On Mon, 2006-08-14 at 13:16 +0200, Uwe Fischer wrote: > Uwe Fischer wrote: > > Hi, > > > > we (the authors of StarOffice and OpenOffice.org Help) would like to > > give more links from the (F1) Help to the documentation on > > documentation.openoffice.org. May be to other Web sites, too. > > 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
Uwe, The members of the documentation project would be more than willing to help. Do you think you could also post to [email protected] so the crew could get involved? -- PLEASE KEEP MESSAGES ON THE LIST. OpenOffice.org Documentation Co-Lead http://documentation.openoffice.org/
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