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Author: Mike Saunders

Coming up on Friday: first Bug Hunting Session for LibreOffice 6.0 Alpha 1

The LibreOffice community has returned from a great conference in Rome (more on that later this week), and we’re now working eagerly on LibreOffice 6.0, which is due to be released at the end of January 2018. This version will include a large number of new features – and those already implemented are summarised on the release notes page.

In order to find, report and triage bugs, the LibreOffice QA team is organizing the first Bug Hunting Session on Friday October 20, 2017. Tests will be performed on the first Alpha version of LibreOffice 6.0, which will be available on the pre-releases server 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 from 08:00 UTC to 22:00 UTC. Of course, hunting bugs will be possible also on other days, as the builds of this particular Alpha release (LibreOffice 6.0.0 Alpha 1) will be available until mid November.

During the day there will be two dedicated sessions: the first to chase bugs on the main LibreOffice modules between 15:00 UTC and 17:00 UTC, and the second to test a set of the top 5 features between 17:00 UTC and 19:00 UTC. All details of the second bug hunting session are available on the wiki.

During the dedicated sessions, we will concentrate our efforts to chase and reproduce bugs, in order to confirm and file them in a more comprehensive way. Of course, the more comprehensive the bug report, the easier it will be for developers to solve the bugs in time for the final release. Thanks in advance for your help, and we look forward to your input!

The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 5.4.2

Berlin, October 5, 2017 – The Document Foundation (TDF) announces LibreOffice 5.4.2, the second minor release of the LibreOffice 5.4 family, which was originally announced in early August. LibreOffice 5.4.2 continues to represent the bleeding edge in terms of features, and as such is targeted at technology enthusiasts and early adopters.

TDF suggests that conservative users and enterprises deploy LibreOffice 5.3.6 with the backing of certified professionals (an updated list is available at: https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/professional-support/).

LibreOffice 5.4.2 includes over 100 bug and regression fixes. Technical details about the release can be found in the change logs here: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/5.4.2/RC1 (fixed in RC1) and https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/5.4.2/RC2 (fixed in RC2).

Download LibreOffice

LibreOffice 5.4.2 is immediately available for download from the following link: https://www.libreoffice.org/download/.

LibreOffice users, free software advocates and community members can support The Document Foundation with a donation at https://www.libreoffice.org/donate/. Donations help TDF to maintain its infrastructure, share knowledge, and organise events such as the LibreOffice Conference, which is taking place next week in Rome (https://conference.libreoffice.org).

Several companies sitting on TDF’s Advisory Board (https://www.documentfoundation.org/governance/advisory-board/) provide 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 community celebrates 7th anniversary

Results of survey amongst desktop users confirm project’s momentum

Berlin, September 28, 2017 – Today, the LibreOffice community celebrates the 7th anniversary of the leading free office suite, adopted by millions of users in every continent. Since 2010, there have been 14 major releases and dozens of minor ones, fulfilling the personal productivity needs of both individuals and enterprises, on Linux, macOS and Windows.

LibreOffice deployments are supported by certified developers and professionals (list available at: https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/professional-support/). Many are employed by companies sitting in TDF’s Advisory Board (https://www.documentfoundation.org/governance/advisory-board/), who provide either value-added Long Term Supported versions of LibreOffice or consultancy services for development, migrations and training.

LibreOffice is available in over 100 native languages, and as such is contributing to the preservation of native cultural heritages, as in the case – for instance – of the Guarani language in South America, and the Venitian language in Northern Italy. All localizations are managed by local volunteers.

LibreOffice is also a reference implementation of the Open Document Format (ODF) ISO standard for office documents, which today represents the only choice in the market for true interoperability.

Results of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS Default Desktop Applications Survey

LibreOffice’s leadership amongst office suites has been recently confirmed by the survey of Ubuntu users for desktop productivity software, with 85.52% of the votes. The closest competitors were Google Docs with 4.29%, WPS Office with 3.22% and Apache OpenOffice with 1.96%.

The Ubuntu 18.04 LTS Default Desktop Applications Survey produced over 15,000 responses in total, with over 6,400 for the office suite category. LibreOffice received the largest margin of preference of the entire survey. Results are available here: http://blog.dustinkirkland.com/2017/09/results-of-ubuntu-desktop-applications.html (video and slides).

Download LibreOffice

Current versions of LibreOffice are available for download from the following link: https://www.libreoffice.org/download/.

LibreOffice users, free software advocates and community members can support The Document Foundation with a donation at https://www.libreoffice.org/donate/. Donations help TDF to maintain its infrastructure, share knowledge, and organise events such as the LibreOffice Conference, with the next one taking place in October in Rome (https://conference.libreoffice.org).

Coming up on 28th September: Reddit “Ask us Anything” (and a birthday)

Thursday, 28th September 2017 will be a special day – not only is it the seventh birthday of The Document Foundation, but we will also be running an “Ask me (us) Anything” session on Reddit – specifically, the /r/linux subreddit.

Team and board members from The Document Foundation will be on hand to answer questions and point people in the right directions. The AmA will run from 12:00 UTC, and we’ll be around for several hours to answer questions. (And indeed we’ll check the post the following day for any extra questions).

We look forward to taking part and talking to everyone!

Document Liberation Project: New releases

LibreOffice’s native file format is the fully standardised OpenDocument Format. This is ideal for long-term storage of data, but many of us have to work with other file formats as well, including those generated by proprietary software. The Document Liberation Project (DLP) develops libraries to help us access these files, and there have been various updates in the last two weeks, so let’s see what’s new:

  • libfreehand 0.1.2 – This is a library for importing Aldus/Macromedia/Adobe FreeHand documents. In this release, the library can import more elements, such as text on paths, text effects, stroke patterns, arrows and paragraph attributes.
  • libzmf 0.0.2 and libcdr 0.1.4 – libzmf is a library for importing Zoner drawing and bitmap files, currently supporting Callisto/Draw 4-5 and Bitmap, while libcdr is a library that parses the file format of CorelDRAW documents of all versions. Both have been made more secure thanks to OSS-Fuzz, which we talked about recently, and there have been build fixes as well.
  • libwpg 0.3.2 and libwpd 0.10.2 – The former is for importing WordPerfect Graphics images, and has performance improvements when reading image data from WPG2 files, while the latter has had build system improvements and also fixes from the aforementioned OSS-Fuzz.

These improvements will be included in future major releases of LibreOffice, and indeed other open source programs that use Document Liberation Project libraries.

Meanwhile, DLP developer Laurent Alonso sent us this great before-and-after picture, showing recent improvements to the import of Lotus 123 spreadsheets. At the top you can see a Lotus 123 file (that contains lots of formatting) being displayed in LibreOffice 5.3 – but the formatting is missing. Thanks to improvements in DLP libraries, though, LibreOffice 5.4 can read and display the spreadsheet much more accurately, as you can see underneath (click for bigger):

The DLP community appreciates all contributions, and even if you’re not a coder, there are many ways to help – such as documenting file formats, or preparing sample documents. To learn more about DLP, check out our short video:

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