I've noticed that the phrase "allow to" or "allows to" appears a lot in the API documentation, and also in some of the help files. AS a native UK English speaker, I feel that I should point out that this is incorrect grammar (I think it's also incorrect in US English). "Allow" must take an object (except in the phrase "allow for"). There's a good discussion of this in http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/85069/is-the-construction-it-allows-to-proper-english which implies that it's a translation problem (maybe a German speaker here would like to comment).
For example "If the current entry in the Settings listbox allows to edit a value, you can click the Edit button." needs editing to something like "If the current entry in the Settings listbox is set to allow editing of a value, you can click the Edit button." There is also the question of whether "allows" is the correct word in many cases. "<This parameter> allows to <change a value>" is, strictly speaking, ambiguous. Does it mean that the parameter sets/clears a switch which makes the change of possible (the strict meaning of "allows"), or that the parameter changes the the value directly, in which case "allows to change" can be replaced by "changes"? In many cases, I suspect that the latter is intended. There's an example below taken from https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/HelpContent#Make_Images_Appear which shows the problem: three of these paras use "allows to", three don't, but I think they all have the same meaning! Create help file: creates a new .xhp file based on the template. If the template is not found, the file can't be created and an error message is displayed. About: displays the version number of the extension Set Document Root: allows to select the document as root file Edit meta data: allows to give a title to the help file and to leave a comment. The Indexing button allows to include or ignore the file when running a search Validate this help file: allows to run some checks on the xml structure of the file Toggle l10n: sets the localize attribute on false: ----- Peter -- View this message in context: http://nabble.documentfoundation.org/Use-of-allow-to-in-documentation-tp4167829.html Sent from the Documentation mailing list archive at Nabble.com. -- To unsubscribe e-mail to: [email protected] Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/global/documentation/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
