I want to respond to the idea that helping is "overwhelming". It is work, no doubt about it. But as someone who definitely doe not know everything (people on the users list can confirm that I regularly post questions there) I still find I can make a contribution. For example, yesterday I did a draft of the update of Chapter 6, Impress, to the 5.0 level. I happened to have the day off from work, so I applied my butt to the chair, and went through the chapter one page at a time with Impress 5.0 open and checked everything the documentation said. I discovered that some menu choices had changed, that some terminology had changed, and updated the documentation to reflect that. Then I put in new screenshots because what I saw was somewhat different from the old screenshots. It took me most of the day to do my first draft, I posted a couple of questions to the list, and I used comments on the draft to explain some of the changes I made. So it was definitely a time commitment, but I wanted to make a contribution. I expect doing an hour a day for a week would accomplish the same thing for anyone who didn't want to do it in one day, but what it requires mostly is being careful about checking everything.
If you or anyone else wants to ask me about my work process on this I am happy to answer any questions. Regards, On Sat, Jul 4, 2015 at 8:59 AM, John Paton <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi, this is a response to some discussion about Installation > Instructions in the Getting Started Guide. This was a few weeks ago but > I have been on holiday in the interim. > > I have been 'lurking' on this list for some time now, having > thought that I might be able to contribute to the documentation, but > having been overwhelmed by the size of the task. > > As an ordinary user of LO I thought that I might make a point relating > to the Installation info in the Getting Started book. > > I suspect that the vast majority of ordinary users like me, who use > Linux as their OS, simply install LO from their distribution's > repositories, if it is not already installed as part of the base install > of their distribution. (As a side comment this will often be an older > version of LO - my version is 4.2 for instance in the latest Linux Mint > 17.1 install). Distributions aimed at non technical users in particular > tend not to include even the most up to date 'stable' version. > > This requires no knowledge of the Installation process since the Package > Manager for the distribution handles the whole thing seamlessly. > > In those circumstances the ordinary user may certainly find a 'Getting > Started Guide' useful but will have no use for installation > instructions, which might frighten them anyway. > > I accept that Users on Windows and OSX may have different needs but I > have no idea what the 'market penetration' of LO is on these platforms. > LO or one of the forks is almost the default Office suite in mainstream > Linux distributions. > > I know that this post hardly helps move the documentation forward but I > felt that the view of an ordinary user may be of interest. > > John > > -- > To unsubscribe e-mail to: [email protected] > Problems? > http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ > 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 -- Kevin B. O'Brien [email protected] http://google.me/+kevinobrien “If there are no dogs in Heaven, then when I die I want to go where they went.” - Will Rogers -- To unsubscribe e-mail to: [email protected] Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ 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
