LibreOffice Conference 2026: The Bookshelf Project for Quick LibreOffice Documentation Access

Duration: 14:09 1642 transcript words EN summary

Video summary

The Bookshelf project represents an initiative within LibreOffice aimed at providing users with rapid and reliable access to comprehensive documentation guides. These guides serve a dual purpose as both reference materials for specific features and step-by-step tutorials for tasks such as creating templates or building pivot tables. A key design principle of the project is ensuring consistency across different platforms; by linking the static guide pages directly into LibreOffice's online and local help systems, users can seamlessly navigate between application help pages and detailed documentation without encountering conflicting content based on their media source. To achieve this seamless integration, the project team developed a method to transform standard OpenDocument Format (ODF) files into optimized web pages using a specialized extension called Writer to XHTML. This process involves repositioning chapter elements like logos, titles, and tables of contents into HTML sections that can be styled with CSS grids, which are not native to ODF definitions. The resulting static pages are lightweight, relying only on minimal JavaScript, which allows organizations to clone the repository and host the documentation locally within their own facilities or on the internet without dependency on external databases or services. The Bookshelf platform offers these resources in multiple formats, including downloadable PDFs, source code, printed copies, and online reading versions, catering to diverse user preferences. The interface includes a header with the guide name, a dedicated donation section for the foundation, and a global table of contents that allows users to search across all available books. By providing direct links at the bottom of every help page, the system ensures that whether a user is accessing local help or the online service, they can quickly jump to the relevant chapter in the Bookshelf, effectively bridging the gap between quick application tips and deep-dive documentation. Regarding user engagement, the project team has begun analyzing traffic data to understand how users prefer to access this literature. Initial statistics indicate a significant daily volume of visits, with an average session duration of about one minute, suggesting that users are actively searching for specific information rather than just browsing passively. While exact preferences between downloading PDFs and reading online are still being gathered by the infrastructure team, the current setup demonstrates high utility, particularly when social media inquiries or specific feature needs arise, allowing users to instantly locate solutions like master document guides through the unified Bookshelf interface.

