Community Member Monday: Tomoyuki Kubota

Today we’re talking to Tomoyuki Kubota (aka himajin100000), who is active in the Japanese LibreOffice community and recently became a member of TDF…

To start with, tell us a bit about yourself!

I live in Tsurumi Ward, Yokohama City, Kanagawa Prefecture, Japan. Though it’s not as advanced as central Tokyo, Yokohama is one of the major cities near Tokyo, so it’s relatively easy to reach big stores.

One of my hobbies is, of course, reading the source code of LibreOffice via OpenGrok (for symbol-based searches) or via GitHub (sometimes, for text based search), to try to find out the cause of trouble I sometimes see on someone’s tweets when I search for the term “LibreOffice” on Twitter.

Sometimes I watch videos on www.nicovideo.jp, mainly Voiceroid and CEVIO commedy drama series made by others, and videos on the games I played in my childhood with Super Nintendo, such as Romancing SaGa 2, Kirby’s Dream Course (known as Kirby Bowl in Japan) etc. Sometimes, I enjoy watching videos on Human Resource Machine played by newbies’ to computer programming!

Why did you decide to become a member of TDF?

I was invited by Ilmari Lauhakangas, who is in charge of Development Marketing at TDF.

What are you working on in the LibreOffice project right now?

Honestly speaking, my main focus varies drastically, frequently at a whim, sometimes driven bya bug’s difficulties. I was planning to work on this bug and also this one, but what I did in the end was research on:

• Ask LibreOffice questions (and this one (copying the content in just one whole cell entails a new line character as the row separator, isn’t this behaviour inconvenient?)
• this tweet (in what rule, bar graph axis starts with a number other than zero?)
• Behaviour of ‘Date Acceptance Patterns’
• ‘Python Macros’ dialog has a ‘Create’ button, but it’s grayed out. (Possibly caused by ‘Creatable’ flags not set? BeanShell and JavaScript relies on the same script providers made in Java.)

Still not tackled enough: this tweet (printing company said they can’t guarantee the output if fonts are embedded in PDF with their encoding being ‘built-in’. Workaround is to use Microsoft Print To PDF, which sets identity-H, but the pseudo-driver does not have a UI for changing page size!)

After doing research on other matters to a certain degree, I want to return to my initial purpose – the bugs I mentioned at the start of this answer.

What does LibreOffice really need?

After meeting with Naruhiko Ogasawara, Shinji Enoki and Jun Nagota of the Japanese LibreOffice community, I noticed that event attendees are often developers, or who already know about LibreOffice to a certain degree, so not very successful in welcoming new end users.

Aside from that, IMHO, people new to LibreOffice are often even newbies to computer science itself, and don’t have concrete ideas on what application software is, how files are managed,
etc, and for those people, I think, before giving inpus on LibreOffice, helping them to get that knowledge first would be easier for them to start using LibreOffice.

Thanks to Tomoyuki for all his help! Stay tune to the blog for more community member interviews…