TYPO3 Core

I think it is pretty confusing not to see the documentation only because the exension is not currently installed. The docs are there anyway and it surely makes sense to have a look into them before actually installing (or not installing) the extension.

The documentation is there. And our customer reported that he would want to have a look into it before activating it. They went to TER then, looking for the information they already had locally. Well ...

OK, Stefan, so to make things clear, you are still using TYPO3 6.2 and we speak about the Help > Documentation module, right?

Having a look back at the code, the problem looks like only related to showing link to OpenOffice manuals. If you use the Documentation module to download a copy of the documentation as on docs.typo3.org, it should be visible regardless of the state of extension in EM.

Finally, there's always the possibility to post-process the list of manuals using the available signal, see \TYPO3\CMS\Documentation\Controller\DocumentController::emitAfterInitializeDocumentsSignal(), if this is really a must have for your client.

Basically the problem is not really located within this extension but within the TYPO3 standard libraries which prevent, without some hack, to find extensions and their location on disk. Changing the behaviour of which manuals should be shown is a no go for 6.2 and I'd say even for 7, imho.

The original category was "extension manager". And that's what I refered to. Links in EM pointing to the downloadable documentations.