Home » Archives for Mike Saunders » Page 114

Author: Mike Saunders

LibreOffice community events: Cyprus and Japan

Happy new year! But before we really get into 2019, here are a couple of short event reports from our LibreOffice communities around the world, for events in December 2018. A big thanks to the organisers for their work, and the participants – you’re all doing a great job to boost the community, improve LibreOffice, and share information!

Cyprus: METU NCC LibreOffice Event(s) 2018

During the last weekend of the year (December 28-30), there was a series of events at METU NCC (in Cyprus), organized by the METU NCC ACM Student Chapter. The number of attendees at the seminar was much lower than the last year, probably because of the holiday season, but interaction/result efficiency of the workshop/hackfest was better than the last year. Most of the attendees were from the Computer Engineering department.

All attendees completed the “getting started” part of LibreOffice development. Some of them submitted their patches to Gerrit, and some are preparing to do so. Here are the event pages on on our wiki: METUNCCLODev2018 and METUNCC2018.

Japan: Kanto LibreOffice Offline meeting 2018.12

On 13th December, at the Yahoo! Lodge (1-3, Kioi-cho, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo), LibreOffice community members who are usually far away from one another met up for a chance to interact. At this event, participants had a question-and-answer session about translations, discussed some other topics, and prepared slides for the following day. Attendees included: Naruhiko Ogasawara, Shinji Enoki, Masaki Murakami Tomas Kapiye (from Namibia), Dieudonne Dukuzumuremyi (Rwanda), Hatem Wasfy(Egypt) Rin Nakamura and Atsushi Ueda. Here’s the event page (in Japanese).

Japan: Open Source Conference 2018.Enterprise

On the following day, the LibreOffice Japanese team did a seminar. This time, the speakers were Tomas Kapiye, Dieudonne Dukuzumuremyi and Hatem Wasfy(Egypt). Event page (also in Japanese). One of the talks was about “How African students contribute to LibreOffce” – click here for the slides, and here’s a video of it:

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 some photos from the Japanese events:

Try the LibreOffice 2018 Christmas Quiz!

How much do you know about LibreOffice – the software, the community and its history? We’ve made a little quiz for you to try out, so check out the questions below, and you’ll find the answers at the bottom. Good luck 🙂

1 – LibreOffice is a successor to OpenOffice.org, which was based on the proprietary suite StarOffice. Which company was behind StarOffice?

A: Star Corp
B: Solar Sys
C: Star Division

2 – In which year was The Document Foundation (TDF), the non-profit entity behind LibreOffice, legally established?

A: 2009
B: 2012
C: 2014

3 – Who is the current chairperson of TDF?

A: Marina Latini
B: Michael Meeks
C: Thorsten Behrens

4 – LibreOffice includes a graphics editing tool – what is it called?

A: Create
B: Draw
C: Graphic

5 – If you don’t like the default icon set in LibreOffice, how can you change it?

A: Under the Format menu
B: Via Tools > Options > View
C: Using an extension

6 – What’s the standard document format of LibreOffice called?

A: OpenDocument Format
B: OpenXML Format
C: LibreDocument Format

7 – What is a “Hybrid PDF?”

A: It includes interactive elements and animations
B: It includes all fonts, to display properly everywhere
C: It includes the original source document, to allow editing

8 – LibreOffice includes a dockable window to help you move around complex documents. What is it called?

A: DocBrowser
B: Navigator
C: Overview

9 – If you want Writer to automatically add numbered captions when inserting objects, where do you go?

A: Tools > Options > Objects > Preferences
B: Insert > Image > tick “Add captions” box
C: Tools > Options > LibreOffice Writer > AutoCaption

10 – With which major LibreOffice release did the branding change to include cubes?

A: LibreOffice 4
B: LibreOffice 5
C: LibreOffice 6

11 – LibreOffice 6.2 will include a new (optional) user interface design. What’s its name?

A: TabBar
B: GroupedBar
C: NotebookBar

12 – Where did the 2013 LibreOffice Conference take place?

A: Berlin
B: Milan
C: Paris

13 – And where will the 2019 Conference be?

A: Almeria
B: Stockholm
C: Budapest

14 – Markus Mohrhard is a long-time LibreOffice developer, who has been involved in the project since its early years. What is his nickname?

A: Moggi
B: Marko
C: Maggi

15 – Another hard-working member of the community is “raal”, who helps out with events in the Czech Republic. But what’s his real name?

A: Stanislav Horáček
B: Zdeněk Crhonek
C: Jan Dvořák

16 – Finally, who can join the LibreOffice project and help to improve the software?

A: Experienced C++ developers
B: Members of The Document Foundation
C: Absolutely anybody

And now, the answers:

1: C
2: B
3: A
4: B
5: B
6: A
7: C
8: B
9: C
10: C
11: C
12: B
13: A
14: A
15: B
16: C, of course!

We in the community wish you all a great Christmas and festive time, and a happy new year. Here’s to a great 2019, with many more LibreOffice releases, events and fun to be had!

Coming up on December 20: Next C++ workshop

Improve your C++ skills! Last week, we had a workshop covering an introduction to the language, and looking at functions and strings. Participants watched a couple of presentation videos, and then had the opportunity to put questions to experienced LibreOffice developers.

Well, the second workshop is coming up! On December 20 at 19:00 UTC, join us to discuss these topics: I/O streams and building LibreOffice! Beforehand, you can watch this video for an overview:

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.

Then check out this page about I/O streams, and the building guides for LibreOffice. (You don’t have to read them all in detail, but take a look, and think of things you want to talk about!)

On December 20, you can join the discussion in the following ways:

See you then!

Coming up on December 21: Bug Hunting Session for LibreOffice 6.2 RC 1

After the first and second Bug Hunting Sessions of LibreOffice 6.2, which were held on October 22th 2018 and November 19th 2018 respectively, we’re glad to announce the third and final Bug Hunting Session for LibreOffice 6.2 on December 21st. You can see the release notes describing the new features here.

In order to find, report and triage bugs, the tests during the Third Bug Hunting Session will be performed on the first Release Candidate (RC1) version of LibreOffice 6.2, which will be available on the pre-releases server on the day of the event. Builds will be available for Linux (DEB and RPM), macOS and Windows.

Mentors will be available on December 21st 2018, from 7AM UTC to 19PM UTC for questions or help in the IRC channel: #libreoffice-qa and its Telegram bridge. Of course, hunting bugs will be possible also on other days, as the builds of this particular Release Candidate (LibreOffice 6.2.0 RC1) will be available until mid January, 2019. See the release plan.

During the day there will be two dedicated sessions, one about the new KDE5 Integration between 11AM UTC and 13PM UTC and the other about the tabbed NotebookBar from 15PM UTC to 17PM UTC as it is not experimental anymore.

Help us to make document compatibility even better

The Document Liberation Project (DLP) is a sister project to LibreOffice, and provides many software libraries for reading and writing a large range of file formats – such as files created by other productivity tools. Thanks to the DLP, LibreOffice (and other programs) can open many legacy, proprietary documents, but there’s always room for improvement! Check out this short video to learn more:

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.

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 Future of Open Standards and the Importance of ODF

Open standards don't make headlines. Instead, they work quietly behind the scenes to define how information is created, shared and…