New “LibreOffice Expert” magazines available for schools and communities

LibreOffice Expert magazines

Recently, Linux New Media released an updated version of its “LibreOffice Expert” magazine, which contains tutorials, tips and tricks about LibreOffice. And some articles were contributed by members of the LibreOffice community! The magazines come with DVDs that include LibreOffice for Linux, Windows and macOS, alongside extra templates, extensions, videos and guidebooks.

We have some copies to give away, for schools, universities and local communities. Ideally, we’d like to get these magazines out to places where internet connections aren’t always available – so that the users can really benefit from the DVDs.

So, if you can help us to distribute these magazines, drop us a line! Please note that we can only send a maximum of five copies to any one place, to make sure many people get a chance. When you contact us, please include this information:

  1. What you want to do with the magazines
  2. How many you want
  3. The address to which we should post them

Include that information in an email to us and let’s see what we can do!

(Note: if you want to buy the magazine directly from the publisher, you can do so here.)

LibreOffice project and community recap: August 2023

Recap logo

Here’s our summary of updates, events and activities in the LibreOffice project in the last four weeks – click the links to learn more…

  • We started August by posting the full version of TDF’s Annual Report 2022. The Document Foundation is the non-profit entity behind LibreOffice, and our report highlights community and project activities in the previous year. Check it out!

TDF Annual Report 2023 cover

LibreOffice guidebook covers

  • Our native-language communities use Weblate to translate LibreOffice’s user interface. Thanks to donations, The Document Foundation has been able to fund some Weblate improvements, to help all users.

Weblate logo

  • The Debian Project was officially founded by Ian Murdock 30 on August 16, 1993. The Debian Community celebrates its birthday, Debian Day, on this day each year. And we celebrated 30 years with them, as they are one of the organizations supporting the LibreOffice project since day one.

Debian 30 years logo

  • The biggest news in August was the release of LibreOffice 7.6, with a bunch of new features and updates. Many thanks to all community members, developers and ecosystem companies that contributed to this release! 😊

LibreOffice 7.6 banner

Fourth Edition of the LibreOffice Latin America Conference

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Announcing the Fourth Edition of the LibreOffice Latin America Conference

Latin America is a growing area for free and open source software.

The Latin American LibreOffice community announces the Fourth LibreOffice Latin America Congress, to be held at the Faculty of Engineering of the UNAM, Mexico City, on November 9th (Thursday) and 10th (Friday).

The congress brings together professionals, developers, academics and free software enthusiasts from all over Latin America. On this occasion we will have guests from Asia and Europe, to explore the progress, applications and perspectives of the LibreOffice project. There will be keynote talks, hands-on workshops and certification sessions with a wide range of topics, focusing on development, quality control, documentation and translation.

The activities and registration period will be communicated in the coming weeks through the event’s official website.

LibreOffice Latin America Conference logo

The members of the organizing team are Celia Palacios, Mauricio Baeza and Juan José Gonzalez from Mexico, Olivier Hallot (Documentation Team Coordinator), Gustavo Pacheco (Membership Committee member), both from Brazil, and Daniel Rodriguez from Argentina.

For the conference, they have proposed the logo above, based on the Quetzalcoatl and traditional Mexican colors.

Weblate (translation tool) improvements funded by TDF

Weblate logo

Weblate is a free and open source software (FOSS) translation tool, with version control features. It’s used by many projects around the world, including LibreOffice, Fedora and openSUSE, to assist their communities with translating user interfaces, documentation, and other aspects of software.

Because we in the LibreOffice project use Weblate, we wanted to contribute back and help to fund fixes and improvements. This is all possible thanks to generous donations from you!

The full list of changes is at the bottom of this blogpost, but as a summary: TDF funded improvements to the administration interface, making it easier to work with permissions, and filter by language when generating reports. A night theme was added (shown below), along with other cosmetic improvements, and it’s now possible for translators to explain why they reject a suggestion.

Weblate night/dark mode

All of these are available in Weblate 4.18 (the latest release) and future versions. And more are coming in Weblate 5.0, such as nested projects or project grouping and per-language translation workflow settings.

Thanks again to our donors for making this possible, and Sophie Gautier and Jan ‘Kendy’ Holešovský for ther help! And we can say to other FOSS projects looking for translating tools, we recommend Weblate 👍


Full list of improvements and fixes

  • #7205 – unchanged translation flag notwithstanding glossary term marked as untranslatable, fixed in 4.17
  • #5854 – Autofix Bangla/Bengali sentence ender to ।, fixed in 4.17
  • #5842 – Shortcut for suggest, fixed in 4.15
  • #4368 – Improved presentation of differences in machine translations, fixed in 4.18
  • #4160 – Allow to filter on language in reports, fixed in 4.17
  • #3242 – Ability to download all translation memory from a given project in a per-language basis, fixed in 4.17
  • #2241 – Search who translates the same language, fixed in 4.18
  • #2127 – Create Group Administration Permissions, fixed in 4.15
  • #1994 – Check if two different strings share same translation, fixed in 4.18
  • #1661 – Suggestion rejection reason: possibility of explaining why you reject a suggestion, fixed in 4.18
  • #2969 – Add night theme, fixed in 4.18
  • #5519 – Glossary import and export with explanations, fixed in 4.18

LibreOffice project and community recap: July 2023

Recap logo

Here’s our summary of updates, events and activities in the LibreOffice project in the last four weeks – click the links to learn more…

Michael Weghorn

  • Talking of the TDF team: in June, team members met in Munich to discuss ideas and proposals for the community and software. They worked on lots of topics – and now we’ve uploaded the report of the meeting. Check it out and let us know what you think!

The Document Foundation team

LibreOffice Draw Guide 7.4 - Czech version

  • We had one release in July, LibreOffice 7.5.5. This is the fifth maintenance release of the LibreOffice 7.5 branch, and all users are recommended to get the update.

LibreOffice 7.5 banner

Screenshot of Extensions and Templates website

Keep in touch – follow us on Mastodon, Twitter and Facebook. Like what we do? Support our community with a donation – or join us and help to make LibreOffice even better!