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Author: Mike Saunders

Community Member Monday: Khairul Aizat Kamarudzzaman

Today we’re talking to Khairul Aizat Kamarudzzaman from our Malaysian community. He’s a long-time fan of free and open source software, and is helping with LibreOffice advocacy and marketing…

To start off, tell us a bit about yourself!

I’m from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. I started exploring and using FOSS way back in 2004 (Debian, Red Hat, the BSD family and sticking with Ubuntu till today) when I was studying at the university. From there I started exploring and contributing to Ubuntu, which you can find here, and I was accepted to be an Ubuntu Member, Kubuntu Membes (merits as Ubuntu contributor). Finally I was appointed to be part of the Asia Oceania Membership Board.

A a FOSS community member, I work in a few IT companies in Malaysia and was one of the engineers working at Open Source Competency Centre (OSCC) under Malaysian Administrative Modernisation and Management Planning Unit (MAMPU). Now I own my own IT company, namely Informology Sdn Bhd. Not stopping there, I continue actively being a FOSS enthusiast in Malaysia. When the cloud computing era came, I was involved by leading Malaysia OpenStack User Group, and I’ve recently been exploring and leading the Endless OS user group for Malaysia.

What are you working on in the LibreOffice project right now?

I started the LibreOffice Malaysia Group on Facebook, and I’m planning with the group to finish the LibreOffice Malay translation as soon as possible, with guidance from the Indonesian LibreOffice translation team – so that we can have Malay language support in LibreOffice and Collabora Office.

Why did you decide to become a member of The Document Foundation?

It’s in line with what I’ve done since I started using FOSS: open source advocacy targeted at students, teachers, government staff and the open Source community members in Malaysia. I especially focused on Linux, and office automation like LibreOffice and Collabora Office as an alternative to Microsoft Office. Then, last year in 2019, I managed to participate in the Gnome Asia Summit 2019 in Surabaya, Indonesia where I met a lot of FOSS enthusiasts who are advocating and spreading open source in Indonesia, along with a few awesome TDF members (Ahmad Haris), TDF Board member (Franklin Weng) and GNOME Foundation Staff.

So I asked myself… since I already pitching the Open Document Format (ODF) since I was in OSCC, why not start contributing more to LibreOffice by doing translations? So I challenged myself by applying to become a TDF member, with advice from Ahmad Haris and Franklin Weng.

Anything else you plan to do in the future?

Keep spreading and marketing LibreOffice in Malaysia – especially in the government and educational sectors. Give these sectors LibreOffice as an alternative, by not using piracy and a cracked version of Microsoft Office.

Maybe the LibreOffice Malaysia group can suggest to TDF to host the LibreOffice Conference in Malaysia one day in the future!

Thanks Khairul! And indeed to everyone in the Malaysian LibreOffice community. Your work is essential to help spread awareness of LibreOffice across the globe.

Join the LibreOffice community today! Have fun and build up your skillset…

Marketing plan draft: Discussion about options available, and timetable

Lothar Becker, Chairman of The Document Foundation’s Board of Directors, writes:

Dear community,

thanks for the feedback on the marketing plan draft via different channels so far. We want to let you know and have you take part, as the board is discussing the options now available with that draft.

In the meantime, some more feedback will be integrated in the document already and will be published on next Monday. This is still not the last chance for a change for version 7.0.0, but we will reach that point soon.

The last change for all strings and tags would be possible the latest by Monday, July 20. With some preliminary phase for decision making of the board the public feedback phase on all this will end by the time of the next public board call, i.e. Friday, July 17, 1300 Berlin time.

What are the realistic options so far:

  • Variant 1: Implementation of a marketing plan would be postponed to V7.1, as no UI changes can be made in minor releases. This would imply a longer discussion period.

OR

  • Variant 2: Implementation of the marketing plan draft with V7.0.0 with flavour tags.

At the moment it looks like, this would be called “Community Edition” (in change to the RC1) and with the introduction of the umbrella brand “Enterprise Edition” with explanations and pointer to ecosystem partner offerings.

The feedback here we still need until the mentioned Friday, July 17, 1300 Berlin time is about all strings and tags (e.g. “Community Edition”), you can give that on the board-discuss mailing list, or on Bugzilla.

OR

  • Variant 3: As variant 2 above and further tweak all strings and tags for V7.1, after gaining experience and more feedback with it from V7.0.

We encourage all the community to bring in your opinions further, also on the public board call (Friday, July 17, 1300 Berlin time), and all the other channels. Please be aware, that any sort of decision of the board must be made the latest at the dates stated above.

Thanks so much for your input so far! All the best, and keep healthy!

Lothar,
Chairman of the Board

Quick video tutorial: Starting LibreOffice and its modules on Windows 10

Videos created by our community are a great way to spread the word about LibreOffice, and help new users to get the most out of the software. This video, from Harald Berger, summarises the different ways to start LibreOffice 6.4 – and its various modules – under Windows 10:

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Board statement on the LibreOffice 7.0 RC “Personal Edition” label

Dear LibreOffice Community, supporters and friends,

Thanks to the hard work put in by many individual and ecosystem contributors, working together as a team in different fields, such as development, QA, design, marketing, localisation, release engineering, infrastructure, just to mention some, in a few weeks’ time we will be welcoming our LibreOffice 7.0 milestone.

At the same time, we are discussing our vision for the next five years, with a starting point being marketing and branding. See our marketing and board-discuss mailing lists.

Due to draft and development work in the area of branding and product naming, some speculation, in particular related to the “Personal Edition” tag shown in a LibreOffice 7.0 RC (Release Candidate), has started on several communication channels. So let us, as The Document Foundation’s Board of Directors, please provide further clarifications:

 1. None of the changes being evaluated will affect the license, the availability, the permitted uses and/or the functionality. LibreOffice will always be free software and nothing is changing for end users, developers and Community members.

