Hi :) You have 6 seconds and 3 mouse-clicks to grab & hold a persons attention before they leave the website. Demanding that they download and install an unfamiliar product pushes people away unless the entire process is completed in under that time.
People on an early visit may just open documentation just to see that it's there and easy to access, looks reasonably up-to-date, 'professional' and easy to use. The slightest thing could put people off. Deliberately making documentation difficult to access is unlikely to be of benefit with market penetration as low as it is in English speaking countries. Once we reach 20%, as in Europe, then it is a more viable proposition. Regards from Tom :) ________________________________ From: Marc Paré <m...@marcpare.com> To: documentation@global.libreoffice.org Sent: Thu, 23 June, 2011 15:13:56 Subject: Re: [libreoffice-documentation] HTML versions of the Guides Le 2011-06-23 04:35, Jean Weber a écrit : >> I will chime in as well. I would rather see the ODF versions first and the >> .pdf only if needed. We are, after all, telling people that we have the best >> office suite on earth, so let's prove it! It does work!. I would even go as >> far as not publishing any .pdf versions. People needing documentation will >> have LibreOffice to read the ODF files. I would only supply .pdf files if it >> involved anything with the installation of LibreOffice. >> >> Cheers >> >> Marc > > Marc, please see my earlier note about the importance and necessity of > providing PDFs. > > --Jean Hi Jean We are essentially saying the same thing. For necessary files where the ODF cannot be read due to the inability of having LibreOffice installed to read ODF files then falling back on .pdf's is fine. If there is a need to create a quick and dirty ODF reader, then we should put this to the dev's as a project -- a "LibreOffice Reader". We should not be advocating the use of any other format unless we really have to. If our documents are so important for a user to want to read, then they should download our product to read our wonderful manuals. Otherwise, we relegate the ODF (and LibreOffice) to a secondary position -- there will always be individuals inside our group who will clamour for a .pdf version to add "universality" to our product line. This is completely counter-productive. The request for .pdf will never cease and all of our documentation will be in ODF/PDF versions with no real reason to fully adopt the ODF format by any user. Worse, corporate adoption of our product will be hard to get if they will never see the benefits of using our products if they only read it through .pdf formats for their convenience. It is difficult to issue accolades to a product that second guesses itself to its intended user base. If pdf's are so necessary, then people should be looking for a .pdf office suite as everyone extolls its virtues. I don't think Adobe would ever suggest to anyone else to use a different format for people to read their manuals, they would of course tell all to download their reader and to then read their wonderful manuals. We should do the same, as we do have the better format of the two. The use of .dpf's should be done in a very strategic way and not in a universally applied fashion. All of my opinions. Cheers Marc -- Marc Paré http://www.parEntreprise.com -- Unsubscribe instructions: E-mail to documentation+h...@global.libreoffice.org Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/global/documentation/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted -- Unsubscribe instructions: E-mail to documentation+h...@global.libreoffice.org Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/global/documentation/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
