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Author: Italo Vignoli

Wednesday Community #3

FOSDEM 2018 is approaching. As usual, several members of the LibreOffice community will move to Brussels to gather for the largest meeting of free and open source advocates in Europe.

People attending FOSDEM 2018 can find LibreOffice representatives at LibreOffice booth in building K during Saturday and Sunday.

On Saturday, there will be several LibreOffice-related presentations at the Open Document Editors DevRoom.

Immediately after FOSDEM, on Monday and Tuesday, there will be a LibreOffice HackFest, with developers working at new features and community members meeting to discuss certification, marketing, QA, design, and other relevant topics.

The Document Liberation project announces five new or improved libraries to export EPUB3 files and import AbiWord, MS Publisher, PageMaker and QuarkXPress documents

Berlin, January 22, 2018 – The Document Liberation Project announces five new or improved libraries to export EPUB3 and import AbiWord, MS Publisher, PageMaker and QuarkXPress files. The libraries have been originally developed for the LibreOffice 6.0 major release, but can be used by any other software thanks to the OSI (Open Source Initiative) compliant license.

libe-book exports LibreOffice ODT files to EPUB3. At the moment it offers just basic features, but development is still undergoing and new features will be added before the next major release. The library can be downloaded from https://sourceforge.net/projects/libebook/. A description of the architecture and the features is available here: https://vmiklos.hu/blog/basic-epub3-export.html.

libabw imports AbiWord documents, and can be downloaded from http://dev-www.libreoffice.org/src/libabw/. The library home page is at https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/DLP/Libraries/libabw.

libmspub imports MS Publisher documents, and can be downloaded from http://dev-www.libreoffice.org/src/libmspub/. The library home page is at https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/DLP/Libraries/libmspub.

libpagemaker imports PageMaker 6/7 documents, and can be downloaded from http://dev-www.libreoffice.org/src/libpagemaker. The library home page is at https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/DLP/Libraries/libpagemaker.

libqxp imports QuarkXPress 3.1/4.1 documents and templates and can be downloaded from http://dev-www.libreoffice.org/src/libqxp/. The library home page is at https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/DLP/Libraries/libqxp.

The Document Liberation Project was created to empower individuals, organizations and governments to recover their data – hidden inside obfuscated proprietary file formats – and migrate them into perennially accessible standard file formats.

To return effective control over content to the real authors, the Document Liberation Project develops software libraries that can be used by applications to read data in proprietary formats. The libraries are currently used by Calligra, Inkscape and Scribus.

Sunday Marketing #3

Google Trends is a service which compares end user searches for specific terms, and as such is a useful marketing tool to get some insight on the awareness of LibreOffice in comparison with other applications. I have compared the five alternatives to the leading office suite during the last 12 months: LibreOffice is leading, followed – as expected – by OpenOffice and WPS Office. LibreOffice is also leading in term of geographical coverage.

Wednesday Community #2

The sun never sets on the LibreOffice community, as there are always active members in some countries. Unfortunately, only a minimal part of this global effort is reflected on this blog, which should feature all activities and achievements. In order to get to this objective, we warmly invite all native language communities around the world to send us a short synopsis and a couple of pictures – if available – every time they do something significant for LibreOffice: a talk at a conference, a booth at an exhibition, a meeting, a conference, a localization sprint, or any other event. The same for achievements such as LibreOffice adoptions by government bodies, central or local public administrations, or large enterprises. Just send an email to media@documentfoundation.org, and we will take care of writing the blog post (if necessary, we will translate the local language to English).

Sunday Marketing #2

In 2017, The Document Foundation has announced the availability of a Dashboard, based on data gathered from several development-related repositories. It is a very useful resource for marketing, as it can be configured to provide either an overview of the project or several detailed charts which can be used to get a more precise picture of what has happened in term of commits, committers, organizations, and issues. The time span covered by the dashboard can be set by the user, from days to years.

The three histograms show trends related to commits, committers and organizations during the last 12 months (clicking on the thumbnails will open a large image, easier to read).

Commits and committers show a rather stable trend, which confirms the maturity of the project. The very few lows in commits are either seasonal or related to the LibreOffice Conference, when core developers are spending most of their time on knowledge sharing rather than on code hacking.

The organizations’ histogram adds the affiliation bit to commits. Collabora, Red Hat and independent volunteer developers (marked as “unknown” in the legend) are the three largest group of contributors, followed by CIB and SIL. Of course, we would like to see more contributions from developers paid by large organizations deploying LibreOffice for personal productivity.

The following four thumbnails show the dashboard home configured for the following time intervals: 2 years, 1 year, 6 months and 90 days. They provide some interesting insights.

Wednesday Community #1

Our global community of volunteers, represented by The Document Foundation and based on many independent native language projects, is one of the main strengths of LibreOffice. Starting from today, we launch a new weekly blog post – scheduled on Wednesday – focused on community activities: events, seminars, conferences, projects with schools and central or local government bodies, achievements, etcetera. We want to show the world how diverse and inclusive is our community, and at the same time we want our community members to be proud of being part of it.

One of the largest and strongest LibreOffice communities is based in Indonesia. From March 23 to March 25, 2018, they will organize their first LibreOffice Conference Indonesia in Surabaya: 3 days of meetings based on Workshops, Seminars, Discussions about The Document Foundation, and gathering of LibreOffice advocates and activists. The event is also intended to be a form of thanks to LibreOffice developers who have provided the outstanding free software solution.

LibreOffice Conference Indonesia will be hosted by the Politeknik Elektronika Negeri Surabaya. The event will start on March 23 with a workshop focused on testing LibreOffice builds and localizations, and will follow on March 24 with a full day of seminars on everything LibreOffice, from an introduction to LibreOffice 6.0 to success stories and technical talks. The last day, March 25, will be dedicated to the meeting of LibreOffice Indonesian community members. Call for Papers is already open, and will close on February 8, 2018.

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