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Author: Mike Saunders

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.

Community Member Monday: Jwtiyar Ali

Today we’re talking to Jwtiyar Ali, who is helping to localise LibreOffice into Kurdish…

To start with, tell us a bit about yourself!

Hey! I live in the Kurdistan region, in the north of Iraq – the city of Sulaymaniyah. I have an MSc in Physics, but I love computer science too. Currently I am working in the Cement Quality Control Department at a cement factory, as a physicist.

I do translations for many open source projects such as Ubuntu, Gimp, Firefox etc., leading these translation projects. My hobbies are following new open source projects and seeing how they can be more competitive. I also like football, walking, and reading Python programming courses in my free time.

What are the opportunities and challenges for promoting/using free software and LibreOffice in your region?

In my country, promoting open source apps and systems is a very big challenge because most people – maybe 90% – use proprietary apps, because they don’t hear about or know about open source alternatives.

So we in the team at www.chawg.org decided to make a website to introduce many open source projects. We created a wiki platform and a forum for that reason – and now we have Facebook groups and pages.

In my opinion, an opportunity is to provide users with more guides, and make a comparison between LibreOffice with other apps. Show users what LibreOffice can do that others apps can’t. Also, show people that LibreOffice can do the same things – or even more – with their daily work, and send them articles to educate them about the software.

What are you doing in the LibreOffice project right now?

I am translating LibreOffice. I hope to see LibreOffice in my language – that would be perfect. Also, it would help users to interact with LibreOffice more often than before.

How did you get involved in LibreOffice, and what was the experience like?

My love for open source projects made me engage with LibreOffice and the big community behind it. Being in the community made me feel that I wasn’t working in a specific part of the world – but people around the world can benefit from what I do.

The experience was amazing, because I didn’t know beforehand that we have a great app like LibreOffice.

Anything else you want to add?

I want to thank everyone who helped me to join this great community. My passion for LibreOffice has no borders, and I hope to see other open source projects grow faster than ever. The best part of the community is that we all trust in open source and teamwork.

Thesedays, I am promoting LibreOffice to my colleagues and friends. Also, I help them to fix any problems that they may face it during installing or when using the suite.

Thanks to Jwtiyar for all his contributions! Our native language communities are always open for more help – so if you want LibreOffice and its website localised in your language, give us a hand!

Documentation updates: Czech Guide for LibreOffice Math

Math is LibreOffice’s formula editor, and can be invoked in your text documents, spreadsheets, presentations and drawings, enabling you to insert perfectly formatted mathematical and scientific formulas. Your formulas can include a wide range of elements, from fractions, terms with exponents and indices, integrals, and mathematical functions, to inequalities, systems of equations, and matrices.

We have an English guidebook for Math in LibreOffice 6.4, and now our Czech community has completed a translation, thanks to Zdenek Crhonek, Petr Kubej, Eliska Rolfova and Roman Toman. Click here to read it!

Meanwhile, they’re working on the Getting Started Guide and Calc Guide. If you speak Czech, give them a hand! You can also follow the Czech LibreOffice community on Twitter.

And indeed, the documentation community appreciates help in all languages – plus, contributing is a good way to build up skills for a possible career in technical writing. See here to get started!

openSUSE + LibreOffice Conference Update

The organisers of the openSUSE + LibreOffice Conference have slightly adjusted the conference dates, from the original of October 13 – 16 to the new dates of October 15 – 17.

The new dates are Thursday through to Saturday. Participants can submit talks for the online conference until July 21 when the Call for Papers is expected to close.

The length of the talks for the conference have also been changed. There will be a 15-minute short talk, a 30-minute normal talk and a 60-minute workgroup session to select. Organisers felt that shortening the talks were necessary to keep attendees engaged during the online conference. The change will also help with the scheduling of breaks, social video sessions and extra segments for Questions and Answers after each talk.

The live platform that will be used will allow presenters with limited bandwidth to play a talk they record, should they wish not to present a live talk. The presenter will have the possibility to control the video as well as pause, rewind, fast-forward, etc., which is built into the system.

Organizers have online, live conference sponsorship packages available. Interested parties should contact ddemaio (at) opensuse.org for more information.

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