LibreOffice documentation, help and beyond

Today, I’d like to talk about what is going on at the LibreOffice documentation project. My name is Olivier Hallot and I am a French national living in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, since my infancy. Back in 2002, I got involved in the OOo project leading the software translation team for Brazilian Portuguese. My background includes being an executive in two of the major software companies before going on my own and joining the open source community.

The LibreOffice software needs improvements on the documentation process for new features as well as updates or improvements of help contents. This situation has raised my attention, because acceptance in business environments and the quality for the end user can be heavily improved with proper documentation and help.

My presentation at the LibreOffice Conference in Aarhus, in Denmark, was intended to raise the attention of the developers and the community at large, and at the end of 2015, TDF decided to invest into improving the situation of our documentation project.

So here we are, with the challenge to work in many directions:

• get the help content updated and modernized, using a state of the art technology for 2016 and beyond;
• coordinate the literature produced by LibreOffice volunteers, and maintain a set of updated reference book that can be translated to as many languages as possible;
• implement the necessary tooling to make the work of documenting LibreOffice new features the most exciting, for both developers and documentation volunteers.

Of course, all these tasks have to be carried out in a coordinated way with TDF’s mission and objectives.

Working for a Brazilian company, in the future I’ll be supporting the LibreOffice community at large to improve the documentation, and to make it easily accessible to all users. Feel free to poke me on TDF mailing lists as well as on IRC channels in freenode, where I will pop up as ohallot.

Happy documenting!