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Author: Mike Saunders

Marketing activities so far in 2017: Mike Saunders

Thanks to donations to The Document Foundation, along with valued contributions from our community, we maintain a small team working on various aspects of LibreOffice including documentation, user interface design, quality assurance, release engineering and marketing. Together with Italo Vignoli, I help with the latter, and today I’ll summarise some of the achievements so far in 2017.

Videos

The year started off with preparations for LibreOffice 5.3, a major release that arrived on February 1st. We’ve found that videos are a great way to demonstrate new features to end users – and news websites often embed them as well. So I created a series of New Features videos for LibreOffice 5.3 covering the suite as a whole, along with Writer, Calc and Impress. So far they’ve had over 150,000 views in total:

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I also coordinated script translations from our diligent localisation community, so that the videos had subtitles in 17 different languages. Thanks to everyone who helped!

Around the same time, FOSDEM took place in Brussels, and I used the opportunity to record video interviews with various people involved in The Document Foundation. If you want to learn more about how TDF works, and what you can do to help the project, check out this playlist:

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After returning from FOSDEM, I also edited and uploaded LibreOffice-related presentations from the event.

Month of LibreOffice, and events

In May, we had another Month of LibreOffice, celebrating contributions from right across the project. But this time we awarded printed stickers to everyone who took part:

Over 300 contributors won stickers, and we gathered together some photos showing them in action on laptops, PCs, and even a bike!

Regarding events, I attended the MuvGoc ’17 BarCamp in Munich together with Thorsten Behrens. We discussed removing barriers in the digital world, and the relationship between open data and open source. See here for the write-up.

From 23 – 25 of June, I helped to organise a German LibreOffice community meeting in Berlin. We talked about various topics, including ways to bring in new contributors and link different parts of the project and community together – see here for the details (German version).

Website, blog and infrastructure

The LibreOffice download page was due for a facelift, so I worked with Christian Lohmaier (Cloph) on a new design: this makes the download button more prominent, provides better and clearer information, and is generally more pleasant to look at. Similarly, we worked on a restructured donate page, making it significantly simpler and more user-friendly than the previous version.

Meanwhile, I created a new Frequently Asked Questions page on the site, to handle some of the queries TDF receives every day. Community members can point users to these answers where necessary, and discuss them further on Ask LibreOffice.

Various LibreOffice-related events around the globe have taken place since the start of the year, and I collected information about them and wrote a short report. In addition, I summarised various updates from the Document Liberation Project.

If you haven’t seen TDF’s 2016 Annual Report yet, check out out – the TDF team worked together to write it and translate it into German.

Infrastructure-wise, Guilhem Moulin and I set up a new Nextcloud instance for community members to host and share data. We also moved the events calendar to Nextcloud as well.

LibreOffice timeline and LibreOffice 5.4

LibreOffice has a rich history behind it, starting with StarOffice in the 1990s and being open sourced as OpenOffice.org in 2000. To showcase many of the important steps along the way, we worked on a LibreOffice timeline on the website. Along with new versions of the suite, you can see news of major LibreOffice migrations and events that took place.

In August, TDF welcomed a new Development Mentor, Teodor Mircea Ionita (aka Shinnok). I worked with him to examine the state of our build system documentation, to see how we can make it friendlier for new developers – here’s my report.

Finally, for LibreOffice 5.4 I created another New Features video – and again, our localisation communities did a great job providing subtitle translations:

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So that’s the progress so far this year – but there’s more to come, with the LibreOffice Conference in October, another Month of LibreOffice in November, and preparations for LibreOffice 6.0 – which is due to be released early next year!

LibreOffice contributor interview: Chandrakant Dhutadmal

LibreOffice contributors around the world have a big impact on the success of the project – we really appreciate their help. Today we’re talking to Chandrakant Dhutadmal, who is involved in various free and open source projects including Mozilla Firefox and LibreOffice…

Where do you live?

I live in Pune, Maharashtra State, India.

Do you work for a LibreOffice-related company or just contribute in your spare time?

I work for the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), which is an autonomous scientific organization under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, in the government of India. We worked on a project of national importance where we aimed to provide software tools in Indian languages (free of charge) so that people can easily use the software in their own languages.

One of the applications which we worked on initially (way back in 2006) was OpenOffice.org. Later we shifted to work on LibreOffice. I do contribute to the project in my free time as well.

How did you get involved with LibreOffice?

During the above mentioned project work, we interacted with many organizations and individuals. Mr. Rajesh Ranjan was one of the persons who I interacted with – and told to about how the open source community works, and what kind of impact can it bring to the overall project.

We interacted very frequently and that is where we started working on organized efforts of volunteers for LibreOffice in India. I started doing a bit of contributions for LibreOffice since that time. Mr. Mahesh Kulkarni, who heads the department where I work, and my office in general have been really supportive for such activities.

What areas of the project do you normally work on? Anything else you want to tackle?

I normally work on LibreOffice marketing, community building and localization. These tasks keep me occupied enough.

What was your initial experience of contributing to LibreOffice like?

