RE: Help integration (was What do we do at Apache versus what do we do elsewhere?)

["Dennis E. Hamilton" <de...@acm.org>]

There's an intermediate case:

There is also on-line versions of the help files and, in the LibreOffice distributions I've been testing with, those are used if the separately-downloadable off-line help is not installed.  (The OOo-dev 3.4 beta install that I have seems to have only the integrated help.)

I assume both are localized but I may only have dreamed that I saw language in the URI used to fetch an on-line help page once.

 - Dennis

PS: My favorite approach to this is in the Visual Studio Express editions (so it must be in the up-scale versions too), although the 2010 edition is not my favorite.  

In 2010 I can 
 - specify whether I want to use local or on-line help (in the past, there was a way to search on-line if local didn't have it or if you wanted to see if there was more information than what local had to offer) and I can change that setting any time,
 - I can check for updates to the on-line help and selectively install it locally, and help can be installed from media.  I expect that it will integrate with MSDN Libraries and also additional material of downloaded and installed SDKs, but I haven't exercised any of these in a while.  
 - There are some odd statements about accessibility which seem to be directed to doing everything from a keyboard (so an assistive device could do that), but I think there is more to accessibility that is not addressed.  Also, I can imagine specialized help for accessibility cases and for accessibility provisions in the off-line and on-line help
 - The more interesting cases were the options (that I don't see in 2010) for widening searches to MSDN online material and wider to other web sites that compile information for developers.  There was some selective control over this, and I could imagine widening to an internet search. (These latest Visual Studio IDEs have embedded web browsers, which is how a lot of it works now. I've never used Eclipse so I don't know what is comparable).
 - In the case of *Office.org, this could be a means to access the (language) community for user-contributed solutions and content, submit (user-level) bugs, etc.

-----Original Message-----
From: Rob Weir [mailto:apache@robweir.com] 
Sent: Friday, June 17, 2011 15:25
To: ooo-dev@incubator.apache.org
Subject: Re: What do we do at Apache versus what do we do elsewhere?

On Fri, Jun 17, 2011 at 5:33 PM, Jean Hollis Weber <je...@gmail.com>wrote:

> Just a small comment here: the "product documentation" in your first
> list is, I assume, the Help shipped with the product.
>
> There is another set of documentation, the user docs, which mostly
> produced by the community. These include user guides -- available in
> ODT, PDF, wiki (OOo 3.2 and earlier), and printed form -- and the
> documentation wiki (containing, among other things howtos, tutorials,
> faqs, etc). IMO these user guides and wiki items are in the "user
> support" area, along with support forums -- a subset of your "many other
> similar functions".
>


So you call the integrated product documentation "Help", and the
supplemental guides "user doc"?  I understood the distinction, but didn't
know the existing naming convention.

-Rob