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Author: Mike Saunders

The Month of LibreOffice, November 2020 begins – help out and get awesome merch!

Love LibreOffice? Want to help make it even better? Now’s your chance! The software is developed by a passionate community, spread across the globe, with many volunteers working in their spare time. And you can join them: not only is it a great way to build your skills for a possible future career, but also an opportunity to meet new people, have fun… And get some cool merchandise throughout November! So how does this work

Well, everyone who contributes can claim an awesome sticker pack at the end of the month:

And then, we’ll also choose 20 contributors at random to receive a piece of bonus merchandise – a LibreOffice mug, T-shirt or 10/20 anniversary hoodie (proudly modelled in the photo above).

How to get your stickers

So, let’s get started! There are many ways you can help out – and you don’t need to be a developer. For instance, you can be a…

  • Handy Helper, answering questions from users on Ask LibreOffice. We’re keeping an eye on that site so if you give someone useful advice, you can claim your shiny stickers.
  • First Responder, helping to confirm new bug reports: go to our Bugzilla page and look for new bugs. If you can recreate one, add a comment like “CONFIRMED on Windows 10 and LibreOffice 7.0.3”.
  • Drum Beater, spreading the word: tell everyone about LibreOffice on Twitter or Mastodon! Just say why you love it or what you’re using it for, add the #libreoffice hashtag, and at the end of the month you can claim your stickers.
  • Globetrotter, translating the user interface: LibreOffice is available in a wide range of languages, but its interface translations need to be kept up-to-date. Or maybe you want to translate the suite to a whole new language? Get involved here.
  • Docs Doctor, writing documentation: Whether you want to update the online help or add chapters to the handbooks, here’s where to start.

So there’s plenty to do! As the contributions come in, we’ll be updating this page every day with usernames across our various services. So dive in, get involved and help make LibreOffice better for millions of people around the world – and enjoy your sticker pack at the end as thanks from us. And who knows, maybe you’ll be lucky enough to win a bonus hoodie, T-shirt or mug as well…

Let’s go! We’ll be posting regular updates on this blog and our Mastodon and Twitter accounts over the next four weeks – stay tuned!

LibreOffice monthly recap: October 2020

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 the month by chatting with Adolfo Jayme Barrientos, a long-time member of the LibreOffice community. He told us how he joined the project, what he’s working on, and where he thinks we should go in the future…
  • Our yearly conference took place this month (more on that later), but before it started, we added merchandise to our online shop. It’s still there, so don’t miss the chance to get a cool 2020 hoodie, T-shirt, bag or baseball cap!

  • There were two bugfix updates to LibreOffice in October: 7.0.2 on the 8th, and 7.0.3 on the 29th. With these releases, LibreOffice 7.0 is becoming a mature branch of the suite, and 6.4 will no longer receive updates after the end of November.

  • On the 19th, we caught up with Marcin Popko, who joined the project recently to help out with social media in Poland. Thanks to Marcin’s efforts, more and more people in his country are learning about LibreOffice – and indeed, everyone around the world is welcome to help us with social media channels in many languages.

  • In technology news, TDF published a tender to finish the transition of LibreOffice to OpenDocument Format 1.3. If you’re a LibreOffice developer with some experience in this field, check out the requirements – it might be something perfect for you…
  • Our documentation community announced the LibreOffice Math Guide 7.0. Many thanks to Rafael Lima, Jean H. Weber, Rizal Muttaqin and Drew Jensen for their work on this!

  • LibreOffice 7.1 is due to be released in early February, and our QA team is already running Bug Hunting Sessions. We’ll have more in the run-up to 7.1 – so to ensure that it’s a rock-solid release, give them a hand!

  • And finally… The joint openSUSE + LibreOffice Conference 2020 took place this month! Hundreds of people attended talks, presentations and workshops, so we’re really grateful to everyone who took part. And now we’ve put some of the videos online – see here for the playlist. There are 21 videos so far, but we plan to add more (and upload to PeerTube as well).