I was very pleased with the way the global LibreOffice community accepts newcomers and beginners. Initially, I was hardly a serious contributor to LibreOffice. But the fact that even small contributions by new contributors are valued by the community. Members like Sophie Gautier and Italo Vignoli have always been very supportive to me and others in India.

What does LibreOffice need most right now?

One of the most common and frequent issues which people report to me whenever I talk about LibreOffice is compatibility with Microsoft Office. It is quite a difficult task to satisfy them by explaining a few facts. I generally ask people to pinpoint the issues which affect them. Another area is to build a community of developers in India who can contribute to LibreOffice development.

What do you do when you’re not working on LibreOffice?

I read lot of articles on financial literacy. This is one of the topics which interests me a lot. I also like to travel to different places.

Anything else you want to mention?

I hope people get motivated enough by reading interviews like this, and get involved in the project!

Thanks Chandrakant – and indeed, there are many ways to get involved and make LibreOffice better for millions of users around the world. Our community is friendly and fun, and contributing to the QA, documentation, design, marketing or other projects is a great way to build up experience for a future career!

LibreOffice and Google Summer of Code 2017: The results

The Google Summer of Code (GSoC) takes place every year, and provides university students with funding to work on free and open source software. For 2017, nine LibreOffice projects were accepted into GSoC, and as developers finish their work, let’s take a look at some of their achievements…

Grzegorz Araminowicz – Improve SmartArt import

SmartArt graphics are used in Microsoft Office to “easily make a visual representation of your information”. LibreOffice already had the ability to import SmartArt, with file parsing code and basic layout features, but Grzegorz started to extend it, taking Office 2007 test files one-by-one and implementing missing features to load them correctly.

Throughout GSoC, Grzegorz worked on many fixes and improvements, as described in this mailing list post. At the end, he summarised his results:

I am happy with project results. Now LibreOffice is able to load and correctly render many types of basic diagrams. However, there is still much to be done to support more complex SmartArts. If anyone would be interested in contributing in this area, feel free to contact me for any help.

Muhammet Kara – Revamp the customization dialog

LibreOffice’s “Customize” dialog box, under the Tools menu, is very versatile but could also be improved in terms of design and user friendliness. Muhammet started his work by adding a search feature for the Functions pane of the Keyboard tab, as search was described as “the killer feature” by the design team.

He then started cleaning up the source code (most of the dialog was implemented in a single file with over 5,000 lines of code), before moving on to layout and design improvements. In the end, he had 19 patches integrated into LibreOffice, and made a video demonstrating the updated dialog in action:

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Aditya Dewan – LibreOffice online

Aditya is a third-year undergraduate student at the Indian Institute of Information Technology in Allahabad, specialising in Information Technology. Throughout GSoC he worked on LibreOffice Online, the cloud-based version of the suite. He started with small features and fixes to get familiar with the codebase, such as compression on startup and extra graphs in the admin console.

Then he moved on to a bigger job: adding an interactive horizontal ruler, as seen in the desktop version of the suite. Here’s Aditya’s demonstration of the new feature:

With that done, he extended the current WOPI implementation to support “Save as” functionality. Summarising GSoC, he said:

It was a very good experience for me. I have done a lot, and learned a lot this summer. Thank you to all LibreOffice developers, especially my mentors, for your support.

Gautam Prajapati, Alex Pantechovskis, Mohammed Abdul Azeem, Ximeng Zu, Akshay Deep and Varun Dhall – various improvements

Meanwhile, other GSoC developers did great work fixing bugs, adding new features and boosting compatibility. Gautam Prajapati made significant improvements to the Android Viewer build system, as described in his report, while Alex Pantechovskis helped to create a QuarkXPress import filter for the Document Liberation Project (see our recent blog post).

Mohammed Abdul Azeem produced many patches for migrating from the legacy parser to FastParser, and Ximeng Zu fixed various “most annoying bugs” in the Android Viewer (see here). Finally, Akshay Deep worked on updates for the special characters dialog, while Varun Dhall replaced the EditEngine binary clipboard with an ODF filter.

Wrapping up

So 2017’s Google Summer of Code was a terrific success, and has helped to improve LibreOffice in many different areas. We’ll all get to enjoy these changes and new features in LibreOffice 6.0, due early next year. Thanks to all of the developers for their excellent work – and thanks to Google for their support and initiative. We look forward to GSoC 2018!

The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 5.4.1 “fresh” and LibreOffice 5.3.6 “still”

Berlin, August 31, 2017 – The Document Foundation (TDF) announces LibreOffice 5.4.1, the first minor release of the new LibreOffice 5.4 family, which was announced in early August, and LibreOffice 5.3.6, the sixth release of the mature LibreOffice 5.3 family, which was announced in January 2017.

LibreOffice 5.4.1 represents the bleeding edge in term of features, and as such is targeted at technology enthusiasts and early adopters, while LibreOffice 5.3.6 is targeted at conservative users and enterprise deployments.

TDF suggests deploying LibreOffice 5.3.6 with the backing of certified professionals (updated list available at: https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/professional-support/).

LibreOffice 5.4.1 includes approximately 100 bug and regression fixes, along with document compatibility improvements. Technical details about the release can be found in the change logs here: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/5.4.1/RC1 (fixed in RC1) and https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/5.4.1/RC2 (fixed in RC2).

