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Author: Mike Saunders

Community Member Monday: Muthuramalingam Krishnan (Tamil project)

Today we’re talking to Muthuramalingam Krishnan, who’s helping to spread the word about LibreOffice in southern India…

Tell us a bit about yourself!

I’m Muthuramalingam, from Tirunelveli – a southern district in Tamil Nadu, currently living in Chennai. I was in the IT industry for around 10 years, from 2007 to 2017. Currently, I’m giving training on technical matters around open source programming languages like Java and Python in Payilagam, Chennai.

What are you doing with LibreOffice in Tamil?

A long time ago, I started contributing to LibreOffice by raising a few bugs. After a while, as I had the opportunity to meet a number of youngsters and graduates, I started introducing them to LibreOffice. Once they started using LibreOffice, it became very easy for us to get them involved in LibreOffice QA (Quality Assurance) related of activities. Thus, we started conducting few offline and online trainings. A few links about them are here, here and in this video.

What are some of the opportunities and challenges with free and open source software (FOSS) adoption in your region?

Let me think about the challenges first regarding FOSS adoption. As many people are using proprietary operating systems here, they don’t have much idea or clue about FOSS adoption. Thus, it would be difficult for us to convince them that they are capable of contributing to any FOSS software.

Where there are challenges, there are also opportunities. Hence, our easiest opportunity is creating awareness about open source first, and then ask them to use a FOSS operating system. (Linux Mint is a good start for Beginners.) Once they adopt the operating system (dual-booting is also fine for us), every other FOSS ddoption will automatically follow, including LibreOffice.

How can other people help out in the Tamil community?

There are lot of people who are involved in FOSS development in Tamil. There are many active communities including Kaniyam, ILUGC, KanchiLUG etc. They will definitely help us with spreading the word about events, by publishing on their websites, Telegram groups, Sometimes they will help us to get event spaces at places including colleges and Universities. We can get senior members of these communities to guide people with translations, QA and other activities.

Join the Tamil community on Telegram here! And thanks to Muthuramalingam for all his help 😊

Say hello to the team at The Document Foundation!

Joining a free and open source software project, such as LibreOffice, is a great way to build your skills, gain experience for future career options, meet new people – and have fun!

But sometimes, joining a large and well-established project can be a bit daunting at the start. So here we’ll introduce you to the small team at The Document Foundation, the non-profit entity behind LibreOffice. Most team members oversee certain sub-projects in the LibreOffice community – click on their names to learn more in interviews…

Note that this is just the team at The Document Foundation; the LibreOffice community is made up of hundreds of people! Most of the new features are implemented by developers in our ecosystem and volunteers.

Now that you know who we are, click here to get involved and join our projects!

LibreOffice ID at the Indonesian Linux Conference 2022

Great activities in the Indonesian LibreOffice community! They got in touch and gave us a quick summary:

LibreOffice’s Indonesian community collaborated with the Organizing Committee of the Indonesia Linux Conference 2022, to hold a short presentation, “Implementation of LibreOffice in the Ecosystem at a University”.

This event was held on Friday, November 4, 2022 in the 2nd Campus Hall of Universitas Muhammadiyah Sidoarjo, Surabaya – and at the same time became a pre-event running up to the Indonesian Linux Conference 2022, which was held on November 5, 2022.

Rania Amina, leader of the Indonesia Linux Conference committee, who is also an official member of The Document Foundation, said that the LibreOffice presentation was a request from the campus community, which felt the need to introduce a powerful open source office application that has active support from the community in Indonesia.

Sokibi and Rahman Yusri Aftian (Aftian) were the speakers in this talk. Sokibi explained in a straightforward manner what LibreOffice is, comprehensive with its development history until now. Aftian presented material about using LibreOffice to write Pegon script, one of the local manuscripts, for campus scientific research.

The participants who attended were very enthusiastic about what was presented.

Apart from information about talks, at the Indonesia Linux Conference 2022 there were also two topics about LibreOffice presented by Nawinda (Lecturer at Budi Luhur University Jakarta) and Adrian Saputra (Student oat Nurul Fikri). Nawindah shared her experiences about teaching LibreOffice Base on her campus for the purposes of recording transactions and so forth. Meanwhile, Adrian brought up the topic of data visualization with LibreOffice.

At the Indonesian Linux Conference 2022, LibreOffice Indonesia received a booth slot with GimpScape ID and Shoes Fans to showcase and share about LibreOffice ID’s community activities – and invite participants to participate actively in the open source world, especially LibreOffice, both in the local and global community as well.

Many thanks to Rania, and all the Indonesian community members, for helping to spread the word about LibreOffice and free software!

Month of LibreOffice, November 2022 – First week results!