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 for everyone!

Next batch of videos from the openSUSE + LibreOffice Conference 2020

We’ve uploaded another batch of presentations and workshops from the recent openSUSE + LibreOffice Conference 2020! You can see them in the YouTube playlist (or on PeerTube), and here are the individual videos:

Building LibreOffice’s Korean community, and CJK issues (DaeHyun Sung):

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Fun with Firebird (Patrick Fitzgerald):

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On sessions, statutes and software (Florian Effenberger):

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History of Online & Mobile (Jan Holešovský):

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ODF state of the union (Thorsten Behrens):

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LibreOffice Virtual Hackfest (Ilmari Lauhakangas):

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Collabora Office on iOS: Recent developments (Tor Lillqvist):

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Ecosystem, Branding & Investment (Michael Meeks):

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First batch of videos from openSUSE + LibreOffice Conference 2020

We’ve edited and uploaded the first batch of videos from our recent joint conference. Here’s the playlist – use the button in the top-right corner to switch videos:

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Full list:

  • State of the Project (Italo Vignoli)
  • Bringing the Sidebars Online (Ashod Nakashian)
  • Revamping the Italian language support (Marina Latini)
  • Improving the User Experience of LibreOffice’s Website (Christine Louie)
  • Certification Workshop
  • Evaluation of new tooling for LibreOffice contributors (Ilmari Lauhakangas)
  • Growing the LibreOffice Japanese community under COVID-19 (Shinji Enoki)
  • Google Season of Docs Panel
  • Working with native/indigenous communities (Kuan-Ting Lin)
  • OOXML / PDF Digital Signing in Draw and elsewhere (Miklos Vajna)
  • Marketing Plan Workshop

And there are more to come – stay tuned to the blog! (We’re also uploading them to PeerTube too.)

Bug Hunting Session for LibreOffice 7.1 Alpha

LibreOffice 7.1 is being developed by our worldwide community, and is due to be released in early February 2021 – see the release notes describing the new features here.

In order to find, report and triage bugs, the LibreOffice QA team is organizing the first Bug Hunting Session for LibreOffice 7.1 on Monday October 26, 2020. Tests will be performed on the first Alpha version. Builds will be available for Linux (DEB and RPM), macOS and Windows, and can be installed and run in parallel along with the production version.

Mentors will be available from 07:00 UTC to 19:00 UTC for questions or help in the IRC channel #libreoffice-qa and the Telegram QA Channel. Of course, hunting bugs will be possible also on other days, as the builds of this particular Alpha release (LibreOffice 7.1.0 Alpha1) will be available until mid November. Check the Release Plan.

All details of the first bug hunting session are available on the wiki.

Tender to finish transition of LibreOffice to ODF 1.3 (ODF 1.3 delta) (#202010-01)

The Document Foundation (TDF) is the charitable entity behind the world’s leading free/libre open source (FLOSS) office suite LibreOffice.

We are looking for an individual or company to finish transition of LibreOffice to ODF 1.3 (ODF 1.3 delta).

This tender builds on the previous ODF 1.3 tender and aims to implement additional features.

The work has to be developed on LibreOffice master, so that it will be released in the next major version.

The following required features (section A) need to be implemented:

  • chart:data-label-series. Missing feature. It is needed for import from Excel.
    • Relevant bugs in TDF’s Bugzilla: #94235, #133176
    • OASIS reference: OFFICE-2117
  • chart:regression-moving-type. Implementation of types “center” and “average-abscissa” is missing. It is needed for interoperability with Gnumeric.
    • For this feature, there is existing code that can be extended.
    • Relevant bug in TDF’s Bugzilla: #133423
    • OASIS reference: OFFICE-3959
  • <text:index-entry-link-start> and <text:index-entry-link-end> in user-index. The link marks exist, but the function itself is not implemented.
    • For this feature, there is existing code that can be extended.
    • Relevant bug in TDF’s Bugzilla: #121842
    • OASIS reference: OFFICE-3941

