Community Member Monday: Afshin Falatooni

Today we’re talking to Afshin Falatooni, from the Persian-speaking LibreOffice community!

Tell us a bit about yourself…

I am from Iran, the city of Mashhad. I speak Persian (Farsi), and I love to contribute to LibreOffice! This January, I have just turned 46 years old. My favorite hobby is climbing, and if I have time, I usually go to the mountains on Fridays, which is the weekend holiday in our country.

I work as a book editor, typesetter and layout designer. I became interested in the LibreOffice project because of my job. Many editors and typesetters use Microsoft Word more than any other program, and I was one of them before I got acquainted with LibreOffice. But, now that I know the advantages of LibreOffice as a free software project, I use Writer as much as the norms of the publishing market allows me.

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

I write regularly on the Persian LibreOffice blog. My goal is to provide educational contents around LibreOffice there. Additionally, if I find a bug that is either directly or indirectly related to Persian language, in addition to reporting it to Bugzilla with the necessary screenshots and documents, I post it to the blog to make others aware of the important bugs.

We also have a Persian-speaking group in Telegram, where I answer questions as far as I can, alongside the other admin of the group.

Many years ago, I added a large collection of Persian words to OpenOffice.org project, which were likely to be written incorrectly. Using that word list, the Persian language was added as part of the OpenOffice.org auto-correction feature. The word bank continues to exist in LibreOffice, and is useful for the Persian speaking users.

Many thanks to Afshin for all his contributions 😊 All LibreOffice users are welcome to build up our native-language communities and reach more people around the world!