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Author: Mike Saunders

TDF Marketing Activity (and a Debian Bug Squashing Party!)

As we head towards the second half of the year – and an exciting new release of LibreOffice in August – I wanted to recap some work from the Marketing Team that I’ve been involved in over the last few months. But before that, I’d also like to say congratulations to the LiMux team for a great Debian Bug Squashing Party!

LiMux is a project by the City of Munich to transition away from proprietary software and closed document formats to free software and open standards. GNU/Linux and LibreOffice are key components in this migration, and on 27 – 29 May the LiMux offices hosted a Debian Bug Squashing Party. As the name suggests, this is a mini hackfest where developers work to fix bugs in the Debian GNU/Linux distribution (and related software).

LiMux is based on Kubuntu, which in turn builds on Debian’s mighty foundations; other developers associated with KDE, Kolab and LibreOffice were present as well. Lots of hacking was done and bugs fixed – but it was also a great opportunity just to chat about the state of LiMux, make new contacts, and try great food! The Indian dishes on the first evening were especially good…

Marketing updates

Moving on to Marketing at The Document Foundation: we’ve had a busy few months, attending the CeBIT show in Hannover with new flyers and other materials. Thanks to the ever-industrious community, we received audio translations for our LibreOffice 5.1 New Features videos – so there are now versions in French, German and Spanish. Following this, we started work on the 2015 Annual Report, a summary of last year’s news and activity inside The Document Foundation and LibreOffice. It will be online soon, so stay tuned to this blog!

The LibreOffice main website and The Document Foundation wiki are packed with useful information, but some of it is duplicated or slightly dated, so we’ve been going through both sites to perform cleanups and updates. In addition, we added a new page to track migrations to LibreOffice, a First Steps guide for potential contributors to the marketing project, along with a style guide. On the main website we updated the screenshots and added a new “Who uses LibreOffice?” page.

The Document Liberation Project (DLP) is another effort supported by The Document Foundation, and we’ve been working to raise awareness about its mission and spread the word. After talking with the teams at Inkscape and Scribus, both of those projects now feature DLP logos on their sites, while the DLP front page has been redesigned to more succinctly express what it does. On top of that, we made a short video summarising the DLP’s goals.

Month of LibreOffice

Most recently, we had our Month of LibreOffice campaign, highlighting activity across all areas of the software. Many people think that contributing to an open source project is all about code – but we’ve tried to show that it’s possible to help in other ways including translations, confirming bugs, writing documentation and simply spreading the word. We awarded over 330 badges, so thanks to everyone who got one, and we plan to do another campaign like this later in the year.

The next few months are going to be busy as well: LibreOffice 5.2 is due to be released in August with many new features, and then we’ll have our yearly conference in September. We hope to see you there!

Friday 24 June: Next Bug Hunting Session

Help to fix bugs in the next version of LibreOffice, and make it the best yet! As we mentioned last week, we are holding a Bug Hunting Session on Friday 24 June, from 07:00 to 20:00 UTC, and everyone is welcome to take part. All you have to do is:

And as thanks for your help, if you find or confirm a bug we’ll award you a shiny Badge that you can proudly show on your website, blog or social media. For more details, see the full Bug Hunting Session wiki page.

We hope to see you on Friday, at some point between 07:00 to 20:00 UTC – and thanks in advance for your help!

Document Liberation Project: progress so far in 2016

If you haven’t heard of the Document Liberation Project (DLP) before, we made a short video explaining what it does and why it’s important. In summary: it supports development of software libraries to read documents from many (usually proprietary) applications. If you’ve ever opened a file generated by Apple Pages, WordPerfect or Microsoft Works in LibreOffice, you’ve benefitted from the hard work of the DLP team. And DLP libraries are used in many other prominent FOSS tools such as Inkscape and Scribus as well.

For example, here’s a file being created in Apple Pages, and the same file being rendered in LibreOffice thanks to DLP libraries (click for a bigger version):

So, what has been going on in the DLP so far this year? Here’s an overview.

New releases

In January, libetonyek 0.1.6 was released with a bunch of new features. This library, which helps applications to read files produced by Apple Keynote, Pages and Numbers, can now properly parse links, lists and text languages in Keynote 6 files, while resizing of tables is handled properly. Text containing non-ASCII characters (ie, the majority of non-English languages) is now managed much better as well.

Scribus 1.5.1 was released in February, as part of the development process towards a stable 1.6 release of this desktop publishing tool. Along with many new features and updates, Scribus 1.5.1 makes use of the libfreehand 0.1.1 library, which allows it to read documents created in Adobe FreeHand. This feature is still marked as experimental – as it’s very early days – but is already working well and will be very useful to some Scribus users.

March saw the release of two other DLP libraries: libpagemaker 0.0.3 (for parsing Adobe PageMaker documents) can now read big-endian (Mac) files, while writerperfect 0.9.5 (for conversion of various document formats to ODF, EPUB and AbiWord) includes a number of build fixes and can also convert old StarOffice files.

