Jean Hollis Weber wrote:
Hello! I am in Switzerland, it is raining, and I have finally got
Grüezi!
a chance to start catching up on two weeks worth of accumulated
email.
Frank Peters wrote:
The fact that there is no English native language community
(or particularly a US/North America community) keeps all projects
in English more separate resulting in less momentum...
That is one of the major reasons why I, amongst other people,
pushed last year for a English NL community, which was rejected.
But that is a can of worms that I am not interested in opening again.
I can imagine. But I still think that we'd ultimately need one.
But I won't touch the can opener, either :-)
We need to find the right balance (which is always hard to find :-)
There are many ways to create a balance. I have written an
I know. The hard part id to find the right way to create
the balance ;-)
Without reading your book (which I will certainly do shortly)
I assume that you agree that knowing your audience is the key
point. And we still don't know enough of it. So it's best
guessing (it will always be for a part).
and one way is to get feedback from the users that don't feel
comfortable with the OLH as it is. Unfortunately, this is rarely
the case. This is one thing I wanted to promote at OOoCon. The easiest
way in contributing to OLH is to yell out what you don't like
(and occasionally tell us what you do like, too, so we don't get
overly frustrated :-)
In the past, I have mentioned on various lists many problems with
the help. My comments have been general rather than specific,
because I did not (and still do not) have the time to itemise all
the many problems or to present suggested solutions. (I wish I
did have the time.)
We appreciate that but just general comments are not always
very helpful. We are aware of most of the problems, it just
takes a while to fix them. Now that we have the online_help
alias I'd like to encourage you to post feedback for the help
there if you can't file a specific bug.
Here is the good news :) The help has improved very much since
v1.x, especially in having much more diverse information
available for different audiences. Unfortunately the indexing is
still very bad, so it is often extremely difficult to find the
information that is there (others have commented on this in the
past few days, too). I think the indexing is the biggest problem.
As I have mentioned in a previous reply, I think that
indexing is actually the hardest part. We put a lot of
effort in it so I am sorry to hear that you feel it is
*very* bad. With the lack of feedback it's actually hard
to create an index not knowing the user's terminology.
If you have suggestions, please post them.
Just for clarification: we are talking about the keyword
index here, I presume, not the fulltext search.
The second biggest problem is that some complicated (or more
advanced) topics have no help that explains them for people like
me. I am not a beginner, and with any new word processor I
immediately want to find out about fields and page layout and
styles and templates and master documents and a variety of other
topics at that level. But I do not understand many of the
examples and explanations in the OLH in some of these topic
areas, for example much of the info to do with fields.
I understand that issue and it's actually an issue of
doing the splits between concise and easy, and verbose
and profound. Ideally, we have beginners and advanced
content, presenting beginners content first and giving
users the chance to "Read More..."
However, I think that conceptual information is misplaced
in the help (although for legacy reasons we have some there)
and should be addressed by guides/books/etc.
I wrote a chapter for the Writer Guide on fields, in words that
made sense to me. It is not complete, and probably needs
improvement, and may not be completely up to date with changes in
the program.
I do not have the time to extract relevant bits from this chapter
for use in the OLH, but if someone else has the time, I encourage
you to do so. In fact, I suggest there are many explanations in
the OOoAuthors guides (among other sources) that could be reused
in the OLH, where they explain things at a different level. Make
new topics and cross-reference them well with older topics. If I
Thanks, Jean.
Frank
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