Home » Archives for Mike Saunders » Page 106

Author: Mike Saunders

Annual Report 2018: LibreOffice Online

LibreOffice Online is a cloud-based version of the suite that end users can access via a web browser. It uses the same underlying engine as the desktop app, so that documents look identical across the versions. But where did it come from, what happened in 2018, and how can you deploy it on your infrastructure? Read on to find out…

Some History

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, produced by SUSE. In 2015, this proof of concept was re-written into an initial Online Development Edition by Collabora, allowing advanced users to check out LibreOffice in the cloud for the very first time.

In 2016, the first source code release of LibreOffice Online, a cloud office suite which provides basic collaborative editing of documents in a browser by re-using LibreOffice desktop’s “core engine”, was added to the master branch for the announcement of LibreOffice 5.3.

This last development brought collaborative editing to LibreOffice Online, a feature which transforms the application into a state of the art cloud office suite – the first to natively support the ISO/IEC standard Open Document Format (ODF) with collaborative editing features.

The rendering fidelity of LibreOffice Online is equivalent to that of the desktop software, and interoperability matches that of LibreOffice thanks to the support of both standard and proprietary document formats. LibreOffice Online has been developed mainly by Collabora, a leading contributor to the LibreOffice codebase and community.

LibreOffice Online in 2018

The main feature in online office suites is collaborative editing, and LibreOffice Online is no exception. The server module, which is key for this feature, is improved with every new major release of LibreOffice, with a focus on performance and security.

The graphical user interface was enhanced with the release of LibreOffice 6.1 by exposing various dialogs in LibreOffice core to the web browser. These dialogs were:

  • Writer: Find & Replace, Edit Style, Hyperlink, Special Character, Index Entry, Character, Paragraph, Bullets & Numbering, Table Properties, Spelling & Grammar, Word Count, Change Tracking Management, Insert Header & Footer, and Column Formatting
  • Calc: Ability to Add Autofilter, Ability to Filter Items via Autofilter Popup, Format Cell, Sorting Functionality, Support for Hidden Tabs, Support for Chart Data Series Editing, and Data Validation
  • Impress: Position & Size, Line and Area

The most significant improvements and new features announced at the time of LibreOffice 6.2 were the following:

  • Performance: improvements of scroll wheel, zooming, disk space, session and cache management, reduction of latency and unnecessary animation, and avoidance of repeated re-layout of comments & red-lines
  • Mobile: simplification of user interface, improvement of on-screen keyboard and cursor handling, addition of context toolbar and cleaning of other toolbars, and improvements to comment rendering
  • Integration: insertion of remote graphic from integration, addition of configurable time-limit for document conversion, installation of sample webserver config snippets, and addition of hosting/capabilities endpoint to list online features
  • Document signing: integration of Vereign compatible authentication and document signature, new LibreOfficeKit signing and certificate APIs, configuration to enable/disable the signature, and addition of a signing infobar
  • Other features: opening PDF files in a new tab instead of downloading them, improving configuration options for track changes, addition of a new shape insertion toolbar and of missing configuration defaults, and cleaner and more attractive 404 error reporting

LibreOffice Online Positioning

LibreOffice Online is server software which – to be fully functional – must be integrated with a service that provides file storage and authentication. As such, it can be considered an enabling technology for the public cloud of ISPs, or the private cloud of enterprises and large organizations, when it is integrated – for example – with enterprise file sync and sharing software, or a groupware solution.

The Document Foundation does not plan to develop or deploy a public cloud solution similar to existing products from Google and Microsoft, because this would not be in line with the original mission of the project. The task is therefore open to ISPs and providers of open source cloud solutions, with many options already available on the market.

Given the mission-critical nature of LibreOffice Online, The Document Foundation will not be maintaining binaries for enterprises, because this would create expectations which could not be fulfilled by volunteer-based support. However, builds of the latest code, suitable for home users and those who wish to contribute to development – which is encouraged – are available as Docker images.

Community Member Monday: Buzea Bogdan

Today we talk to Buzea Bogdan, who is making useful videos for LibreOffice users – check them out below!

Where do you live, and what do you enjoy in your spare time?

