FOSDEM 2011: LibreOffice Online Help (Wikihelp)

I realized I did not post my FOSDEM slides online; this blog post is to fix that ;-) So if you want to learn more about our approach to the on-line help, please have a look here:

LibreOffice Online Help (Wikihelp)

It talks briefly about what we have done to bring the LibreOffice help online, and about the future steps. Talking of the future steps, in 3.4, the .xhp files are still the source of the help (check the presentation if you want to know what are the .xhp files), because we did not manage to do the 2nd step - converting the wiki markup back to the native help files.

Actually - I would like to mentor a GSoC task for that:

Convert LibreOffice Help to Platform Specific Help Files

If you are a student interested in Free Software, with free summer, and Python or Perl knowledge (to bind to existing MediaWiki markup parsers), this might be a nice task for you!

LibreOffice GSoC: The UI Cleanup

As you might have heard, LibreOffice has been accepted for this year's Google Summer of Code program. I am a mentor or a co-mentor of several tasks, but one of them is the closest to my heart, and that is the UI Cleanup task.

Please consider applying for it - in the summer time frame, we can do a big change. And it is better than that, this task consists of several smaller sub-tasks, each of them few days to a week long, so you can see the results of your work immediately, and the big change is in fact result of all those smaller fixes 'here and there'.

If you are one of those who looks at the screenshots first, this is a task for you :-)

LibreOffice Findbar improvements

Yesterday I played a bit with the Findbar in LibreOffice, and changed it to look and behave more like in the applications like Firefox, or Evolution:

It is now hidden by default, and opens when you press Ctrl-f (for the old Search and Replace dialog I changed the keybinding to Ctrl-Alt-f), or when you choose Find in the menu. It opens at the bottom of the document, and you can close it again (and return back to the document) by pressing Escape. I also made the text entry wider so that more characters fits in there.

Enjoy! :-) - will be available in LibreOffice 3.4.