A week ago, we started the Month of LibreOffice, November 2022. Anyone who contributes to our projects will get a cool sticker pack – and has a chance to win more merch! So far, over 100 people have joined in – here are their names/usernames:

Adolfo Jayme Barrientos afit5 ajlittoz Alain Romedenne Alessandro Alex Pakhotin Alex Thurgood Amarjargal Gundjalam Annabelle WĂŒbbelsmann Anupam Malhotra Aron Budea Asier Sarasua Garmendia Ayhan YALÇINSOY bantoniof Baurzhan Muftakhidinov Bayram Çiçek Benyamin Limanto Bogdan B Chollot Christian KĂŒhl cpb csongor Daniel Lohmann David Gilbert David Lynch Dieter Dimitris Spingos EarnestAl Elisabetta Manuele Emanuele Goldoni Eyal Rozenberg floris_v Francisco.ruiz Grantler HanV Hasan Yıldız Henner Drewes Hrbrgr jan d Javier Salamanca JCR Jeff Fortin Tam jfn Jim Raykowski JohnSUN Jorge Teixeira JosĂ© G Moya Y Julien Nabet jun meguro Justin L JĂŒrgen Kirsten KamilLanda Karl Morten Ramberg karolus kees538 Kevin Suo KingAwiin KolbjĂžrn StuestĂžl KovĂĄcs Viktor LeroyG Lupp m.a.riosv Marco Pinto Martin Sourada Maxim Monastirsky Menoo Michael H Michael Wolf MiloĆĄ Ć rĂĄmek Nalini Dash offtkp Olaf Guse Paul D. Mirowsky Peter Schofield Philip Jackson Pierre Fortin Prcek Quentin PAGÈS raal Radish Rafael Lima Rainer Bielefeld Ratslinger Regina Henschel RegisPerdreau Robert Großkopf Roman Kuznetsov Sahil Butola Samson B ScootrKDEbug Richards Secară Cristian serval2412 Shinji Enoki sokol92 Stanislav Horáček Stephen Heumann Stevefanning Strepon sujith taichi Telesto Theppitak Karoonboonyanan TorrAB TXDon V Stuart Foote Villeroy Wanderer William Friedman Ximena Alcaman Zizi64 ΜÎčÏ‡ÎŹÎ»Î·Ï‚ Î–ÎźÏƒÎ·Ï‚ @Bassogna @hgucpardus @livreeaberto @mattroyal @MichlFranken @stevepdp @vleeth_

Don’t see your name there? Click here to join in!

LibreOffice Conference 2022: Impressions from an attendee (and speaker!)

Regina Henschel writes:

Since the LibreOffice Conference 2022 was a “hybrid” conference, I decided to travel to Milan. These were exciting days. I gave two presentations: “Introduction to the ‘Limo Stretch’ feature of shapes” and “Creating ‘fontwork’ geometries beyond the predefined shapes”. The first one is addressed at developers, whereas the second one is suitable for everyone. You find the slides and additional material here and here. Videos of my talks are below.

It was important for me to gain insights into other areas. The Community Meetings on Wednesday introduced me to the problems that LibreOffice communities have in several regions of the world, along with solutions and success stories from others. During the conference, I heard a lot about language-specific aspects of LibreOffice. Do you have ever think about the way a piece of text in Arabic is justified? Or noticed what special problems occur with writing directions top-to-bottom and then right-to-left as used in Japanese?

Last but not least, I enjoyed personally meeting community members. Having lunch together and the wonderful pasta community dinner were opportunities to get to know each other, beyond code review, Bugzilla and mailing lists. I hope to meet you all again at next LibreOffice Conference.

Thanks to Regina for attending and giving her presentations! And, of course, all her work in our community 😊 Here are videos of her talks at the conference:

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LibreOffice project and community recap: October 2022

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

  • Throughout October, we edited and uploaded videos from our recent LibreOffice Conference 2022. So far, there are 36 videos from talks and presentations – with more to come! Here’s the playlist:

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  • Our documentation team released an updated edition of the LibreOffice Calc Guide 7.4 (revision 1) with new contents on sparklines and conditional formatting. Typos and last minute mistakes and formatting were also fixed in this release. Great work!

  • Meanwhile, we released LibreOffice 7.4.2, the second minor update to the 7.4 branch. All users are recommended to update, for maximum reliability and security.

  • Dominique Welt, Ph.D. Candidate and instructor at McGill University, told us about a presentation: “Using LibreOffice Base to Teach Relational Database Management”.

  • On October 20, TDF announced the availability of LibreOffice for Windows on the Microsoft Store, to support end users who want to get their desktop software from Microsoft’s own sales channel. There’s a convenience fee of €4.59, which will be invested to further support development of the LibreOffice project. But the suite will remain free of charge to download from the main website.

  • Finally, we launched a new “Liason” role in the Native Language Communities. This role aims to improve the communication between the global projects, The Document Foundation and the local communities. This communication should be directed in two ways: keep local communities informed on what is happening internationally, and keep the international community informed of what is achieved by the local communities. If you’re interested, we look forward to hearing from you 😊

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

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