subject:"\[tdf\-discuss\] Re\: A proposal for effective, volunteer\-friendly user support in LibreOffice"

Re: [tdf-discuss] Re: A proposal for effective, volunteer-friendly user support in LibreOffice

2010-11-24 Thread Barbara Duprey


On 11/24/2010 7:00 AM, Michael Wheatland wrote:

On Wed, Nov 24, 2010 at 9:08 PM, Charles Marcus
  wrote:

Does Drupal Forums allow one to 'subscribe' (get email notifications) to
both Main Topics/Sections as well as individual threads?

The Drupal messaging/notification system can provide subscriptions and
mail back responses for ANY part of the site. Topics, Sections,
Threads, Areas of the site, Even every post across the site in a
specific language to go to extremes.
If you want a subscription available for something that is not
available when the Drupal site goes Beta then you can request it and
it will be added easily, but we will try to anticipate all possible
use cases.

The input and output of the system is fully configurable. You can even
get your subscriptions sent to you in Twitter, Facebook or Jabber
(Google Chat) messages if you want.

Plug and play really.

Michael Wheatland


Drupal is sounding really good! From what you're saying, it seems that whatever mode of 
communication they choose, somebody who asks a question can be fully interactive with the community 
in things such as answering follow-up questions, getting additional clarification, and so on, 
without having to make commitments to receive all the mail (or a digest) for a list or log in to a 
forum. The lack of this kind of continuity is what I feel has been a "fatal flaw" in the handling of 
questions from unsubscribed users -- for instance, with the often-suggested modification of the 
Reply To header to include the unsubscribed user. (In that case, for example, only replies made 
directly to the original post would be sent to the unsub; everything else requires special handling 
based on the knowledge that the user is not subscribed.)


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Re: [tdf-discuss] Re: A proposal for effective, volunteer-friendly user support in LibreOffice

2010-11-24 Thread Barbara Duprey

On 11/23/2010 8:07 PM, Marc Paré wrote:

Hi Robert et al:

Here is the information from Jean Hollis Weber from the documentation team. Jean is one of the
senior leads on the documentation team.

Marc, thanks for passing this on.

Some factual info regarding the OOo user guides:
1) The ODTs of the OOo user guides are available as well as the PDF
versions. At one point we were not allowed to put the ODTs on the main
OOo website because of license differences, but there are links to where
one can get them.

2) In most cases, the PDFs are *smaller* in filesize than the ODTs.

3) The PDFs of the OOo Writer Guide and the other user guides in their
current form (for V3.2) are NOT formatted for 5X7, although at least one
older version of those books was made available in the PDF used for the
pre-printed guide sold through Lulu, which is close to that size. The
current are formatted for reading on screen and for printing 2-up on
A4/US paper.

After complaints from users who wanted to print them, the draft V3.3
guides (and the first draft of the LibO guides) have been reformatted
for printing on A4/US paper size.

4) OOo provides the user guides in chapters as well as full books,
because we know that often people want only a subset of the
information.

5) Surely the answer to "if you are a new user, this is the one you
want" is the book titled _Getting Started with OOo_.

Having said all that, I agree that improvements could (and should) be
made. I think the current "Getting Started with OOo" book, at over 350
pages, is much too long. My original intention was to have it no more
than 200 pages, but it grew... people kept adding things and it's hard
to decide -- or agree upon -- what to cut out. Turning some of the
chapters, particularly the chapter on Writer, into stand-alone books of
about 100 pages, is a good idea. Expand a bit on what's there and
include pointers to more detailed into in the full Writer Guide, which
runs around 500 pages.

Aside: I would like to split the Writer Guide into two books, one with
basic info and one with more advanced topics like master documents and
forms. The book of basic info does need to include the basics of style
use, because styles are fundamental to so many features of Writer.

Shipping a user guide with the product is a good idea, but runs into the
practical difficulty of getting stuff written/updated in time. The docs
always run behind, mainly because there are not enough people to work on
them.

--Jean

As well, other personal emails suggested that adding it to the download would probably not be
acceptable, for the same reasons discussed before.

Cheers

Marc

I'm just trying to catch up with this discussion, but how about if the installation process included
an offer to download documentation, and provided some options about that (e.g., basic introductory
material for Writer/Calc/Impress/..., the current Getting Started, the full guides, or whatever) as
well as links to the online documents? If this material could be captured for later use, too
(perhaps as a Documentation option in the Start menu or the equivalent), that would be good.

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