How do we install OFFLINE HELP for LibreOffice v. 21 posts / 0 new. Log in or register to post comments. August 30, 2015 - 9:40pm. PortableApps LibreOfficePortable App libreoffice help en' and run it after the contents of the help pack have been extracted. The batch file first creates eight subfolders and then moves 24.
I tried searching but I see no search facility here. There are two earlier solutions, one referring to CAB files, but there are no CAB files in LibreOffice5.0.1Winx86helppacken-US.msi offline help from LO. The other solution is a poorly written homemade installer and freezes in Windows 7 x32 so bad the process cannot be killed, either via Windows Task Manager nor SysInternals Process Explorer. Looks like only a reboot will get rid of it.
Can someone please post CLEAR and TESTED instructions on how to install Offline Help for V.5x of LibreOffice? Thank you in advance. The simple answer is that there aren't any right now. I maintain LibreOffice Portable mostly solo at present and don't have the time to work on it. Most users don't use help. And for most of the users that do use help, the online help is all they need. That's why it's not a pressing issue.
The current guides on the site were for older layouts of the help installers. We don't have easy to install add-on packages due to the work involved. If the publisher made an easy to use all in one installer for help we could extract and package, we likely would.
That isn't the case. There are 108 separate offline help installers. And a basic extraction using an online installer for them won't work due to the fact that there are 3 files that use the same name in 6 different directories so they can't be easily extracted with 7-zip. So, each installer would have to be packaged individually. 108 languages packaged individually for each release of both LibreOffice Fresh (5.0.x) and LibreOffice Still (4.5.x). Practically speaking, it's quite a lot of work for a relatively small level of use. Based on a quick look, however, you can may be able to install it into a portable version if you have admin rights.
Download the offline help installer of your choice and run it. Install to something like C: Desktop Username Desktop LOHelp.
After installing, copy the files in this directory to your LibreOfficePortable App LibreOffice folder overwriting any duplicates. You can then uninstall the help package from your PC via the Control Panel without removing it from your LibreOffice install. I think this should work but can't check until tomorrow as I'm out of the office at the moment. Of course, this won't work without admin rights and I don't see any easy way to accomplish this without admin rights at present. This is not an official guide, it is simply what I use for my own personal use. Note that the internal makeup of the help msi changes without warning between versions, so sometimes these instructions may need to be altered.
Install LibreOffice Portable installed to the standard directory, 'X: PortableApps LibreOfficePortable'. Download the corresponding help file. Ie, 5.0.0 5.0.0, 5.0.1 5.0.1. Using 7-Zip, 'Open Inside' that file.
For 5.0.0, extract all files therein to 'X: PortableApps LibreOfficePortable App libreoffice help en', note the lack of -US on the folder name. Enjoy offline help! If you want to be able to search the help contents that you have set up using the above method, you are free to use a short batch file that I have prepared. You can find it here: Copy the contents into a text editor, save the file with a.bat extension in the folder 'X: PortableApps LibreOfficePortable App libreoffice help en' and run it after the contents of the help pack have been extracted.
The batch file first creates eight subfolders and then moves 24 files to these subfolders (3 files per folder) and renames them. This will put the index files in the same structure the normal install procedure does, thus making them usable. Thank you Gordon and SakiTC! I can now open the offiline help. I see tabs for Contents/Index/Find/Bookmarks. The Contents and Index tabs display many topics of LO but when I click on any of them, including the 'Display' button, I see nothing in the right-side detail pane.
FIND does not show any hits, for example 'macro' or 'margin' give 'No topics found.' SakiTC's bat file fixed the Find issue, but I still cannot see any details in the right pane. My path is: C: PA LibreOfficePortable App libreoffice help en and also contains these files: C: PA LibreOfficePortable App libreoffice help.xidxcaption.xsl, xidxcontent.xsl, xmaintransform.xsl. I am using LibreOffice5.0.0Winx86helppacken-US.msi with PortableApps 5.0.0.5. Language Of/UI and Locale both = English (USA).
Any help is appreciated. A clean re-install got rid of the refresh flashing in Offline help; no new issues and Offline help is working. Instead of replacing the registrymodifications.xcu, I kept a copy and I can cut paste if needed. I also took screenshots of all my Appearance/Custom Colors so I can always recreate them. I will raise this issue of easing install of offline help directly with The Document Foundation people. Most of them don't use portability but still the languages needs to be streamlined into fewer folders and the 5MB of Offline-help should always be installed by default.
I would like to see all the languages under a single 'Locale' folder, but how they implement it is their decision. Every time I updated the full version I spent 1/2 an hour finding/removing the unused language folders. Thanks to everyone that helped!
@Gord Caswell, I just installed LibreOffice Portable 5.2.0.4, then I downloaded the LibreOffice Offline Help file for 5.2. LibreOffice5.2.0Winx86helppacken-US.msi When I extracted the offline help.msi archive to./help/en/ many of the files needed were not there. However, I did see another.cab archive that was contained within the.msi archive, it is a file called: libreoffice1.cab After looking inside the.cab file I could see the missing files. So I extracted the.cab file to./help/en/ as well. Now offline help works OK (but no Find searching in Help unless you run the.bat file mentioned by SakiTC elsewhere in this thread).
I did run the.bat file from SakiTC and it worked. Now I can use Find in Help to search too. Thanks & Regards, David. I finally got it to work by copying the 'en-US' folder from a working non-portable install of LibreOffice (Program Files (x86) LibreOffice 5 help en-US) to the PortableApps PortableApps LibreOfficePortable App libreoffice help folder. Before the copy, that 'help' folder containes three.xsl files, after the copy it contained those 3 files plus the en-US folder.
That en-US folder contains 77 files and 8 folders and has a size of 24,785,092 bytes. Now, when I open LibreOffice help (F1), I get the offline help.
Hope this also works for you! Unfortunately there seems to be sufficient difference in the way LibreOffice accesses its local documentation even with minor version updates of LibreOffice to make the currently known tricks (up to 5.2) stop working. I tried 'all of the above' in this thread, but on a Win7 x64 machine I can not get the documentation ( LibreOffice5.4.3Winx64helppacken-US.msi) to work. Adding it to a full LibreOffice 5.4.3.2 install works, copying the help files over to the LibreOfficePortable install does not - it still shows the 'LibreOffice built-in help is not installed on your computer'. How do we get this done for LibreOfficePortable 5.4.3.2 ( LibreOfficePortable5.4.3MultilingualStandard.paf.exe)?