I live in Romania, a country with beautiful landscapes. I like computers and I like to ride my bicycle – or, more recently, my electric scooter.

What are you working on in the project at the moment?

I am reporting bugs, verifying them, and helping with other bug reports. In addition, I created a channel on YouTube with short tutorials about LibreOffice.

With the help of Xisco Fauli (LibreOffice’s QA engineer) and others in the LibreOffice groups on Telegram, I began to bibisect bugs. Also, with the help of others in the same direction, I may learn more about finding bugs and checking for fixes. I feel there are not so many technical videos about this.

How did you get involved with LibreOffice?

I started with LibreOffice almost a year ago, following a post about how everyone can contribute to this project. At that time, I thought it was time to financially support the LibreOffice community with a small donation. But I soon returned to the software’s website, because I had a small problem with displaying menus. Xisco helped me to solve the problem at the time, and then I thought: “If it is so simple to help others like me, could not I use my time to contribute with the little that I know?”

From that point on, I began to contribute by checking bug reports, along with videos and other information to solve some other bugs. I have also been involved in the translation of LibreOffice into Romanian. And recently I started the new YouTube channel that I mentioned, with short and simple explanation about little things that people usually find hard to solve. Here is a playlist – you can switch between videos using the icon in the top-left:

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.

YouTube privacy policy

If you accept this notice, your choice will be saved and the page will refresh.

Finally, what do you see in the future for LibreOffice?

A few years ago I started using LibreOffice after watching a video on YouTube where OpenOffice and LibreOffice were compared by a well-known blogger. This kind of video could help LibreOffice become more familiar, and help people to discover the features and possibilities they have with open source software.

I feel LibreOffice is more mature now than ever, but the stable version needs to be stable enough – well tested. And this is the way I can help a little bit. I also feel that LibreOffice needs more engineers to work on bugs in order to maintain a smaller numbers of unsolved bugs, relative to all bugs that are reported.

So, huge thanks to Buzea for his help in the QA community, and the videos too! Checking and confirming bug reports is a great way to make LibreOffice even stronger, and doesn’t need a lot of time – if you want to give us a hand, jump into the LibreOffice QA channel and we’ll show you what to do. Cheers!

Annual Report 2018: New releases of LibreOffice

Thanks to your generous donations, and contributions from our ecosystem of certified developers, we released two major releases of LibreOffice in 2018: 6.0 on January 31, and version 6.1 on August 8.

In addition, 14 minor releases were also made available throughout the year, for the 5.4, 6.0 and 6.1 branches. Meanwhile, several Bug Hunting Sessions were held in preparation for the new major releases. These typically took place on a single day between set times, so that experienced developers and QA engineers could help new volunteers to file and triage bugs via the IRC channels and mailing lists. The Bug Hunting Sessions for LibreOffice 5.4 were held on April 27, May 28 and July 3 – while those for LibreOffice 6.2 took place on October 22, November 19 and December 21.

LibreOffice 6.0

On January 31, LibreOffice 6.0 was officially released after six months of development. This included a new ePUB filter, for saving documents as eBooks, while support for opening QuarkXPress documents was added as well. Other new features included: a revamped special characters dialog; OpenPGP support for signing and encryption on all desktop platforms; a brand new web browser-based help system; and better flexibility when using custom dictionaries.

In addition, LibreOffice 6.0 lets users perform mail merge operations using data from tables inside Writer itself, while in Calc, new commands were added to select unprotected cells on protected or unprotected sheets. Impress was also improved thanks to 10 new templates, designed for home and business use. This video summarises the improvements:

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.

YouTube privacy policy

If you accept this notice, your choice will be saved and the page will refresh.

LibreOffice 6.1

Later in the year, on August 8, LibreOffice 6.1 was made available. This release included many new features such as Colibre, a new icon theme for Windows based on Microsoft’s icon design guidelines, which makes the office suite visually appealing for users coming from the Microsoft environment.

The image handling engine was reworked to be significantly faster and smoother thanks to a new graphic manager and an improved image lifecycle, with some advantages also when loading documents in Microsoft’s proprietary formats.

