Integrated Help
The LibreOffice Help, which is available both online in help.libreoffice.org and optionally locally with LibreOffice installation, provides extensive help on different aspects of LibreOffice.
In many dialog boxes, you see "Help" button. Upon clicking on the button, integrated offline or online help will be displayed for the LibreOffice user.
In this page, you can find more information about technical aspects of the integrated LibreOffice help.
Integrated Help Topics
The integrated help has useful contents for these topics:
- Text Documents (Writer)
- HTML Documents (Writer Web)
- Spreadsheets (Calc)
- Presentations (Impress)
- Drawing (Draw)
- Database Functionality (Base)
- Formulas (Math)
- Charts and Diagrams
- Macros and Scripting
- LibreOffice Installation
- Common Help Topics
How to Compile Help
To compile HTML help contents, you should add the --with-help="html" option to the autogen.input, and then invoke make. The required help files will be downloaded and HTML help will be built automatically for you.
You can refer to the build instructions on different platforms on Development page for more information about how to build LibreOffice from sources.
Source Code
Source code for for LibreOffice help is available as a separate git repository, on git.libreoffice.org/help/. In a LibreOffice source code repository, it is available in helpcontent2 as a submodule.
Bookmarks
Each of the help dialogs are linked with the code using bookmarks, identified by a branch name. These branch names have to be unique in order to work properly. As the dialog files are generated with .ui files created with Glade, the branch name consists of the the UI file name (with out .ui), and also the ID of the widget in the Glade .ui file.
Examples of valid bookmarks with branch=...
- From a UI file:
<bookmark branch="hid/sfx/ui/tabbarcontents/unlocktaskpanel" id="bm_id191723729601251" localize="false"/>- the branch="hid/..." is mandatory for target bookmarks
- sfx/ui/tabbarcontents is the ui file located in sfx2/uiconfig/ui/tabbarcontents.ui. Note the slight different XPATH.
- unlocktaskpanel is the widget inside the tabbarcontents.ui
- id=... is unique inside the XHP file. "bm_id" is a prefix convention for this kind of bookmark.
- localize=false is mandatory.
- from a UNO command (activated by F1 key in menus)
<bookmark branch="hid/.uno:ParaStyle" id="bm_id5183654" localize="false"/>- hid/.uno:ParaStyle, same as above but .uno:ParaStyle is the name of the UNO command
- all other attributes above applies.
- From a ID pointer
<bookmark branch="hid/SVT_HID_FILESAVE_DIALOG" id="bm_id3155619" localize="false"/>- SVT_HID_FILESAVE_DIALOG is defined in core/ . This one is defined in core/include/svtools/helpids.h
- all other attributes above applies.
Help Editing Tools
XHP Editor
The Help is written in XML (XHP - Help XML page) and built with a XSLT transformation into HTML files displayed in the browser. To facilitate the XML editing and the DTD rules to follow, an XHP editor is available at
The XHP editor renders the Help file edited in the left part of the editor screen. It also check XML, DTD and ID uniqueness of the Help XHP file which are critical to the Help.
XHP reference
The XML used in Help is fully described in the following page: