LibreOffice Conference Call for Papers

Berlin, May 4, 2015 – LibreOffice Conference will be held in Aarhus, Denmark, on September 23-25, 2015, at the Urban Media Space and is hosted by the Aarhus Municipality. The Document Foundation invites members and volunteers to submit proposals for papers.

Proposals should be filed by July 15, 2015, in order to guarantee that they will be considered for inclusion in the conference program.

a) Development, APIs, Extensions, Future Technology
b) Quality Assurance
c) Localization, Documentation and Native Language Projects
d) Appealing Libreoffice: Ease of Use, Design and Accessibility
e) Enterprise Deployments and Migrations, Certifications and Best Practices
f) Open Document Format, Document Liberation and Interoperability
g) Building a successful business around LibreOffice.

The Call for Paper page is available at the following address: http://conference.libreoffice.org/2015/call-for-papers/.

Proposals, including a short bio of the speaker (max 500 characters) as well as a short abstract of the contents (max 1,000 characters), should be sent to the program committee address: conference@libreoffice.org.

Presentations, case studies, workshops and technical talks will discuss a subject in depth, and will last 60 minutes (including Q&A). Lightning talks will cover a specific topic and will last 20 minutes (including Q&A). Sessions will be streamed live and recorded for download.

Whether you are a seasoned presenter, or have never stood up in public before, if you have something interesting to share about LibreOffice we definitely want to hear from you!

The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 4.3.7

Berlin, April 25, 2015 – The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 4.3.7 “Still”, the seventh minor release of the LibreOffice 4.3 family, which is now the suggested version of the software for large deployments in the enterprise and for conservative users. LibreOffice 4.3.7 contains over 100 bug fixes.

LibreOffice 4.3.7 and LibreOffice 4.4.2, announced in early April, include a security patch for CVE-2015-1774: OpenOffice HWP Filter Remote Execution and DoS Vulnerability, where an issue in OpenOffice’s Hangul Word Processor (HWP) filter allows attackers to cause a denial of service (memory corruption and application crash) or possibly the execution of arbitrary code by preparing specially crafted documents in the HWP document format in versions from 1997 or older.

Users are invited to update their version of LibreOffice to 4.3.7 “Still” or 4.4.2 “Fresh”, in order to protect their system from the potential effects of this vulnerability.

The Document Foundation suggests to deploy LibreOffice 4.3.7 in enterprises and large organizations when backed by professional support by certified individuals (a list is available at http://www.documentfoundation.org/certification/) capable of providing value added support.

People interested in technical details can find change logs for LibreOffice 4.3.7 here: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/4.3.7/RC1 (fixed in RC1) and https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/4.3.7/RC2 (fixed in RC2).

Download LibreOffice

LibreOffice 4.4.2 “Fresh” and LibreOffice 4.3.7 “Still” are available for download from the following link: http://www.libreoffice.org/download/.

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

First bug hunting session for LibreOffice 5.0

Berlin, April 17, 2015 – The LibreOffice community is getting ready for the next major release – planned for the end of July – with a bug hunting session focused on new features and fixes for bugs and regressions. The session will last 3 full days, from May 22 to May 24, 2015, and check the first beta of LibreOffice 5.0.

On those dates, mentors will be available from 08AM UTC to 10PM UTC to help less experienced volunteers to triage bugs, on the QA IRC channel and via email on the QA mailing list.

Those who cannot join during the bug hunting session are always welcome to help chasing bugs and regressions when they have time. There will be another bug hunting session in June, to test LibreOffice 5.0 Release Candidate 1.
Builds of LibreOffice 5.0 Beta 1 will be available until early June from this link: http://dev-builds.libreoffice.org/pre-releases/.

Further information are available here: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/BugHunting_Session_5.0.0.0.

The decision to change the naming/numbering scheme of the next LibreOffice major release from LibreOffice 4.5 to LibreOffice 5.0 is based on the following rationale:

  1. The next major release of LibreOffice will be the first available for Windows 64bit, and – during the life of the 5.0 family – on mobile and cloud;
  2. The next major release of LibreOffice will integrate another significant batch of visual and usability improvements, which will complete the activity started with LibreOffice 4.4;
  3. The difference in numbering will make it easier to communicate the gap in features with the previous generation, and convince an increasing number of users to switch to LibreOffice;
  4. Last, but not least, 2015 is the 5th anniversary of the announcement of The Document Foundation and LibreOffice.

