Documentation/Help

The LibreOffice Help underwent a radical change since version 6.1 and is now displayed in the system browser.

Introduction to LibreOffice Help editing
LibreOffice Help pages are text pages in XML (Extensive Markup Language). Here is a summary to help you in contributing to the Help project:

Documentation for Help editing
A minimal knowledge on XML or even HTML is necessary. The XML for LibreOffice Help (also known as XHP) is not hard to catch if you know XML basic concepts. It will be useful for small changes until you get more familiar with the do's and don'ts of the LibreOffice Help files.

Documentation for the understanding, authoring and editing of LibreOffice Help can be found in online version. These wiki pages are under revision and enhancement and will follow the development of LibreOffice Help resources.

The most important wiki page for XHP is page 2: XHP Reference.

The original PDF book is available: [[Media:OOo2HelpAuthoring.pdf|Understanding, Authoring and Editing OpenOffice.org HELP (PDF)]]. Note that this book is now outdated.

Editing LibreOffice Help Files directly in gerrit
A complete page on the subject is available here

Sources of the LibreOffice Help with git
The sources of the LibreOffice Help are in git. The easiest way to set everything up is to simply add this line into your autogen.input file inside your core LibreOffice directory:

Now the next time you run make, the Help submodule will be cloned into helpcontent2 and automatically configured. The only manual configuration you need to do is to add the pushurl like so:

From then on, you work with the git repository in the normal way:


 * To get the latest changes, do  in the core directory
 * To send your changes for approval, push to gerrit. See the section How to send it back for approval via gerrit.

Read How to setup gerrit the first time, and How to send a patch for review. If you have trouble setting up, please contact the developers at channel, they will be glad to help you!

Sources of the Help as packed archive
Admittedly, git is the safest way to have the latest help source code. But if git is not a solution for you, you can download the Help source file as a tarball and uncompress it in your working directory.

To download the latest help source code look for the latest version in this page

http://download.documentfoundation.org/libreoffice/src/X.Y.Z/ where X, Y and Z must be replaced by the most recent version. For example, as of today (May 24th, 2017) X.Y.Z is 5.4.0.

Editing the Help
A short manual describing how to author the help content is available here.

How to find the file to work on
When you have the sources of the help, and string you want to change (like to change the "wide variety of options" on https://help.libreoffice.org/Writer/Writer_Features#Designing_and_Structuring), do:

This will return you: source/text/swriter/main0503.xhp:$[officename] offers ...

which means this text is in.

Using a text-based editor
Practically any text editor is able to open the file  (for example, it is Kate in KDE, gedit in Gnome, or Notepad2 in Windows. You may want to use vim or any professional xml-editor).


 * 1) Open a Help file in the menu  or by using  function from a file manager (for example in KDE, right-click on the file and select in popup menu ).
 * 2) For the reason that files may be very big and have a large number of xml-tags, you can use the find by file (usually  or ).
 * 3) Make the necessary changes (if you are not confident with xml-tags of help files, make sure you have not touched them).
 * 4) Save the file.

This method is good when we need to make minor changes without touching the xml-tags, for example, to correct a typing error.

Using the XHP Editor assistant
The Documentation XHP Editor offers some assistance in order to check .xhp files rendering. It does not support all .xhp tags, but covers a reasonable subset of them. The XHP Editor does not provide DTD compliance, which means permanent care is still necessary while editing an .xhp file.

Understanding LibreOffice Help file structure
Th LibreOffice Help file is composed of several mandatory parts. Look at this guided example.

How to verify changes
If you make changes or create a new page for Help, it is good idea to check how it will look in the interface. You must build the Help of LibreOffice.

For the first time you need to build LibreOffice. In the future, this can be done from time to time to update the version. More information about the build of LibreOffice can be found on these pages: for Linux, for Windows, and for macOS.

The local Help
Use the option  for   when you build LibreOffice

The resulting build is placed in  together with many companion files needed to navigate the pages. Open the file  from your browser or hit press   from your LibreOffice build to access the Help entry page.

The online Help
Use the option  for   when you build LibreOffice

The resulting build is placed in  together with many companion files needed to navigate the pages. X.Y is the major release you are building. To navigate in the online Help build locally, set a web server in your computer and make it open the page  https://localhost//instdir/help/X.Y/index.html .

How to send it back for approval (via gerrit)
Gerrit is a tool that allows easy review of changes that go into LibreOffice. Help uses the same workflow that is described in the wiki article for sending a patch for review. The detailed documentation about working in submodules are in a separate article.

If you want to create a new change, create a new branch:

Edit the files in helpcontent2 and commit your changes inside the directory. While in the helpcontent2 directory, submit to Gerrit with this command

Once your submodule patch is merged, you can delete 'my_branch':

By using the ./g script, you do not need to worry about git submodule update.

If you get a gerrit error about not having a Change-ID, run this command in the core directory:

If that command does not help, follow the advice in the error "Hint: To automatically insert Change-Id, install the hook:".