Then there was the reorganization of Draw menus with the addition of a new Page menu, for better UX consistency across the different modules, along with a major improvement for Base, only available in experimental mode: the old HSQLDB database engine has been deprecated, though still available, and the new Firebird database engine is now the default option (users are encouraged to migrate files using the migration assistant from HSQLDB to Firebird, or by exporting them to an external HSQLDB server).

Finally, Online Help pages were enriched with text and example files to guide the users through various features, and are now easier to localize. Check out the other short video:

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.

YouTube privacy policy

If you accept this notice, your choice will be saved and the page will refresh.

This was all possible thanks to your donations! Support our community today, so we can keep improving LibreOffice, organising events and sharing knowledge. Thank you!

Next C++ workshop: Binary Search Trees, 23 May at 18:00 UTC

Learn C++ features with the help of LibreOffice developers! We’re running regular workshops which focus on a specific topic, and are accompanied by a real-time IRC meeting. For the next one, the topic is Binary Search Trees. Start by watching this presentation:

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.

YouTube privacy policy

If you accept this notice, your choice will be saved and the page will refresh.

And check out the suggested EasyHacks.

Then join us for a discussion via our #libreoffice-dev IRC channel. You can ask experienced LibreOffice developers questions, and learn more about the language. We look forward to meeting you!

Month of LibreOffice, May 2019 – half way through!

It’s the Month of LibreOffice, and we’re awarding sticker packs – and the chance to win cool mugs – to all contributors in the project! On this page we’re maintaining a list of names/usernames for people who’re helping out, and everyone there can claim a sticker pack at the end! We’ll also choose 10 people at random to get one of the mugs. So, how many packs have been awarded so far?

But there are still two weeks to go, so if your name isn’t there, check below to see how you can get involved! Many tasks only take 10 or 20 minutes, but make a big difference to the project. (And if you have already contributed this month, but your name isn’t there, email us with details and we’ll look into it.)

How to take part

There are many ways you can help out – and you don’t need to be a developer. For instance, you can be a…

  • Handy Helper, answering questions from users: over on Ask LibreOffice there are many users looking for help with the office suite. We’re keeping an eye on that site so if you give someone useful advice, you can claim your shiny stickers.
  • First Responder, helping to confirm new bug reports: go to our Bugzilla page and look for new bugs. If you can recreate one, add a comment like “CONFIRMED on Windows 10 and LibreOffice 6.2.3”. (Make sure you’re using the latest version of LibreOffice!)
  • Drum Beater, spreading the word: tell everyone about LibreOffice on Twitter or Mastodon! Just say why you love it or what you’re using it for, add the #libreoffice hashtag, and at the end of the month you can claim a sticker. (We have a maximum of 100 stickers for this category, in case the whole internet starts tweeting/tooting!)
  • Globetrotter, translating the user interface: LibreOffice is available in a wide range of languages, but its interface translations need to be kept up-to-date. Or maybe you want to translate the suite to a whole new language? Get involved here.
  • Code Cruncher, contributing source code: The codebase is big, but there are lots of places to get involved with small jobs. See our Developers page on the website and this page on the wiki to get started. Once you’ve submitted a patch, if it gets merged we’ll send you a sticker!
  • Docs Doctor, writing documentation: Another way to earn a badge is to help the LibreOffice documentation team. Whether you want to update the online help or add chapters to the handbooks, here’s where to start.

So dive in, get involved and help make LibreOffice better for millions of people around the world – and enjoy your sticker as thanks from us. We’ll be posting regular updates on this blog and our Mastodon and Twitter accounts over the next four weeks!

Annual Report 2018: The Document Foundation

Every year, The Document Foundation produces an Annual Report, detailing its activities in the projects and community. We’ll be posting parts of it here on the blog, while we prepare a final printed version…

Election of TDF Chairperson and Deputy

In February, the Board of Directors of The Document Foundation – during its first meeting of the new term – confirmed Marina Latini in the role of Chairwoman, and appointed Björn Michaelsen to the role of Deputy Chairman.

Marina said: “Our project is growing fast with contributors from several countries, and we need to focus much more on lowering the barriers to being a really welcoming community. I would like our community to become as inclusive as possible, and never leave out those who, just in appearance, look different to us. Openness is a state of mind.”