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[music] Hello everybody. That's me again. Let's talk about uh a project that I am conducting within the documentation which I call uh the bookshelf or Libra office guides. And u the idea of this um u project is to make all the guides available quickly for oh for uh the um users. So what happens is the guides are also a reference for Libra office users. Yeah. So it's important for them to have quick access on the topic. It's also important to make a search in the chapter uh to search also in the book. Uh the guides are also tutorial for features. For example, if you want to create a template, so you have all the instructions in the guides to create a template, you if you want to open a or create a pivot table, then uh everything is explained there. So it's important that the guides are talk took as tutorial also and also the howto and uh the guides are linked in the libri help and sometimes you have an overlap of the help contents and the guides. Uh this is on purpose. We don't want to to have uh different contents uh depending on the the media that you are using. And uh the advantage also is that uh we created the guides as a static pages. It's not connected to any service specifically such as database. It's just a uh a set of uh at best JavaScript uh inside the pages. So uh you can also if you want you can clone the uh the repository of the guides and install in your in in your facility or your internet. This is perfectly possible. Okay. Uh what uh we did uh we we have a challenge in our guides. This is the structure of a chapter. We have a logo. We have a guide name. We have a chapter title. We have a subtitle, copyright, a table of contents, and the contents of the chapter. And the challenge is to transform that into a web page. Okay. So uh just to make sure this this uh the logo uh is mapped here, the uh guide name is mapped here. Uh the chapter and subtitle, the copyright, the table of contents and the the area where all the contents is is displayed. So this is the structure of the chapter and we need to transform that into a different layout. So the layout that we have in usually in pages in web pages we have a header here and we have a table of contents here a copyright is over there and the contents are uh displayed here. So this the the the challenge is to transform that structure of the chap chapter in the previous slides to this one. We did it in the past and we added some further sections. Uh one is for donation for the foundation. The other one here is to have the table of contents of all the book the books. uh here an imprint of the content of the foundation and a search uh mechanism to uh search within all the databases. Right? So how do you transform an ODF file into a web page? Um this was done by the trick is to reposition the chapter parts we use with sections. So I saw with the arrows all the sections that we had to create and the sections hopefully uh was mapped into a a tag div in HTML. Uh so also we uh the div can be handled in HTML by uh the CSS and the grid and uh we have to introduce the grid because the grid does not exist in the ODF definition. So this is something we had to add into the export of our um uh contents. uh and also we use a very small script to add the CSS to the exported HTML. So that for example in ODF you have a section with name XYZ. Internally this section is named XYZ region and in HTML you can have this this uh tag and of course then it becomes very easy to position all the contents of the chapter. Okay. Uh then of course the tool that we use to export we use an extension name it writer to h [snorts] x x to xhtml. This is a extension that has been developed in uh long some time ago. Um and uh it uses Java through um as a mechanism as a language and it's very flexible and it produces as a less cluttered HTML page. So you can have this extension here in the extension websites and we applied this uh this thing. So the bookshelf was designed by um in the beginning of course by myself but then Juan Jose helped me to create this page. So you have all the guides available here and the guides you can download it from um PDF. You can download the source code the ODF. You can uh buy a printed copy. Sometimes we we made some of these guides available for as a printed copy and you can read it online. So the idea is to have a quick access to all this literature and also what is important for us and I saw that in several uh social media people asking some guidance on how to do uh for example a master document then I can go to the bookshelf to the chapter of of um um master documents and get the link and publish for the people. All right. So, it's a very fast access. Um that each chapter has a table of contents. You can navigate by chapters right there. Okay. So, this is for the car guide and it's very quick. And this is the results that we have. Uh here is the header with the logo, the guide uh uh name, the chapter, the donation. This is the book uh the table of contents of the book. This is the contents of the chapter. And then you can navigate and scroll down here u the u all the contents of your chapter. For example, in that case, the introduction. Okay, I will explain in another um um presentation how do we transform that in more details but this is the result that we have in this project and we are doing that for all the available guides that we publish. So that's basically my presentation. Um yeah I'm ready to take some questions. It's quite quick but uh the results is there and we are uh working actively to make all those the books available in the bookshelf. So yes please you mentioned you did mention that the online help is linked to to those pages. >> Uh yes >> whether it's local or online. >> Yes. the uh if you open the health in the application you will see on each health page you have a link to this uh book. So if you if you are looking for information about uh say uh um something related to inress then you will be able to in the help pages to to be able to >> you navigate from the help >> yeah but it's just a link >> local either >> no you you have the help online which is a service that we offer. We you have the lo the help locally and both of them you you have on the bottom of the page you have a link to the bookshelf. So if you want if you read the help page and it wants more information, you just have a simple link between the two services. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. >> They don't have to be simultaneously. >> No, no, no. It's [clears throat] it's simple. Let me just try to show it. >> Um let me just uh here open my navigator. I hope that it's connected. Okay. Uh then we have for example this this is a page and uh uh online. Let's put on English. Let's put this now right now in and then you have on the bottom you have uh these links. Okay. It goes to the bookshelf directly. So very simple and effective. Thank you. >> One more question. >> Yes. >> Uh yes. So, I was just wondering uh since we have the guides available in a variety of formats and I feel like I'm just asking you for uh statistics today, but um do we have uh statistics on how most people are uh accessing the guides these days? Um do people prefer uh to download the PDF and uh access it as a book? Um, do people prefer to what search online and uh access it that way? Is it an even split? Yeah, we we have um the infra um uh the infra team has a um uh I don't know exactly what's the name it's the name is Matmo and uh it collects information on the traffic that we have in our facility. Maybe uh Kilam can give me more information. But uh I can show you some traffic uh information. Let's it's it will be quite interesting to see how it works. Let me just um uh find in my bookmarks. I have tons of uh Yeah. Let's see uh if we can let's see something here. Let me just try to get the right the right books liberty office.org. So, what do we have? Let me try to see if we can increase visits over time. Um, we have uh about 100 visits. Uh, no. Yeah. What's that? What? Uh, we have a a peak here. Um, and the the average duration is uh 1 minute here. And we have about let's see about 1,000 visits a day.