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Author: Italo Vignoli

Day against DRM

Sunday, July 9, is the Day against DRM. The Document Foundation supports the global campaign led by FSF, to raise the awareness of issues related to the so called Digital Rights Management software. As any other proprietary technology, DRM is killing user freedom of choice, and should always be avoided.

LibreOffice users are fighting a similar battle when they are promoting the ODF standard file format against the OOXML pseudo-standard, and they should be amongst the first to support the Day against DRM on social media or by educating their contacts.

This is FSF campaign website: https://defectivebydesign.org/2017-dayagainstdrm-call-to-action.

LibreOffice 5.3.4 immediately available for download

Berlin, June 26, 2017 – The Document Foundation (TDF) announces the availability of LibreOffice 5.3.4, the fourth minor release of the LibreOffice 5.3 family, targeted at technology enthusiasts, early adopters and power users. LibreOffice 5.3.4 integrates over 100 patches, with a significant number of fixes for interoperability with Microsoft Office RTF and OOXML documents.

People interested in technical details about the release can access the change log here: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/5.3.4/RC1 (fixed in RC1).

For all other users and enterprise deployments, TDF suggests LibreOffice 5.2.7, with the backing of professional support by certified professionals (updated list available at http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/professional-support/).

Technology enthusiasts and early adopters looking for bleeding edge features can start evaluating the next major release by installing LibreOffice 5.4 RC1, which is available here: http://dev-builds.libreoffice.org/pre-releases/.

Download LibreOffice

LibreOffice 5.3.4 is immediately available for download from the following link: https://www.libreoffice.org/download/download/. Flatpak and Snap versions are also available from the same link.

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

Several companies sitting in TDF Advisory Board (http://www.documentfoundation.org/governance/advisory-board/) are providing either value added Long Term Supported versions of LibreOffice or consultancy services for migrations and training, based on best practices distilled by The Document Foundation.

LibreOffice Migration Workshop in Tirana

I have spent the last weekend in Tirana, the capital city of Albania, with a group of young members of the local LibreOffice/FLOSS community – Anxhelo Lushka, Augest Dalliu, Greta Doci, Jona Azizaj, Kristi Progri, Mariana Balla, Marinela Gogo, Redon Skikuli, Sidorela Uku, Silva Arapi and Suela Palushi – for a LibreOffice Migration Workshop.

As everyone can see from the picture, the LibreOffice/FLOSS community in Albania is different from any other open source community, as it has a large majority of women: in fact, the workshop was attended by seven women – Greta, Jona, Kristi, Mariana, Marinela, Sidorela, Silva and Suela (plus another two or three for a few hours) – and three men: Anxhelo, Augest and Redon.

We have planned the workshop at the end of OSCAL, the local FLOSS conference I have attended in mid-May, after a meeting with several representatives of the city of Tirana – organised by Redon Skikuli, and attended by Anxhelo Lushka, Jona Azizaj and me – during which the authorities have expressed their interest in LibreOffice.

During the two days of the workshop, we have covered a large number of topics, from the history of LibreOffice – including development, and activities focused on improving quality and reliability of the software such as Coverity Scan and OSS-Fuzz – to the Migration Protocol and the Training Protocol.

We have gone through every step of the Migration Protocol and we have focused on the different activities included in the analysis, as during the upcoming months the local team will support the city of Tirana for this stage of the project, to help understand the challenges of the migration to LibreOffice.

Last, but not least, I have presented – for the first time – the new slide deck explaining the advantages of ODF vs OOXML to end users, based on the extensive research on the subject I have done during the last six months.

All slide decks will be uploaded to TDF wiki during the next weeks (https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Gallery_Presentations).

 

LibOCon 2017 Call for Papers

The Document Foundation invites members and volunteers to submit proposals for papers for the conference in Roma. Whether you are a seasoned presenter or have never stood up in public before, if you have something interesting to share about LibreOffice, we want to hear from you!

Proposals should be filed by August 15th, 2017 in order to guarantee that they will be considered for inclusion in the conference program.

