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Month: September 2016

Prototypefund: an opportunity for German freelance developers

The Document Foundation is happy to share with the community the opportunity represented by Prototypefund (http://codefor.de/blog/prototype-fund), an excellent project for freelance developers based in Germany.

TDF Board of Directors encourages all hackers with the necessary credentials and interested in improving either LibreOffice or the Document Liberation Project to apply for the fund. Approved projects will be supported by the LibreOffice development community, which will provide the mentoring resources to achieve the objective.

This is a list of potential projects, which will be very helpful both for LibreOffice users and for the broad scope outlined by Prototypefund:

  1. Develop a LibreOffice Calc import filter from public administration sources, to allow citizen to process and analyze data themselves. Such an import filter would allow to easily create content for publication.
  2. Develop a digital tool based on LibreOffice, to create, share and use (open) data, for data visualization and storytelling, social engagement, transparency and citizen participation. An example project would be to create a filter that export diagrams in Calc to d3js for publication on the web.
  3. Develop an “open data browser” – most likely as an extension – capable of importing data made available at: https://offenedaten.de/dataset into LibreOffice Calc or Base.
  4. Allow LibreOffice to read/process and render basic geographic data from OSM using Calc or Draw.

These are just examples, which can be used to look at Prototypefund in a creative way, to write the project (according to the website, one page should be enough to apply).

The Document Foundation is happy to help the interested developers with their pitch related to the development of LibreOffice.

LibreOffice Conference 2016: video roundup

A short video roundup of this year’s conference in Brno – thanks to everyone who attended, and see you next year in Rome!

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LibreOffice contributor interview: Regina Henschel

Regina Henschel LibreOffice developer

Now that the LibreOffice Conference has finished, we’re back to our regular contributor interviews. This week it’s the turn of Regina Henschel who helps LibreOffice users by answering questions, testing new features and working on bug reports.

What is your IRC nickname / location / social media page?

I live in Dortmund (Germany). You can best contact me via the mailing lists. I don’t have any account on Twitter or Facebook or similar, and I seldom use IRC (nickname pppregin).

Do you work for a LibreOffice-related company or just contribute in
your spare time?

I do all of my work for LibreOffice in my spare time. In my daily job I’m teacher of mathematics.

How did you get involved with LibreOffice?

That is a wide range: I’m member of the Open Document Format Technical Committee (ODF TC), I answer questions on ask.libreoffice.org and on the mailing lists, I discuss and test new features and work on Bugzilla issues, and sometimes I contribute code.

What areas of the project do you normally work on? Anything else you want to tackle?

Currently I watch the development of some new features coming in from the Google Summer of Code, including testing, and I need a lot of my time for to prepare me for ODF TC meetings.

I would like to do much more coding. But especially in Draw, which I like most, the code is complicated and I don’t have enough spare time to learn it quickly. My special interest is in the 3D features of Draw.

What was your initial experience of contributing to LibreOffice like?

I started with user support for StarOffice in Usenet newsgroups more than sixteen years ago, and have got a lot of product experience with OpenOffice.org. A really surprising aspect of LibreOffice was how much easier it has become to build on Windows. Using Gerrit was unfamiliar for me, but help on IRC or mailing list was always there.

What areas of LibreOffice do you think need to be improved?

We need more volunteers to look after the increasing amount of users, and manage the growth of questions and bug reports. Also, we need more testers for new features and people to document user interface changes and new features.

Which is your preferred text editor? And why?

A lot of my work is creating test files and examining file formats. For that I use XML Notepad 2007, where I can work directly on the nodes, without need for all the quotes and angle brackets, which are needed in a simple editor. And I use Notepad++. It has syntax highlighting for XML and C++ (among lot of other languages), folding, it reformats XML, and makes diffs. Sometimes I use PSPad, mostly as a notepad, because of its quick starting, or I use its HexViewer. That is all on Windows, as you might have noticed.

What do you do when you’re not working on LibreOffice?

Besides my daily job, all the other time goes to my family.

Thanks Regina! And thanks indeed to our whole community – if you’re reading this and want to get involved, join us today and help to make LibreOffice even better.

Community conference starts with 10th release of LibreOffice in 2016

downloadBrno, September 7, 2016 – The Document Foundation (TDF) has celebrated the opening session of LibOCon with the announcement of LibreOffice 5.2.1, the first minor release of the LibreOffice 5.2 family.

LibOCon is a showcase of the project activity, and will feature over 60 talks in three days, covering development, QA, localization, ODF, marketing, community and documentation, a business session in Czech focused on large deployments of LibreOffice, and a meeting of the Open Source Business Alliance (OSBA).

Details of the conference, including the program and collateral activities such as the traditional “hacknight” – a hands-on session where developers hack over food and drinks – are available on the event website: http://conference.libreoffice.org.

LibreOffice 5.2.1, targeted at technology enthusiasts, early adopters and power users, provides a number of fixes over the major release announced in August. For all other users and enterprise deployments, TDF suggests LibreOffice 5.1.5 “still”, with the backing of professional support by certified people (a list is available at: http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/professional-support/).

People interested in technical details about the release can access the change log here: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/5.2.1/RC1 (fixed in RC1) and https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/5.2.1/RC2 (fixed in RC2).

Download LibreOffice

LibreOffice 5.2.1 is immediately available for download from the following link: http://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-fresh/.

LibreOffice users, free software advocates and community members can support The Document Foundation with a donation at http://donate.libreoffice.org.

Several companies sitting on the TDF Advisory Board (http://www.documentfoundation.org/governance/advisory-board/) are providing either value-added Long Term Supported versions of LibreOffice or consultancy services for migrations and trainings, based on best practices distilled by The Document Foundation.

Press Releases

The Document Foundation Releases LibreOffice 26.2.1 with Contributions from Community and Ecosystem Partners

Videos describing new features available on YouTube and PeerTube Berlin, 26 February 2026 – The Document Foundation today announced the…

Open Document Format

ODF is just the first of the advantages of LibreOffice

Comments continue to be posted on articles that refer to blog posts on OOXML and related topics, from users who…