accessed via the Donate menu in the top-right of the blog.…
The Annual Report of The Document Foundation for the year 2016 is now available as a PDF document, in three different versions: English Low Resolution, English High Resolution, and German.