LibreOffice 5.3.6 includes approximately 50 bug and regression fixes. Technical details about the release can be found in the change log here: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/5.3.6/RC1 (fixed in RC1).

Download LibreOffice

LibreOffice 5.4.1 and LibreOffice 5.3.6 are 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, with the next one taking place in October in Rome (http://conference.libreoffice.org).

Several companies sitting in 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.

Updates from the Document Liberation Project

The Document Liberation Project (aka DLP) is working to free users and content creators from vendor lock-in. To achieve this, it develops and maintains libraries for reading documents in many different formats – including those generated by proprietary software. To learn more about the DLP, check our our short video.

In recent months, DLP developers have been working on updates and new features, so read on for all the details.

QuarkXPress import filter

Lithuanian coder Aleksas Pantechovskis (who we interviewed last year) has been working with David Tardon on a filter to read documents generated by the QuarkXPress desktop publishing application. He was doing this as a Google Summer of Code project, and added code for importing text boxes, shapes and other objects.

The image below shows an original QuarkXPress document on the left, and how it is converted into the open and standardised OpenDocument Format for use in LibreOffice and other software:

Aleksas and David have implemented the filter in a new library, libqxp – it supports QuarkXPress 3.1 – 4.1 documents at the moment.

PowerPoint and StarOffice

Meanwhile, Laurent Alonso has been improving a number of libraries for better compatibility with legacy documents. For instance, in libmwaw he has implemented an import filter for presentations created in Microsoft PowerPoint 2 (Windows), PowerPoint 4 (Mac and Windows) and PowerPoint for Windows 95. If you have old presentations in this format and need to retrieve the main contents, this filter will help you out.

In addition, he has updated libstaroffice, which is a library used to read files generated by StarOffice (which later became OpenOffice.org and then LibreOffice – see our timeline for the full history). Thanks to Laurent’s work, .sdc spreadsheet files preserve more of their formatting when imported, while .sda files created with StarOffice Impress are now converted as presentations.

Give us a hand!

As you’ve seen, DLP is helping users and content creators to free their data from old, legacy and proprietary formats. DLP libraries are used by many well-known applications such as LibreOffice, Inkscape and Scribus, so your contributions can help millions of people around the world.

And you don’t have to be a developer! While code contributions are always welcome, you can help us by reverse-engineering and documenting file formats, or sending us sample documents to analyse and test against the DLP libraries. Any help can really make a big difference, so see this page to learn more. We look forward to meeting you!

LibreOffice contributor interview: Nguyen Vu Hung

The Document Foundation’s wiki has lots of resources and materials for marketing LibreOffice in English – such as presentations, flyers, stickers and branding guidelines. But we also want to spread the word about free software and open standards in every country, so we really appreciate our international community which promotes LibreOffice in other languages. One such community member is Nguyễn Vũ Hưng who helps with marketing LibreOffice.

Where do you live, and are you active on social media?

I live in Hanoi, Vietnam, and you can find me on social media at:

Do you work for a LibreOffice-related company or just contribute in your spare time?

I work as an CTO for a game and offshore development company based in Hanoi. The company has nothing related to LibreOffice, but our staff uses LibreOffice at work. I’m a volunteer in the LibreOffice community in my spare time, and have been a long-time contributor to open source projects.

How did you get involved with LibreOffice?

​It goes back about ten years ago, when I contributed to Vietnamese localization and ​community support with OpenOffice.org. When LibreOffice started, I join the new project with nearly the same role, translating the user interface, until recently. The English skills of average users around the world are getting better, which is why I’ve changed my focus to open source and LibreOffice marketing.

What areas of the project do you normally work on? Anything else you want to tackle?

For a year or two until now, I’ve found that the role most fitting for me is forum and Facebook fan-page content seeding. It works 🙂 For that kind of marketing and content seeding activity, getting people involved is the most difficult part. I’ve been looking at what Slashdot does, and I’m learning about approaches to improve KPIs (key performance indicators) such as the statistics for “seen”, “comments” and “engagement” in Facebook posts.

What was your initial experience of contributing to LibreOffice like?

This is not my first experience with LibreOffice, but I still remember: I was mentoring a student who was finishing an Easy Hack. It was not really “easy” to read so much code and start hacking away on a small improvement – but luckily, he did it 🙂 (Here’s the Bugzilla ticket showing how it went.)

What does LibreOffice need most right now?

It needs to go mobile (more work on Android) and get into the cloud (more work on LibreOffice Online).

What do you do when you’re not working on LibreOffice?

Playing with my kids takes up most of my time. I balance time spent with my family with other IT/open source activities, including LibreOffice, Agile Vietnam ​and ITEC (IT Experts Clubs in Vietnam). We hold monthly events about Agile/Scrum and an event series named “S* Architecture”. I wish I could do the same with LibreOffice in Vietnam!

Thanks Nguyễn for all your contributions. And for others reading this who’d like to help out with LibreOffice marketing – or indeed translations, design, documentation, QA and other projects – join us and get involved!

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