The following are desirable features (section B):

  • draw:fill for background of pages. Attribute draw:background-size specifies whether a background fill covers the entire page or only the content area of the page. It belongs to element <style:drawing-page-properties>. ODF 1.3 has extended its use to all kind of pages. Some related bug reports have been set to “fixed”, but the problem is not completely solved, details in the bug report.
    • The respective attribute seems to get written by LibreOffice already. All Writer documents are now the entire page.
    • Relevant bug in TDF’s Bugzilla: #134734
    • OASIS reference: OFFICE-3937
  • draw:z-index more precise with increase from back to front. Problem needs to be solved too for cases when converting from docx to odt.
    • Relevant bug in TDF’s Bugzilla: #133487
    • OASIS reference: OFFICE-2122

The following features are nice to have (section C):

  • Wrong icon of master document template in Windows Explorer
    • Relevant bug in TDF’s Bugzilla: #133285
    • OASIS reference: OFFICE-2580
  • pivot table based on named range with local scope
    • The previous implementation didn’t work out. This is a rather complex task.
    • Relevant bug in TDF’s Bugzilla: #37268
    • OASIS reference: OFFICE-3665

The following features are purely optional (section D):

  • Adapt function wizard to the fact, that the second parameter of DCOUNT and DCOUNTA may be empty (i.e. optional)
    • This can be qualified as an “EasyHack”.
    • OASIS reference: OFFICE-3906
  • chart:coordinate-region. There is no help about this topic. There exists no option to not use this kind of position and size reference.
    • That feature was handled differently until OpenOffice.org 3.0, where the coordinates included the description, now they are without, i.e. the reference changed.
    • OASIS reference: OFFICE-3928
  • fo:min-height as attribute of draw:text-box. LibreOffice does not use that attribute and ignores it on file open. Missing feature.
    • That element seems to be written by Word, but likely not yet by LibreOffice.
    • OASIS reference: OFFICE-3735

The following feature is purely optional, and not trivial from a UX point of view (section E):

  • svg:stroke-linecap at object style vs draw:style in element. Implementation of draw:style is incomplete. Especially there is no UI to define a line style with round dashes.
    • Relevant bugs in TDF’s Bugzilla: #133499 (Implementation has error), #127509, #127348, #127266, #123349, #53276, #127207
    • OASIS reference: OFFICE-3742

Required skills

  • Extensive knowledge of C++
  • Experience working on the LibreOffice source code
  • Knowledge of the OpenDocument Format standard, particularly in version 1.3.

Other skills

  • English (conversationally fluent in order to coordinate and plan with members of TDF)

We use free, libre and open source (FLOSS) software for development wherever possible, and the resulting work must be licensed under the Mozilla Public License v2.0.

TDF welcomes applications from all suitably qualified persons regardless of their race, sex, disability, religion/belief, sexual orientation or age.

Bidders will get a preference for including a partner or independent developer who has not been involved in a successful tender before.

As always, TDF will give some preference to individuals who have previously shown a commitment to TDF, including but not limited to certified developers and/or members of TDF. Not being a member, or never having contributed before, does not exclude any applicants from consideration.

The task offered is a project-based one-off, with no plans to a mid- or long-term contractual relationship. It is offered on a freelance, project basis. Individuals and companies applying can be located anywhere in the world.

When budgeting, we anticipated that this project (sections A-E) to take in the region of 32 days of work.

TDF is looking forward to receiving your applications for one or more of the aforementioned tasks, your financial expectations and the earliest date of your availability, via e-mail to a committee at tender20201001@documentfoundation.org no later than November 10, 2020.

Applicants who have not received feedback by December 8, 2020 should consider that their application, after careful review, was not accepted.

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