"Help"-ing out

toonetown · Posted: Mon Apr 24, 2006 4:20 pm Post subject: "Help"-ing out

I'd like to help out with NeoOffice, and in looking through the wiki, and forums, and stuff, I think I've found an area that I'm interested in.

Has anyone begun work on getting "real" user help for neooffice? I would like to take the Openoffice help files (and any changes already made specific to mac and neooffice - as listed at http://neowiki.sixthcrusade.com/index.php/Documentation_Parts_to_Change

I think that the best thing would be to integrate this with Apple's help system (Apple Help) so that it adds to the overall "experience".

I haven't used the help system in NeoOffice yet - so this might already be done (and the wiki might be just out of date). If so, let me know. If not, I'd love to start in on this process...maybe we can get it done by the time that 2.0 is released generally. (I don't think it would really be worth the time to try and do documentation for 1.x if we aren't going to be releasing many more versions based off of that code line.)

Let me know.

-Nathan

OPENSTEP · Posted: Mon Apr 24, 2006 7:38 pm Post subject:

Jake was doing some work a while back on doing a translation from the internal format to standard Apple Help formats, but I think the perl scripts were lost in a system crash.

The help migration can be really split into two separate tasks:

1) Determine a system for translating the internal OOo help format (roughly HTML) into Apple Help format (some reference links). Internally the OOo help is mostly HTMLish, but I'm sure there are syntactic differences. This also will probably require perhaps doing image translation and the like.

2) Determine a way to use Carbon or other APIs to extend the context-aware help system within OOo to appropriately message the Apple Help Viewer to display relevant pages and anchors.

I haven't looked more into the process myself besides those really unhelpful generalities. Any thoughts? Let me know and perhaps I can redirect you to relevant spots within OOo's code where the resources are.

ed

toonetown · Posted: Mon Apr 24, 2006 7:42 pm Post subject:

I was thinking more along the lines of writing scripts to accomplish step 1 (translation from ooo to applehelp). However, if that's already spoken for, I'd be happy to help out on anything - I can work on step 2 as well...

-Nathan

sardisson · Town Crier Joined: Feb 01, 2004 Posts: 4588

Help is also available in a number of languages, so don't forget the l10n aspect as this project moves forward Smile

Smokey

OPENSTEP · Posted: Mon Apr 24, 2006 10:05 pm Post subject:

Thus far we haven't done step 1 yet and there aren't any starting points in our repository. If that's what interests you, dive on in Smile

I'm a perl guy myself for most of my regex stuff, but language isn't important Wink

ed

jakeOSX · Ninja Joined: Aug 12, 2003 Posts: 1373

indeed, i feel bad that i have abandoned this.

but this what i learned. the openoffice.org help files need to be translated into base html 3.2 files. when i started, i was using perl to change the files manually (i can not for the life of me remember why i didn't use the XSLT file, but i didn't)

the help files are many different extentions, and the links live in a different file.

here is what i'll do... i'll find what i have tonight and post a link, we'll start a wiki page on it and go from there. (though maybe reading what i wrote, laughing a bit, and starting fresh may be the best option).

-j