28 Feb 2019
LibreOffice monthly recap: February 2019
Check out our regular summary of events and updates in the last month!
- The biggest news in February was the release of LibreOffice 6.2, which features the new NotebookBar, an (optional) user interface based on tabs. There are many other improvements too, including faster change tracking, tidied-up context menus, better compatibility and new features in Writer, Calc and LibreOffice Online. Our video summarises the changes:
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- Meanwhile, The Document Foundation has a new job listing! We’re looking for a Development Mentor to help new LibreOffice coders get involved in the project. The role involves working from home at your location for at least 10 hours per week, up to full-time – and note that the deadline for applications is March 29, 2019!
- Also in February, we talked to Khaled Hosny about his involvement in LibreOffice. Khaled is based in Egypt, and has been contributing in the areas of text layout and font handling, especially for Arabic and other writing systems that require advanced text layout.
- Our developer community organised two C++ workshops, helping C++ coders to understand features in the language. The first covered recursion on 14 February, while the second took place on February 28 and dealt with fractals. Stay tuned for more workshops, and join us!
- Every year, the LibreOffice Conference brings together hundreds of developers, supporters and users from around the world. This month, we announced that 2019’s conference in Almeria, Spain, will take place from Wednesday 11 to Friday 13 of September. So it’s still a while away, but we’ll be posting updates on this blog, showing how you can get involved, and what’s to come…
- On Valentine’s Day (14 February), we celebrated “I love Free Software Day”, a campaign from the Free Software Foundation Europe. This highlights the fact that free software is about much more than just zero cost – it’s about the freedom to share, study and change the software that we use.
- If you’re a happy user of LibreOffice and would like to learn more about our friendly worldwide community, you might be wondering if there’s anybody near you (or at least, in your country or region). Well, we’ve created a map of community members who we’ve interviewed on this blog – and there are many more interviews to come. Check it out!
- And speaking of the worldwide community, the First LibreOffice Asia Conference will be held on May 25-26, 2019 in Nihonbashi, Tokyo, Japan. Several core members from The Document Foundation will attend this conference, including Italo Vignoli, leader of the marketing and public relations community. Note that the call for papers is now open too.
- At FOSDEM 2019, a major get-together of free and open source software developers, members of the LibreOffice project gave various talks about updates and new features. Now the videos are online, so find a topic that interests you and click through to watch the video.
- Finally, we announced LibreOffice’s participation in the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2019, where Google awards stipends to students who successfully complete coding tasks for free and open source software projects over the summer. If you have some C++ knowledge and have some ideas, join in!
