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Author: Mike Saunders

LibreOffice Conference 2019: Lightning talks

Towards the end of the recent LibreOffice Conference 2019 in Almeria, Spain, we had a series of “lightning talks” – that is, quick presentations on various topics. Here’s the video, skip ahead for:

  • 00:03 – Unicode in 5 minutes (Ivan Sanchez Ortega)
  • 08:10 – Archiving important wiki content (Dennis Roczek)
  • 16:05 – GDB tips and tricks (Ashod Nakashian)
  • 24:19 – How to find bad synonyms in translations (Koji Annoura)
  • 35:06 – Reproducible builds in LibreOffice (Bjoern Michaelsen)
  • 41:08 – Replicating Rapid Prototyper (Michael Meeks)

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LibreOffice Macro Team: progress report

Macros help users to automate common tasks in LibreOffice, and in September, we announced a new team in our community to work on macro support.

So, what has happened in the meantime? This article is a collection of the work done by the LibreOffice Macro Team in the past few months, as well as any other macro-related things in the project. If you are interested in contributing to the macro team (development, testing or documentation), we’d love to hear from you – please send an email to ilmari.lauhakangas@libreoffice.org and we’ll get in touch.

Quality assurance work

Tomoyuki Kubota and Alain Romedenne reorganised the macro meta bug, creating several subcategories for macro issues and feature requests.

Wiki docs

Soon after the announcement of the macro team in early September, we were contacted by Nathan Ullberg, who promptly started contributing to the wiki documentation. Nathan is keeping notes on the progress of his work on his wiki user page. Alain is collaborating with Nathan on the wiki effort, which includes creating new articles with example macros, reviewing old ones and translating them from French to English.

Code contributions from macro team members

Tomoyuki Kubota:

Andreas Heinisch:

Alain Romedenne:

Code contributions from honorary associate members

Mike Kaganski (Collabora):

Stephan Bergmann (Red Hat):

Samuel Mehrbrodt (CIB):

Help content

Improved by Alain Romedenne:

Improved by Olivier Hallot (TDF):

Added by Olivier Hallot (TDF):

Finally, we have to highlight Alain’s presentation from the LibreOffice Conference 2019: Scripting LibreOffice Python macros, aka “Macros Well Kept Secrets”:

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Big thanks to everyone for their contributions and special thanks to Alain for coordinating things and being a tireless macro educator! As mentioned, everyone is welcome to join our efforts to improve macro support in LibreOffice – you don’t need to be a developer. Help us with documentation, bug reports and more – and gain valuable experience on the way!

Community Member Monday: Sokibi, Indonesia

A story about how Sokibi uses LibreOffice and other FOSS to spread knowledge and love

Authors: Ahmad Haris and Franklin Weng

Sokibi (no last name – it’s a typical Javanese old-style name) was born in a rural village, around 45KM away from Semarang City in Central Java island, Indonesia. He now runs a small store residing in a traditional market, working on repairing computers, selling new and used computers, and provided open source solutions for migrations, support and training.

Sokibi has had extensive experience with office suites – from StarOffice and OpenOffice.org to LibreOffice. So besides his daily job, he put huge effort into teaching LibreOffice in schools, from primary schools to high schools. It was not always easy to go to different schools, which were usually very far away from his home town or company, but over the last 20 years, Sokibi has insisted on spreading knowledge about these office suites, without getting students locked in to proprietary software. During these times, Sokibi also wrote 16 books about learning computers from beginner level onwards, including four books for kindergarden kids and 12 books for primary school students.

What Sokibi has done is not only teaching computing and LibreOffice in schools. Many villages in Central Java have libraries but no computers at all. Although Sokibi has just run a small store selling computers, he decided to donate many computers to these libraries to build computer labs there, with Linux and many other open source programs – including LibreOffice – pre-installed.

Several years ago, Sokibi joined the documentation team of BlankOn Linux – an Indonesian Linux distribution founded by Ahmad Haris – writing documents for users who wanted to migrate to FOSS, and also about the daily use of LibreOffice. Now he’s still writing books – including computer learning books for high school students, and several other FOSS applications, like the one pictured above (which covers LibreOffice, Gimp and Inkscape).