Website updates

In order to make the goals of the Document Liberation Project clear and accessible, and attract potential new contributors, we redesigned the front page of the DLP website. We broke up the big chunks of text that used to dominate the front page, and added logos and links to several projects that use DLP libraries.

Here’s a before-and-after comparison:

In addition, we added a link to the aforementioned video that describes DLP and tries to make it accessible to a wider audience. As more and more computer users recognise the downsides of non-standard file formats and vendor lock-in, projects like the DLP will become increasingly important.

Get involved!

DLP is always looking for new contributors, and appreciates all help with coding, testing and documentation. If you enjoy programming and tackling new challenges, creating a new import library can be especially rewarding! Fathoming out the insides of a closed file format is fascinating, and you’ll get plenty of appreciation from users in the future who can finally open their old documents without struggling to run ancient software in a virtual machine…

So to join, visit the contributor page for pointers to get started.

LibreOffice developer interview: Muhammet Kara

Every new LibreOffice release is built on the work of developers around the world, who collaborate to add new features and fix bugs. But who are these developers? How did they get involved in LibreOffice, what is their vision for the future of the software, and how do they enjoy their free time?

We asked some contributors these questions, and will be posting their answers here on the blog in the coming weeks. Let’s start with Muhammet Kara…

Where are you based, and do you work for a LibreOffice-related company or just code in your spare time?

I live in Ankara, Turkey. I am still a student, studying computer engineering, and I also work for TUBITAK-ULAKBIM in their Pardus Linux Group. They endorse the usage of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) nationwide. They also encourage me to work on LibreOffice when I am not given other tasks. I am glad I am able to contribute to such a great project as LibreOffice in the workplace. I also code in my spare time.

How did you get involved with LibreOffice?

I have been using and advocating OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice for years, but my involvement as a code contributor started with encouragement of Abdullah Erol, manager of the Pardus Linux Project.

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

I don’t have a particular preference, and I work on various areas usually related to C++ and the user interface. After gaining some more experience, first I would like to spend some time on Base because I felt like it needs some love. I am also interested in getting involved with writing tests because they guard us against the introduction of new bugs and reintroduction of old ones. But there is no reason not to work on Calc or Writer 🙂

What is your vision for the future, and what would you most like to see improved in LibreOffice?

A well-known and widely-used LibreOffice suite worldwide, and particularly in Turkey. I think integration of LibreOffice with the cloud is also crucial for the future.

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

I like going to the movies, reading books, mountain driving, and localizing free software. Nowadays I am trying to get GNOME 3.22 development branch’s Turkish translation to 100% completion. Wish me luck with that 🙂

Thanks Muhammet! And to any other interested developers reading this: join our community and help to make LibreOffice even better.

Coming up: the next LibreOffice Bug Hunting Session

A new release of LibreOffice is coming up – so help to make it the best version ever! LibreOffice 5.2 is due to be released at the start of August, and developers are busy working on new features and updates. With so many changes in the next version, we’d really appreciate your help finding bugs so that we can squash them!

To this end we’ll be holding a Bug Hunting Session on Friday 24 June, from 07:00 to 20:00 UTC. Anyone can take part at any time – it’s simple and fun! All you have to do is download the latest development release, try out the new features, and report bugs on our IRC chat channel. Even if you can only spare half an hour of your time, it’s a great help to make LibreOffice better than ever before – and you can show off a badge like the one above!

So mark the date in your calendar: Friday 24 June. We’ll post more details on this blog soon, so stay tuned…

Month of LibreOffice, May 2016: The results!

So we’ve come to the end of the Month of LibreOffice, our campaign to credit the awesome work of contributors across the globe. And it has been a great month: we’ve seen updates and improvements across all areas of the software, from code and translations through to documentation and bug reports. So without further ado, let’s see the numbers…

Number of badges awarded: 341 – click here to see if you got one!

If you got a badge, click one of the share links to tell the world about it – or use the link to the small image to save a version for your blog or website. Thanks very much for taking part, and we look forward to your LibreOffice contributions in the future!

Here’s a chart showing how many badges were awarded as May progressed. There was a big jump at the start as lots of new names were added, but growth was steady and we could constantly see new names appearing as people made contributions to LibreOffice. This chart shows the total amount of badges awarded at the end of each day in the month:

Meanwhile, we also created a page where community members could award Barnstars to each other. These are icons to say thanks for doing a specific job, with bronze for smaller tasks, silver for bigger ones, and gold for making major improvements:

Number of Barnstars awarded: 22 – click to see if you got one!

So what’s next? Every month in the LibreOffice is full of activity, but we have some major events coming up such as the release of LibreOffice 5.2 in August and our conference in September. We plan to do another Month of LibreOffice later in the year – if you have any ideas or want to help out, join our marketing team!

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

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I decided to start the current campaign, with one blog post per week focusing on the different aspects of Open…