The Document Liberation, one year after

Berlin, April 9, 2015 – The Document Liberation is a project of The Document Foundation, announced in early April 2014 to host the different libraries handling proprietary and legacy document formats within LibreOffice. The idea was to provide a single repository for other software projects willing to deploy the same libraries, in order to simplify the integration. The project is led by Fridrich Strba and David Tardon, two long time LibreOffice contributors.

During 2014, members of the project released a new framework library, called librevenge, which contains all the document interfaces and helper types, in order to simplify the dependency chain. In addition, they started a new library for importing Adobe PageMaker documents, libpagemaker, written as part of Google Summer of Code 2014 by Anurag Kanungo.

Existing libraries have also been extended with the addition of more formats, like libwps with the addition of Microsoft Works Spreadsheet and Database by Laurent Alonso. He is now working on adding support for Lotus 1-2-3, which is one of the most famous legacy applications for personal computers. Laurent has also added support for more than twenty legacy Mac formats to libmwaw.

Developers have created two export libraries – libepubgen for ePub and librvngabw for Abiword – and are currently working at improving import filters for Adobe Freehand – libfreehand – and Apple Pages – libetonyek.

Document Liberation libraries are available for Corel WordPerfect (including Graphics) and Corel Draw, Microsoft Works, AbiWord, Microsoft Publisher and Microsoft Visio, Apple Keynote, Adobe FreeHand, Aldus PageMaker, plus many legacy Mac document formats and many e-book formats.

Each library under the Document Liberation umbrella exists as an independent project, with its own maintainer, release schedule and license, according to the Ethos of Free Software which is championed by The Document Foundation.

For more information: http://www.documentliberation.org.

LibreOffice 4.4.2 “Fresh” is available for download

Berlin, April 2, 2015 – The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 4.4.2, the second minor release of the LibreOffice 4.4 “fresh” family, with over 50 fixes over LibreOffice 4.4.0 and 4.4.1.

New features introduced by the LibreOffice 4.4 family are listed on this web page: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleaseNotes/4.4.

The Document Foundation suggests to deploy LibreOffice in enterprises and large organizations when backed by professional support by certified people (a list is available at: http://www.documentfoundation.org/certification/).

People interested in technical details about the release can access the change log here: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/4.4.2/RC1 (fixed in RC1) and https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/4.4.2/RC2 (fixed in RC2).

Download LibreOffice

LibreOffice 4.4.2 is immediately available for download from the following link: http://www.libreoffice.org/download/.

LibreOffice users, free software advocates and community members can support The Document Foundation with a donation at http://donate.libreoffice.org. Money collected will be used to grow the infrastructure, and support marketing activities to increase the awareness of the project, both at global and local level.

LibreOffice to become the cornerstone of the world’s first universal productivity solution

Berlin, March 25, 2015 – LibreOffice, the best free office suite ever, is set to become the cornerstone of the world’s first global personal productivity solution – LibreOffice Online – following an announcement by IceWarp and Collabora of a joint development effort. LibreOffice is available as a native application for every desktop OS, and is currently under development for Android. In addition, it is available on virtual platforms for Chrome OS, Firefox OS and iOS.

“LibreOffice was born with the objective of leveraging the OpenOffice historic heritage to build a solid ecosystem capable of attracting those investments which are key for the further development of free software,” says Eliane Domingos de Sousa, Director of The Document Foundation. “Thanks to the increasing number of companies which are investing on the development of LibreOffice, we are on track to make it available on every platform, including the cloud. We are grateful to IceWarp for providing the resources for a further development of LibreOffice Online.”

Development of LibreOffice Online started back in 2011, with the availability of a proof of concept of the client front end, based on HTML5 technology. That proof of concept will be developed into a state of the art cloud application, which will become the free alternative to proprietary solutions such as Google Docs and Office 365, and the first to natively support the Open Document Format (ODF) standard.

“It is wonderful to marry IceWarp’s vision and investment with our passion and skills for LibreOffice development. It is always satisfying to work on something that, as a company, we have a need for ourselves,” says Michael Meeks, Vice President of Collabora Productivity, who developed the proof of concept back in 2011 and will oversee the development of LibreOffice Online.

The availability of LibreOffice Online will be communicated at a later stage.