Björn, who had previously served as a Deputy on the Board, added: “I am encouraged to see strong contributors to the project as new candidates in this election, and hope to share the duty of serving with them, together providing a strong and reasonable voice of independent and unaffiliated input in the Board. Ultimately, I hope after this one last term I can confidently leave TDF’s Board with many new diverse and independent voices in all parts of the project and foundation, and retire back to spending my contributions more on – for instance – the source code again.”

New Advisory Board member

In May, TDF announced that BPM-Conseil, a company focused on open source business intelligence and based in Lyon (France), had joined the project’s Advisory Board. BPM-Conseil will develop the integration of LibreOffice with its business intelligence solutions Aklabox and Vanilla, and also create business intelligence-related extensions for LibreOffice.

BPM-Conseil is focused both on development of open source business intelligence solutions and on the related consultancy and integration activities. The company has a large roster of clients in France, such as the Ministries of Environment, Energy and Sea, Lyon Metropole, Nimes Metropole and City, La Rochelle Agglomeration, Haute and Basse Normandie, the Aveyron Department, and the University of Corsica.

Tenders

In 2017, TDF launched four tenders aimed at sharing knowledge about improving LibreOffice in several strategic areas, where the tasks are beyond the capabilities of independent volunteer developers. In 2018, companies selected to implement two of the tenders reported back on their work.

Firstly, Collabora was selected for the tender “improve image handling in LibreOffice (#201705-01)”. A new image life-cycle was developed, with simpler memory management for handling images and new swapping strategy. The results were incorporated into the LibreOffice 6.1 release – and a more detailed technical description of the work is on the blog, in order to share knowledge and experience from this project with the developer community and the general public.

The second tender, “implement HSQLDB binary format import in LibreOffice (#201705-03)”, was also assigned to Collabora and implemented by Tamás Bunth. He developed a mechanism to import database files with high fidelity from the HSQLDB binary file format, used by many existing ODB files, by reading the Java serialization code, and writing a filter to import all data into LibreOffice Base. The objective was to remove the legacy Java/HSQLDB database and to simplify the move to Firebird. More details are provided here.

Highlights of activities

Throughout the year, TDF supported initiatives and campaigns from other organisations that promote free and open source software. For instance, in February, we joined “I love Free Software Day”, a campaign by the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE). As they explain: “We should remember the power of a simple ‘thank you’ to motivate Free Software contributors in their important work for society. And the 14th of February is the ideal day to do that.”
March 27 was “Document Freedom Day 2018”, a campaign about open standards and document formats, aimed at non-technical people. The goal is to make regular users more aware of interoperability issues, and the importance of storing documents (and indeed any kind of data) in open and standardised formats. This helps users to avoid vendor lock-in, giving them more freedom to use the software they want – and this is also important for governments, companies and organisations.

In September, we joined the “International Day against DRM”. DRM, or Digital Rights Management, is a set of access control technologies for restricting the use of proprietary hardware and copyrighted works, by controlling the use, modification, and distribution of copyrighted works. Instead of educating users, companies prefer to restrict them from exercising their legal rights under the copyright law.

DRM is an epidemic spreading across the web, infiltrating homes, classrooms, workplaces, and just about everywhere else users can go. Tools, technologies, books, games, movies, and music are coming to us locked down with DRM, whether they are streaming or claim to be locally hosted. TDF supports the International Day Against DRM as part of its daily fight to make content sharing available to all individuals, and to educate them to adopt open standards to foster innovation.

Document Liberation Project

TDF also hosts and supports the Document Liberation Project (DLP), a sister project of LibreOffice, which fosters the development of software libraries that can import and export data in many different file formats. DLP libraries are used by many free and open source software projects, such as Inkscape, Scribus and LibreOffice, and help users to get control of their data – especially from old and proprietary file formats. In 2018, new libraries were added to the DLP project and the community produced videos encouraging people to contribute. Learn more about DLP in this quick video:

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.

YouTube privacy policy

If you accept this notice, your choice will be saved and the page will refresh.

This was all possible thanks to your generous donations – support us today!

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 importance of ODF during the festive season

To be honest, I didn't think I would publish my usual post about ODF over the festive period, as most…