Hello! I am in Switzerland, it is raining, and I have finally got 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 don't think that we're still that tech-savvy in the OLH style but I may be wrong. One part of the problem that OOo shows an extremely wide audience range. There are beginners who need to get very basic information about achieving a certain task and are feel left alone if the basic information is missing. There are power users that don't want to be bothered with basic information and may even feel offended. 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 award-winning book on this topic, which I recommend to anyone involved in writing online help for diverse audiences. I hope mentioning it here is not too commercial. "Is the Help Helpful? How to create online help that meets your users' needs", by Jean Hollis Weber, published by Hentzenwerke, October 2004, ISBN 1930919603 For more information, visit http://jeanweber.com/books/ithh.htm
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.) 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. 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 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 had time, I would do more than suggest this: I would do some of it myself. That's all I have time to write now. I am very glad to see this discussion. I have not joined the OLH list because of lack of time. If someone wants to copy this note (or relevant parts of it) to the OLH list, please feel free. Regards, Jean --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
