Help wanted?

[Slash]

Hi, together!

I have been using OpenOffice for more than 3 years, now I switched (at least partially) from PC to Mac. Yesterday I installed NeoOffice/J and I DO like it! Since there is not much money left on my account I might offer time and help in the following areas:

1) Translating English manuals and help-files into German - or re-reading the more-or-less-finished versions.

2) Testing specific cross-language problems (e.g. menues or pop-up-windows not fitting because of language-based differences concerning word-length etc.)

3) Creating screenshots for various purposes

4) Adding sound-files (could be useful for presentations...) - I do think this is one of the key features missing in standard OO...

If there is a need for help in these areas, just post a reply - I'll answer.

Slash, Germany

[JKT]

1. Translation - the NeoWiki could probably use some help in that respect. There is a French translation, but I don't know if there is any progress on the German front, which is a great shame given OOo's German background. The Wiki is a repository for tips and hints, FAQs etc. It'd be quite an effort to translate the whole lot by yourself, but whatever you could do to help would be greatly appreciated. More info on the background to the French translation can be found in this thread. Smokey (sardisson), jakeOSX and ovvdlc are the two people with the best experience of the Wiki. Smokey is on vacation at present, and I think ovvldc is busy too, but if you could make a start on the translation, they could help you get set up at the Wiki when they are back.

Also, whenever we have a press release (like when NOJ went final and version 1.1 was released), we need people to translate it to their native tongues. There isn't likely to be one of those for a while yet, but if you are around at the time...

As a long time OOo user, just hanging around the support forums etc would be of great benefit. There are frequently questions that are OOo usability ones rather than being specific to NOJ and sometimes we have to redirect people to the OOo specific sites to get an answer as we simply don't have the knowledge to offer help here. So if you have good experience with OOo, it will largely translate to NOJ.

You can also help by checking the issues entered in the NeoOffice BugZilla - just seeing if they are reproducible etc is of great assistance.

To be honest, although I'm sure Patrick and Ed would appreciate a few dollars to cover overheads, having people to regularly do the support for them here is probably just as valuable as it frees them up to do more coding. So, thanks for offering your support.

[sardisson]

Welcome, and thanks for your willingness to help out!

To follow on what JKT said, yes, we want the wiki translated! There seem to be fairly large Neo/J communities in France and Germany (and Europe in general) and we want the content of the wiki natively accessible to our large userbases.

Work on the multilingual wiki has slowed for a while...in part because we're worn out from the wiki work and Neo/J release cycle this summer, in part because we needed some infrastructure work done on the wiki (some of that is now done; each user can choose a different UI language) and Jake (the wikimaster) is also busy.

Having someone to call on when we do press stuff would also be helpful...we had a partial German translation of our Neo/J 1.1 Announcement this summer but our translator (a long-time Neo community member) disappeared before the final text was ready (and we haven't heard from him since) so our German PR ended up being in English

A couple of German screenshots for our screenshots page would also be great!

We share the help and UI text with OOo, so if you find bugs in those (gasp!), be please file them in the OOo IssueZilla. We've heard that in some languages the terminology differs between Mac OS X and Windows (OOo will always use the Win version), and we haven't figured out a workable solution to that problem yet Soundfiles might be shared through OOExtras or one of the other OOo commons sites....

Anyway, welcome and thanks! If you'd like to start translating pages in the wiki, just let me know and I'll give you the details.

Smokey
(still officially on vacation )