G. Roderick Singleton wrote:
Members of the project should be aware that Uwe Fischer
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> is recruiting on other lists such as
[email protected], OOoAuthors and [EMAIL PROTECTED] Please track
down these messages if you want to get involved.
Thank you, ger
Looks like I have a bad habit of not posting on my favourite mailing
list. I must apologize.
Here is my mail again:
Recently we asked for ideas on the OOo mailing lists how we can improve
the installed Help of StarOffice and OpenOffice.org. One good idea was
to add more links that point to external documents written by the community.
Currently, at the end of many Help pages you find "Additional
information" or "See also ..." sections. These links stay within the
installed Help system, or they link to portal pages like
documentation.openoffice.org which will work without "page not found"
errors for quite a time.
Given the ever changing availability of external documents with regards
to version, operating system, and language, as well as their Web
locations, a database approach seems to be appropriate.
Now we want your feedback about the following proposal
a) the Help Viewer already knows about the operating system, version,
and language of the installed Help. Additionally, the user will be able
to select additional languages to read external documents that are only
available in those languages. And the user will be able to disable the
Web search for additional documents, and to redirect the search to a
folder on the local file system.
One idea is to offer a drop-down list box with the main languages. The
current Help language already has a check mark by default, and the user
can select more languages.
Enable external Web Help:
(none)
v english
german
french
...etc...
Choose (none) to disable Web Help from the Internet.
An additional check box "locally installed documents" can be enabled to
display links to documents that are stored in a given folder on the hard
drive. Every user can store own documents here, which must contain some
meta information to be shown at the right location of the Help.
b) The current Help page gets some additional entries in the "More
Information..." or "See also..." section.
These new entries are visible only if Web Help is enabled and if such
help is available.
If the Web Help is enabled and if the current shown Help page contains a
link to the new Web Help feature, then the Help Viewer connects to the
server over the Internet.
The Help Viewer sends the following information:
- the current Help page
- the current version of the Office software
- the current operating system
- the selected languages for external Web Help
The server evaluates this information.
If any Web Help document is available for the current page (topic),
version, operating system, and language, the respective link or links
are returned. These links will be shown in the "See also..." section.
The user can click the link to load the external document.
If no suitable document is found, the server returns the following text:
"For this Help page we have no external document at this time. You may
consider changing your langauge selection at Tools - Options - ...etc...
Visit documentation.openoffice.org if you want to write an external Web
Help document for the current topic."
The server evaluates the Help pages and languages for which Web Help was
asked. These data will be published periodically. The information helps
to improve internal and external Help offerings.
c) There is a database running on the server. The community maintains
the database. When for example a Language Project has some new
documents, the respective links will be added to the database. There
might be a Wiki to simplify adding and editing the hyperlinks together
with meta information about visible text, language, version, operating
system. A script will update the database based on the Wiki information.
This is what I propose. Now please let us discuss this concept. Give
feedback if you want it in such a way and if you think it can be done.
Then we need to find some community members who really do all the work.
What do you think?
Regards
Uwe
--
[EMAIL PROTECTED] - Technical Writer
StarOffice - Sun Microsystems, Inc. - Hamburg, Germany
http://www.sun.com/staroffice
http://documentation.openoffice.org/
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