The conference program will be based on the following tracks:

a) Development, APIs, Extensions, Future Technology
b) Quality Assurance
c) Localisation, Documentation and Native Language Projects
d) Appealing Libreoffice: Ease of Use, Design and Accessibility
e) Open Document Format, Document Liberation and Interoperability
f) Advocating LibreOffice

Business track:
– Enterprise Deployments and Migrations, Certifications and Best Practices, Building a successful business around LibreOffice.
– Round table with company representatives
– Small local businesses, governments and non-profits, to be conducted in Italian language

Presentations, case studies, workshops, and technical talks will discuss a subject in depth, and will last 30 minutes (including Q&A). Lightning talks will cover a specific topic and will last 5 minutes (including Q&A). Sessions will be streamed live and recorded for download.

Please send a short description/bio of yourself as well as your talk/workshop proposal to the program committee address: conference@libreoffice.org

If you do not agree to provide the data for the talk under the “Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 License”, please explicitly state your terms. In order to make your presentation available on the TDF YouTube channel, please do not submit talks containing copyrighted material (music, pictures, etc.).

If you want to give multiple talks, please send a separate email for each.

Design with LibreOffice: Styles and Templates

Friends of OpenDocument has just released another excerpt from Bruce Byfield’s book Designing with LibreOffice, called Styles and Templates.

Styles and Templates contain most of the information on the subject included in Designing with LibreOffice, with some alterations in structure and edits for continuity. It is intended for those who want information on LibreOffice styles and templates but would prefer not to have the complete book.

Both publications are released under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike license, and are available for download from http://www.designingwithlibreoffice.com. The page also contains a link for buying hardcopy versions of both books.

Second Bug Hunting Session for LibreOffice 5.4

LibreOffice 5.4 will be announced at the end of July 2017, with a large number of new features which are summarized on the release notes page: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleaseNotes/5.4. In order to find, report and triage bugs, the QA team is organizing the second bug hunting session on Friday, June 09, 2017. Tests will be performed on the second Beta version of LibreOffice 5.4, which will be available on the pre-releases server (http://dev-builds.libreoffice.org/pre-releases/) a few days before the event. Builds will be available for Linux (DEB and RPM), MacOS and Windows, and will run in parallel with the production version.

Mentors will be available on June 09, 2017, from 8AM UTC to 10PM UTC on FreeNode #libreoffice-qa channel (connect via web chat). Of course, hunting bugs will be possible also on other days, as the builds of this particular Beta release (LibreOffice 5.4.0 Beta2) will be available until the third week of June.

During the day there will be two dedicated sessions: the first to chase bugs on the main LibreOffice modules between 3PM UTC and 5PM UTC, and the second to test a set of the top 7 features between 5PM UTC and 7PM UTC. All details of the second bug hunting session are available on the specific wiki page.

During the dedicated sessions, we will concentrate all efforts to chase and reproduce the bugs, in order to confirm and file them in a more comprehensive way. Of course, the more comprehensive will be the bug report, the easier will be for the developers to solve the bugs in time for the final release.

Besides, there will also be manual tests to be executed in TestLink, our new platform for manual tests. More information about TestLink here.

As a new feature this time, we will reward every participant who reports a bug found [*] in LibreOffice 5.4 Beta2 with a shiny ‘Proud Contributor’ sticker:

[*] In order to claim the sticker the bug needs to be reproducible in LibreOffice 5.4 Beta2 and it needs to be a not-yet-reported regression introduced in LibreOffice 5.4, a crash or a bug in a new feature introduced in LibreOffice 5.4. The bug’s description must have the detailed steps to reproduce the problem and the affected document if needed.

Press Releases

Announcement of LibreOffice 25.8.4

Berlin, 18 December 2025 – LibreOffice 25.8.4, the fourth minor update to the free office suite developed by volunteers for…

Open Document Format

The philosophy behind ODF: openness, freedom and control

File formats are not usually the subject of philosophical debate because most users just want to open, save and share…