In his point of view, currently there is only small or limited documentation and HOWTOs in his local language Indonesian. Therefore he keeps teaching and spreading the knowledge and love, hoping that the number of contributors to LibreOffice and FOSS can grow.

We believe that there are more people like Sokibi, spreading his knowledge and love to people using the power of free and open source software. Let’s applaud Sokibi, and if you know anyone doing the same, please it share with us!

LibreOffice community at Czech free software events

Stanislav Horáček writes:

Like every year, we would like to say few words about our impressions and experiences from our Czech free and open source software (FOSS) conferences in autumn. As in the last year, we participate with our LibreOffice booth at LinuxDays in Prague (me and Zdeněk Crhonek), and at OpenAlt in Brno (Petr Valach and Zdeněk Crhonek).

We appreciated supporting words from LibreOffice users, as well as their questions and critical remarks – it was good opportunity to realise that LibreOffice is a really complex piece of software, and some ways of using it can be unpredictable 🙂 Some notes from the events:

  • LibreOffice Online is better known than at previous events, but still some people are surprised that there is this version, so there is interest in how to install it and get it working. We noticed a demand for an online service with LibreOffice as paid alternative to Google Docs for small companies.
  • Other quite hot topics were macros and (missing) automatic updates in Windows.
  • Examples of special questions: using a stylus and handwriting recognition in LibreOffice; a version for the Librem device; embedding LibreOffice in another application; creating business cards with pictures; saving values of Solver settings in Calc; filtering by colours in Calc…
  • At LinuxDays, I had a talk about a new Czech spellcheck dictionary (which also uses Wikidata as a source), available as a LibreOffice extension.

Thanks to organizers of both events for this opportunity and to The Document Foundation, the non-profit entity behind LibreOffice, for the support! We can really recommend these types of events, as you get feedback from both end users of our software, and developers/enthusiasts of another communities. Don’t hesitate to attend if there is a similar event in your country 🙂

TDF says: huge thanks to Stanislav, Zdeněk and Petr for all their great work! Native language communities are essential building blocks of the LibreOffice project, helping to share knowledge, spread the word and make LibreOffice even better for everyone. And everyone is welcome to join and help out!

Refreshing LibreOffice’s “Frequently Asked Questions” pages

Ilmari Lauhakangas (aka Buovjaga) writes:

A year ago we started migrating our wiki translations to the standard translation management system used across the known wikiverse. The system allows for proper tracking of translation status, and offers a user experience familiar to LibreOffice translators.

By the end of summer 2019, we had enough experience with the new system to be able to define best practices and give instructions to translators. Right at this moment one of our Czech contributor heroes, Zdeněk Crhonek (aka Raal), expressed interest in offering FAQ translation tasks through a volunteer platform called Um sem um tam. Zdeněk took it upon himself to migrate each FAQ article to the new system while creating the tasks.

In addition to the migration effort, the FAQ pages were checked for accuracy and many changes were made to bring them up to date. All of this work resulted in unprecedented activity in The Document Foundation wiki as can be seen in this chart:

Big thanks to Zdeněk Crhonek, Czech translator Petr Kuběj and the original French creators of the FAQ articles!

Translators are invited to update the FAQ translations as well as to confirm that the source text corresponds to the current LibreOffice interface. If you have questions regarding the migration process in general, please contact Ilmari Lauhakangas.

LibreOffice localisation sprint (and other events) in Albania

The Albanian LibreOffice community has been super active in recent years, organising the LibreOffice Conference 2018 in Tirana, and regularly contributing with translation and marketing efforts. Sidorela Uku reports from a recent localisation sprint at Open Labs Hackerspace:

This was the first event I organized for LibreOffice, in collaboration with a friend of mine, Marcela Korreshi (our new contributor). The presentation included an introduction to LibreOffice and how people can contribute to the project in in various ways, while the second part was focused on translations. (In addition, I talked about whatcanidoforlibreoffice.org.)

We had 14 people participating at the event, and as far as I can see from the translations, there are around 460 strings translated to review – and around 200 strings translated and reviewed.

Meanwhile, some more events are coming up in Tirana:

  • On 20 November, for Design & UI
  • On 23 November, for Marketing & Advocacy
  • And on 26 November, another event for Localization

You don’t have to register for the events, and they are free to attend – full details on this wiki page (Albanian language).

TDF would like to say thanks to the Albanian community for their help and contributions!

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