T. J. Frazier wrote:
I would like to receive author status, if you think I can be useful.
It helps if you mention your username at OOoAuthors. I did manage
to find you, and have given you Author status. Welcome!
I am a retired systems programmer, long-time proof-reader, and general
nit-picker. Besides proof-reading and light copy-editing, I could learn
to index, which ought to be fun.
Having someone do some indexing on the Writer Guide would be
extremely helpful. I've done a first pass at some, but not all,
of the chapters, but a lot more needs to be done. After all the
chapters have received a first-pass indexing, then the fun
begins: editing the index.
If by "nitpicking" you mean an attention to detail, that's good.
Alas, nitpicking too often degenerates into arguing over things
that are more a matter of opinion than anything else, and that we
can do without.
In addition to proofreading, what we really need a lot of is
reviewing, in the sense of checking the writing against the
software and determining if descriptions are accurate and if any
important topics have been left out. Reviewing and editing for
what's not there is, in my experience, a skill that many people
don't have. Note: we don't try to cover everything in the books
(leaving a lot of the details about all the fields and controls,
and possible combinations, to the Help). But we do want to cover
important tasks, especially ones that confuse a lot of people (as
evidenced by questions on user lists and forums).
Let me pick a nit or two, which may or may not deserve their own threads.
* Link problems: the navigation links at the top of the page
"oooauthors.org/en/authors/userguide2" offer "Up one level" and the
breadcrumb "You are here". Clicking on "Up one level" or the "Authors"
crumb produce a site error.
I know what has caused that, but I don't know how to fix it. I
don't know if it's a new problem or an old one, but I had not
noticed it before a week or two ago, so it may be a new problem.
I hope Marko, our main fix-it guy, knows how to fix this one.
I'll send a separate note about this so he'll be sure to notice.
* Master documents: is anybody else (everybody else?) as tired as I am
of all the little glitches with master docs? A couple were mentioned in
the Template How-To. There are others.
I'll start a new thread on this. Thanks again for joining us.
--Jean
