Google Season of Docs 2019

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The Document Foundation has been selected as mentor organization for GSoDOC 2019

Note: The Season of Docs program is now in the execution phase. Come back for 2020!

Read more on this blog post

Selected project: LibreOffice Online Guide

Author: Aaron Peters

LibreOffice online (LOOL) is an instance of LibreOffice running on a (remote) server (cloud server) and accessed with a modern browser. Users open, edit, print and save or export documents located in the server through a browser. The rendered document in the browser is exactly the same as the desktop application.

Because of the online environment, LOOL behave slightly differently than the desktop version. In particular:

• Only Writer, Calc and Impress are available in LOOL (leaving Math, Base and Draw out of LOOL)
• A server framework exist to support LOOL and provide session, security and file management. The most often used framework is the Owncloud and Nextcloud. The frameworks interferes in the way users interact with the cloud server.
• While the rendering engine is LibreOffice and thus support perfect document display of any LibreOffice supported document format, not every feature of LibreOffice desktop is accessible to LOOL. The user interface is limited to the most often used commands (this can change drastically with more developments).

Technical writers are invited to create a LibreOffice Online User Guide, describing the features of the application, its way to address online editing, the framework-specific features and flag the differences with the desktop version when editing documents.

Application features contents of online Writer, Calc and Impress can be linked to or sourced from the desktop version contents. For example, paragraph formatting dialog in text documents is exactly the same as the desktop application.

We envision the guide as source for a future online Help for LibreOffice Online (Help web pages accessed from the online application). However, this step demands developers time and is out of he current scope.

The Document Foundation has a NextCloud server with a recent LibreOffice Online instance that can be used for testing. Access to this server is on demand and under justification.

Technical Writer: Aaron Peters
Mentor: Olivier Hallot