Love LibreOffice? Want to help spread the word? And do you speak another language than English? Then we’d appreciate your help! We have lots of community-created LibreOffice accounts on Facebook and Twitter, but some haven’t been updated for a while. The full list is below, with the date the account was last active – if you’re interested in helping to maintain one, join our marketing list and let us know!
Or if you’re interested in creating a new account on another social media platform, such as Mastodon, that’s awesome too! This is a great way to help the LibreOffice community, and build up experience with managing a social media channel – who knows, it could land you a job somewhere one day…
Berlin, December 12, 2019 – The LibreOffice Documentation Team announces the immediate availability of the LibreOffice Online Guide, a major work authored by Aaron Peters under the Google Season of Docs 2019 programme. LibreOffice Online is a web-based version of the office suite, that can be deployed on local infrastructure and connected to a file-sharing system for document collaboration.
The guide includes content for end-users – as well as for system administrators – for rapid deployment and start of operation. It covers the basic usage of the word processor, spreadsheet and presentation modules, as well as guides for file handling and – one of the major technological achievements of LibreOffice Online – the collaborative editing capability, that allows several users to work on the same document, spreadsheet or presentation at the same time. Users familiar with LibreOffice on the desktop will quickly grasp the operation of LibreOffice Online, except for some specific differences addressed in the guide.
For the system administrator, the guide covers installation and basic operation, and explains deployment in small and limited environments. Professional support and operation services are strongly recommended for large installations and mission critical deployments, available in the LibreOffice business ecosystem.
“The current version of the Guide is complete and has the necessary information for the targeted audience (technology-savvy enthusiasts and/or small businesses), to be able to get the application, install it alongside a hosting application (NextCloud), use the main modules (Documents, Spreadsheets, and Presentations), and use other desktop and mobile tools to access their LibreOffice Online content,” says author Aaron Peters. “My experience working on this guide was fantastic, and I would urge anyone interested in getting involved with open source to consider documentation as a first step. The Document Foundation’s documentation team in particular has a very well-established process and infrastructure for producing their products, and one of the only things I can think of that would help them is more volunteers.”
“The Google Season of Docs programme was an opportunity The Document Foundation (TDF) could not have miss to add a valuable content to its documentation portfolio. The LibreOffice Online Guide is a document whose time had just come and is here to help the LibreOffice Online software and its professional and volunteer community to increase its usage and benefit of its incredible value,” says Olivier Hallot, TDF mentor and Documentation Coordinator. “And working with Aaron was a pleasure and all commitments were delivered on time, which was very appreciated. Special thank you to Google for the wonderful initiative and to the Season of Docs 2019 team for the support.”
The outline of the new Guide is as follows and gives a good view on what is inside.
Preface
Chapter 1: Introducing LibreOffice Online
Chapter 2: Installing LibreOffice Online
Chapter 3: Setting Up LibreOffice Online Before Use
Chapter 4: Navigating Your LibreOffice Online Files
Chapter 5: Editing, Saving, and Exporting LibreOffice Online Files
Berlin, December 12, 2019 – The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 6.3.4, the 4th minor release of the LibreOffice 6.3 family, targeted at technology enthusiasts and power users, who are invited to update their current version. LibreOffice 6.3.4 includes over 120 bug fixes and improvements to document compatibility.
LibreOffice’s individual users are helped by a global community of volunteers: https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/community-support/. On the website and the wiki there are guides, manuals, tutorials and HowTos. Donations help us to make all of these resources available.
LibreOffice in business
For enterprise class deployments, TDF strongly recommend sourcing LibreOffice from one of the ecosystem partners to get long-term supported releases, dedicated assistance, custom new features and other benefits, including Service Level Agreements (SLAs). Also, the work done by ecosystem partners flows back into the LibreOffice project, benefiting everyone.
Also, support for migrations and trainings should be sourced from certified professionals who provide value-added services which extend the reach of the community to the corporate world and offer CIOs and IT managers a solution in line with proprietary offerings.
In fact, LibreOffice – thanks to its mature codebase, rich feature set, strong support for open standards, excellent compatibility and long-term support options from certified partners – represents the ideal solution for businesses that want to regain control of their data and free themselves from vendor lock-in.
LibreOffice Online is fundamentally a server-based platform, and should be installed and configured by adding cloud storage and an SSL certificate. It might be considered an enabling technology for the cloud services offered by ISPs or the private cloud of enterprises and large organizations.
All versions of LibreOffice are built with document conversion libraries from the Document Liberation Project: https://www.documentliberation.org.
Support LibreOffice
LibreOffice users are invited to join the community at https://ask.libreoffice.org, where they can get and provide user-to-user support. People willing to contribute their time and professional skills to the project can visit the dedicated website at https://whatcanidoforlibreoffice.org.
LibreOffice users, free software advocates and community members can provide financial support to The Document Foundation with a donation via PayPal, credit card or other tools at https://www.libreoffice.org/donate.
Lin and Wang in the LibreOffice Conference 2019. The Chinese words in the photo in slide marks: “I have to speak Chinese, not local languages.”
