Tender for Automated Help/Documentation screenshot creation (#201512-06)

noun_112843_ccThe Document Foundation (TDF), the charitable entity behind the world’s leading free office suite LibreOffice, seeks for companies or individuals to

design and implement automated help/documentation screenshot creation

to start work as soon as possible.

Currently the LibreOffice documentation as well as the on-line help contain a large number of screenshots. This increases singificantly the cost of changing the UI, as it involves manual re-taking of screenshots and getting them translated.

The scope of this task is to:

  • opening and closing every dialog to increase UI test coverage
  • provide an automated mechanism to create and maintain screenshots in documents, featuring cropping and highlighting information based on the widget structure of each dialog, by
    • creating a small RDF description of where a screenshot comes from
    • creating the commandline tool to do screenshot updates, and core infrastructure to take those shots, and mark them up for each language
    • providing a few exemplary images in a number of documentation files, along with an easy HOWTO to improve these files in future
    • providing an easy-to-use UI to both create, and annotate screenshots of the current version inside LibreOffice (enabled in some developer mode)
    • setting up a server / VM to do a looped headless re-build of the documentation to form part of our test suite

An automated (ideally headless) tool should be provided that can take an existing documentation file, read RDF data describing screenshots associated with each image, re-fresh that image, and produce a new output file with updated images and the same meta-data.

Required Skills

C++ Programming language for the LibreOffice client part

Other Skills

English (Conversationally fluent in order to coordinate and plan with members of TDF)

TDF welcomes applications from all suitably qualified persons regardless of their race, sex, disability, religion/belief, sexual orientation or age.

As always, TDF will give some preference to individuals who have previously shown a commitment to TDF, including but not limited to members of TDF. Not being a member, or never having contributed before, does not exclude any applicants from consideration.

The task offered is a project-based one-off, with no immediate plans to a mid- or long-term contractual relationship. It is offered on a freelance, project basis. Individuals and companies applying can be located anywhere in the world.

TDF is looking forward to receiving your applications, your financial expectations (name the final price for the turnkey project), and the earliest date of your availability, via e-mail to Florian Effenberger at no later than January 29, 2016. You can encrypt your message via PGP/GnuPG.

Applicants who have not received feedback by March 1, 2016 should consider that their application, after careful review, was not accepted.