 2. Due to the short time frame we are working with, the tagline appeared on the RC and we apologise if this caused some of you to think we unilaterally implemented the change. Rest assured that the consultation with the Community is still ongoing.

 3. This “Personal Edition” tag line is part of a wider 5 year marketing plan that we are preparing, and it has the purpose of differentiating the current, free and community-supported LibreOffice from a LibreOffice Enterprise set of products and services provided by the members of our ecosystem. The marketing plan is still under development and discussion so we are eager to receive and evaluate your feedback!

 4. Any feedback (in an appropriate way) to our marketing plan is welcome. There are several ways to send feedback to the Board of Directors: the most preferred way is to subscribe to the “board-discuss” mailing lists (e-mail here to subscribe), in which many of the discussions will take place in public and be archived. Besides the mailing list, we have a regular time slot (around 10-15 minutes maximum) in our Board meeting public section, for which we welcome all the community members to join and raise their questions. The Board meetings are held every two weeks and are announced in a timely fashion on the board-discuss mailing list.

 5. We are strongly opposed to any form of harassment, on any medium. Feedback itself is not an harassment, but personal attacks are. Please stay focused on the objective and be polite in your conversations!

 6. The team of editors for the marketing plan is weighting all the input, as it is important to get the feedback to define a clear strategy supported by the entire Community. We encourage everybody to support the Board, the marketing team and the Community working out the details; certainly we don’t want to make any decisions that is backed only by a small minority.

 7. This is a complex decision involving many overlapping concerns. We encourage people to read the detailed background slide-deck that Italo has produced, so that they can contribute to the current state of the discussion.

Apologies again if misunderstandings arose! We would very much appreciate your feedback and support!

Best Regards,

From all of The Document Foundation Board members

Annual Report 2019: Updates from the Design community

(Note: this is a section from The Document Foundation’s Annual Report 2019, which will be published in full in the coming weeks.)

Based on LibreOffice’s Human Interface Guidelines (HIG), which provide the core framework, several significant changes were made to LibreOffice’s user interface during 2019. The most important were the improvements and the additions to icon styles, and the release of the NotebookBar in additional flavours.

Improvements in LibreOffice 6.3

Dialog Windows

A completely new Tip of the Day window shows up once per day when the user opens LibreOffice, to provide useful information, tips and tricks about the software, and from time to time a reminder about contributing or donating to the project. Tips are rotating based on a list developed by LibreOffice volunteer contributors.

Menus

Writer’s Form menu can be reorganized to have it Microsoft Office compatible, by checking out the relevant option in the Option > Writer > Compatibility dialogue window.

Toolbars & Sidebar

The NotebookBar has been improved with the addition of a Tabbed Compact option in Writer, Calc, Impress and Draw, to serve users with a wide screen where the Tabbed user interface would steal a large portion of the vertical space. In addition, a Contextual Single option has been added to Writer, Impress and Draw, to serve the same users when the choose the more traditional user interface based on toolbars.

The Toolbar “More Controls” was deleted, and all tools were moved to the toolbar “Form Controls” in all LibreOffice modules. In addition, the Sidebar width can be configured to accommodate contents of extensions which exceed the maximum width of 400 pixel.

Icons

The monochrome Sifr icon theme was significantly reviewed and updated, and the Karasa Jaga icon theme was reworked from 22 to 24 pixels to follow other icon themes. All icons of the two icon themes were drawn in Inkscape to make them available also as SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) images to support HDPI screens.

Other GUI Items

The old Sum tool in Calc’s formula bar has been replaced by a new drop-down widget providing Sum, Average, Min, Max and Count options.

Improvements in LibreOffice 6.4

Menus

Hyperlink context menus were unified. Every hyperlink now has the following context menu entries: Open Hyperlink, Edit Hyperlink, Copy Hyperlink Location and Remove Hyperlink.

Toolbars & Sidebar

A Table panel was added to Writer’s Sidebar, with Insert, Delete, Select, Split/Merge, Optimize a Row, Optimize a Column, set the Table Cell Background Colour and the Border, insert a Function, and forms to set Row Height and Column Width.

Icons

A SVG variant of the dark version of Breeze and Sifr icon themes was added to the view options, and an extra large 32 pixels icon set has been added to Sifr.

Other GUI Items

Thumbnails of documents in the Start Center are now overlaid with an icon showing the LibreOffice module they have been created with.

Much of this was implemented by our certified developers, along with community members volunteering their time. If you find LibreOffice useful, support us with a donation so that we can continue to build our community, share knowledge, and improve LibreOffice for everyone!

Online events in the LibreOffice Hispanic community

Everyone loves to meet in person, share ideas, work on the software and have a good time. Of course, “real life” meetings have been difficult in the last few months, so many communities in the LibreOffice project have chosen to go online. Daniel A. Rodriguez gives us an update:

Yesterday, the Hispanic community of LibreOffice celebrated the second of a series of online events that was broadcast live on YouTube. The activity started at 17:00 UTC and lasted about 3 and a half hours. The virtual assistants benefited from the presence of several members recognized for their participation and collaboration in the project:

  • Xiomara Céspedes, from Costa Rica, provided an overview of the use of styles.

This was, of course, an open event – free of charge and aimed at anyone interested in the FOSS office suite par excellence. Also, we thank our friend Servio from the Latin Community of Free Technologies, who managed the live transmission through YouTube.

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

The Role of ODF in the Era of Digital Identity and Authentication

Digital identity has become an integral part of everyday life. We use it to access work tools and sign documents…