Authors: Author: Kuan-Ting Lin and Tanax Yago (Xiao-Wu Wang)
Foreword: At the LibreOffice Conference 2019, two young people from Taiwan, Kuan-Ting Lin and Xiao-Wu Wang, gave a wonderful talk called “Making LibreOffice a lifesaver for dying languages in Asia”. (Video of the talk is at the end of this blog post.) It covered their work and plans for saving indigenous languages in Taiwan, and what an important role LibreOffice can play here.
Like many indigenous or native people around the world, the indigenous Taiwanese people have been excluded from contemporary technology for decades. During the rapid development of personal computers between the 1960s and 1980s, the indigenous people were suffering from the “national language” policy, which banned all indigenous languages and discourse promoting Chinese identity in school. That is the reason that the earliest Chinese input method for computers was invented before 1976, but there were no equivalents for indigenous languages until the late 2000s.
As smartphones boomed in this decade internationally, more and more indigenous people gained access to the internet mobile apps as, like other people do Taiwan. But the majority of the digital resources are still in Chinese: online news articles, educational materials, translation systems, digital government services, medical information, chat forums, and many more. Almost all of them are not available in the indigenous languages.
Maybe Taiwan has done a lot for indigenous rights, but as members of the indigenous community and students of anthropology here, we think there is still huge room for improvement. The input system is the first step. Typing has been difficult for indigenous people as sentences are treated as English – hence tons of red underlines indicating spelling or grammatical “mistakes” identified by various office software brands in the market. Therefore, making indigenous dictionaries for the apps to remove the underlines has become the top priority of our work.
Making it appealing
Furthermore, the system must be appealing for people to type in their own indigenous languages. It needs to be smart enough to correct grammar, if possible, and spelling. Being able to do so can empower the elderly to use new technology and to align their spelling with the official dictionary as long as they want to. New language learners will benefit from this system, since they don’t need to look up in dictionaries when typing as often.
After our research, we understand that Microsoft not only discourages people to type in indigenous languages in Microsoft Office – by failing to implement such support in the software suite – but also distance people from their mother tongue by restricting modifications to Office with its proprietary software license.
On the contrary, the LibreOffice community discovered this problem years ago and has been tackling it thanks to its open source development, and its appreciation of diverse values. For example, LibreOffice was translated to Guarani to address a similar issue in South America. In Taiwan, community members like Mark Hung have started to build databases for indigenous languages, too.
Working with the youth communities of indigenous people, we are able to extend the project to another level: local participation. We want this project to be an important point of revitalization of indigenous culture, and it can be applied in everyday life. We invite youngsters from all the indigenous communities, and connect them with the LibreOffice community. With such an idea, the LibreOffice community can also benefit from new perspectives and views of different people, and can get a huge group of new and enthusiastic users and promoters.
Good for everyone
The project is also good for the government. The central government of Taiwan is both struggling with its OpenDocument Format/LibreOffice policy and the “official documents in indigenous languages” policy. For public servants, everyday tasks seem to have made them reluctant to learn new things – both dying languages and new software. We hope that combining the two will make it easier for people to adapt new and meaningful policies.
We received so many words and a lot of help from our friends in the LibreOffice community around the world before, during and after the LibreOffice Conference 2019 in Almería, Spain. Our Taiwanese folks, including Franklin Weng and Eric Sun, introduced this wonderful opportunity for us to get to know this community. Mark Hung, Gustavo Pacheco, Eike Rathke and Cheng-Chia Tseng generously provided their precious knowledge and experiences. Shinji Enoki, Jeff Huang and many friendly LibreOffice community friends gave us their sincere encouragement and suggestions. We are so lucky to work on this important issue with these lovely people!
If you agree that this is worth doing, please join us! We’d love to see new participants from various backgrounds. For inquiries, participation, questions or suggestions, just send an email to a @ cssjh . com (Kuan-Ting). We appreciate your interest and support!
And as mentioned, here’s the video of the presentation from the conference:
Please confirm that you want to play a YouTube video. By accepting, you will be accessing content from YouTube, a service provided by an external third party.
LibreOffice’s native file format is OpenDocument, a fully open and standardised format that’s great for sharing documents and long-term data storage. Of course, LibreOffice does its best to open files made by other office software as well, even if they’re stored in pseudo-“standards” with cryptic and obfuscated contents. Compatibility with PowerPoint PPT(X) presentations is therefore a challenge, but developers are working hard on improvements…
Everyone is invited to participate in the PowerPoint support initiative, either in development or testing. If you are interested in joining, please send an email to ilmari.lauhakangas@libreoffice.org.
Indeed, LibreOffice wouldn’t be where it is today, without the incredibly valuable help of hundreds of volunteers in the last decade. So to everyone who has contributed to our project and community over the years, we at The Document Foundation want to say a big thank you! Your work has helped many millions of LibreOffice users around the world benefit from powerful, open and multilingual productivity tools.
And to celebrate, here are some photos of volunteers from events this year:
