Report on the New LIbreOffice Help Pages Online Editor

The Online Help Editor is getting a shape

I have improved and fixed a bit the XHP editor, and changed the page address:

https://newdesign.libreoffice.org/help_editor/index.html

 The editor is still work in progress, but starts to become interesting for creating and editing Help pages.

What's new

• Mike Saunders implementation of the autocompletion of XHP tags for Codemirror editor.
• The left and right panes are now fixed in browser screen and scrollable,
• The right pane uses 99% of the current Help transformation rendering, plus
• some visual debug information left intentionally to help Author in adjusting <embed>s, <image>s and <link>s . 
• You can now open a Help page directly from the interface. 

• The help page is normally source/text/AAA/BBB/myHelpPage.xhp  
• Type /AAA/BBB/myHelpPage.xhp in the text box and click Open File to load in the editor. 
• Press Render page to see it on the right. 

• A set of buttons with XHP snippets to shorten editing workload: 

• For <paragraph>s, <note>s, <heading>s, <emph>s, <menuitem>s, etc... select the raw text or contents and click the corresponding button. The raw text will be wrapped with the opening and closing tag. For paragraph-like contents, an unique id will be created automatically, a feture required for translations. 
• Other snippets builds fragments of XHP tags, such as <table>s, <tablerow>, <list>s, <section>s, and more.
• Just play with and do not forget to render the page on the right. 

Restrictions

• The editor works with Firefox only. Issues with Chrome and Edge. Other browsers not yet tested.
• Saving files not implemented. However you can copy the editor contents and finish the patch in you preferred editor
• More XHP checking are under development, specially id's unicity and DTD checking
• If you get a blank page on the right, this is because you hit a bug in the browser transformation. Unfortunately debugging the browser transformation is very hard, support is almost none.

Invitation for developers and testers

• You are invited to test the editor, report bugs and suggest improvements.  
• The user interface is simple HTML and Javascript. If you have skills in these technologies you are a potential developer for the editor, but we know that PHP will be the right tech choice in near future.  
• The source code is in the dev-tool repository. 
• To clone the dev-tool repository : 
•  git clone https://gerrit.libreoffice.org/dev-tools dev-tools 
• The editor is in dev-tools/help3/html/ 
• If you have a web server working in your computer (Apache, Nginx, etc...) you can run the editor locally: create a link between the web server root and the editor. For example, under Debian-like Linux: 
• sudo cd /var/www/html 
• sudo ln -s help-editor /dev-tools/help3/html 
• and point your browser to http://localhost/help-editor 

Seeking Help and discussion on the editor

Please use the documentation list, the developer list and our IRC channels to get in touch with the development of the editor. 

Ackowledgements

The Javascript editor used is CodeMirror and was carefully selected by Mike Saunders who also set the initial confguration for working with XML and our XML dialect XHP, as well as configured the autocompletion features.

The XHP snippets were originally designed for the KDE Kate editor and ported to the online editor.