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Author: Olivier Hallot

LibreOffice in Guarani

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By Prof. Alcides Torres
Translation: Huber Melli

LibreOffice would be the first office suite translated to Guaraní, a native language from South America spoken by more than 6 million people in this sub-continent. Language is a fundamental tool though which we not only structure, process and understand the world around us, but also communicate and pass information from one generation to the next.

The access to technological tools is a highly significant implement for the development of the peoples. To be able to access information and tools in your mother tongue has a great impact in people’s lives and growth because it facilitates a more profound understanding of them, all of which open a way to a better appropriation and usage.
There is no language unable to grow along with its speakers, in order to express the constantly changing world and the progress of science and technology. What does exist is the prejudice and exclusion.

In a country with a vast majority of Guaraní speakers suffering the existent diglossia, by which Spanish is preferred by the Public administration, service providers, even for the State’s education policies, the translation of LibreOffice to Guaraní represents a turning point. First, because it shatters the bias that Native American languages cannot access areas of technology and Internet. And second, because it will contribute to the Guaraní´s reassessment, to raise the self-esteem of populations that for decades were limited in their capacity to grow and self-develop, as a consequence of a deficient education, using a language that were not even theirs, providing information irrelevant and disconnected to their reality.

 

LibreOffice documentation: join us in this adventure

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The LibreOffice documentation team produces the guidebooks, reference materials, wiki and online help to support users of the software. We’re working hard to add all the exciting new features and functions of recent LibreOffice versions, to show how your office productivity can be improved thanks to the free office suite – and your help would be very much appreciated! Even if you can only spare 30 minutes each week, your contribution would be very valuable, and you’ll also get experience with a big-name open source project. Read on for the full details…

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Brazilian LibreOffice Community: boosting to cruise speed and reaching Latin America

2013 has been one of the best years for LibreOffice in Brazil

and it is becoming even better.

The Brazilian community outperformed itself in all kind of activities around LibreOffice and The Document Foundation during 2013. We attended ten events, signed an important agreement and got our first LibreOffice certified developer. It was also time to start looking at our neighbors in Latin America.

Events

We participated in ten events sponsoring activities in LibreOffice. The FLISOL 2013 in Brasilia to invite new developers to join our development. The FSLDC 2013 in Duque de Caxias, promoting LibreOffice to a broad audience of users and developers. The Document Freedom Day 2013 was also coordinated by the Brazilian community in Rio de Janeiro and sponsored by SINDPD-RJ.

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FSLDC Duque de Caxias
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FLISOL – Brasília: Call for new developers. From left to right: Deivi Kuhn, Henderson Matsuura, Olivier Hallot
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The Document Freedom Day in Rio de Janeiro. From left to right: Eliane Domingos, Marcelo Soriano and Marcio Monteiro

The Lecture Cycle of SINDPD-RJ regularly talked on LibreOffice new developments on each major release in 2013, accessing a focused set of IT professionals and FOSS advocates. The Santa Catarina State LibreOffice community also had its 2nd LibreOffice Meeting that included a hack day for students interested in starting to contribute code to LibreOffice and the SOLISC (in the same state) also had lectures on LibreOffice, lead by Klaibson Ribeiro.

Then we had our major event, FISL 14 in July 2013, where we brought Italo Vignoli, Bjoern Michaelsen and Olivier Hallot of The Document Foundation Board of Directors to lecture on LibreOffice migrations, LibreOffice community engagements and LibreOffice development. At the same event the State of Rio Grande do Sul and The Docuemnt Foundation agreed to partner  for the deployment of Open Document Formats and LibreOffice within the State public administration, aiming a few hundred thousands desktops.

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FISL 2013: The State of Rio Grande do Sul adopts ODF and LibreOffice as document edition format and tool of choice.
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FISL 2013: Community gathering at the largest opensource event in Brazil: From left to right: Olivier Hallot, Bjoern Michaelsen, Italo Vignoli (TDF), Dr. Richard Stallman (FSF), Eliane Domingos, Gustavo Pacheco, David Jourdain (LibreOffice community)

Next in August we had the CONSEGI, in Brasilia, where the federal public administration get together to deal with a broad set of issues related to FOSS, and where our Chairman Florian Effenberger was invited as keynote speaker, together with most of the Brazilian community to run lectures, workshops and round-tables on FOSS and LibreOffice. The Document Foundation represented by Florian and Ms Eliane Domingos received the “Demoiselle” Award in recognition of the contribtion for the communities of open source software.

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CONSEGI 2013: The “Demoiselle” award for achievements in the OpenSource community to The Document Foundation (Florian Effenberger) and Eliane Domingos (LibreOffice Brazilian community)

In October, we ran the LibreOffice show and partied for its 3rd birthday in Latinoware, an event that happens in Foz do Iguaçu, in the triple border of Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay, sponsored by Itaipu Binacional, the company that operates the massive Itaipu hydroelectric dam. This event is a gathering of several nationals interested in promoting FOSS among their citizens and a project to translate LibreOffice to guarani, the native language of Paraguay, emerged.

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Celebrating LibreOffice Anniversary in LatinoWare 2013: from left to right: Julio Neves, Eliane Domingos, Vitorio Furusho, Klaibson Ribeiro and João Fernando

Finally we attended CISL-2013, the Argentinian congress for open source in Buenos Aires to deliver 3 lectures on LibreOffice achievements, on migrations, development and community gathering, in an effort to stimulate the Argentinian community to get more active.

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CISL 2013 in Buenos Aires: Olivier Hallot (TDF) sharing experience in migrations for large organizations.

Development

All events of 2013 also aimed to harvest new developers for LibreOffice. From initial compilation to the first patches, the developer community grew in quantity and quality. We were able do send two Brazilian developers to Freiburg, Germany to participate in the Freiburg Hackfest. We were happy that Marcos Souza got his LibreOffice Developer Certification.

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The high profile developer team in Freiburg Hackfest: Michael Stahl, Marcos Souza, José Guilherme Vanz, Stephan Bergman and Eike Rathke

Community

The community also has it say in 2013. The documentation team leaded by Raul Pacheco and Vera Cavalcante finished the translation of the Writer and Calc User Manual. This is a huge effort that the Brazilian collaborators undertake to bring knowledge to end-users, not only in Brazilian Portuguese but also for the broader Portuguese-speaking community.

The LibreOffice Magazine, an e-magazine in PDF writen and edited by the Brazilian community leaded by Eliane Domingos e Vera Cavalcante, released 6 editions on time with more than 70 A5 pages each full of information on open source software in general, LibreOffice tutorials and case studies for migration and deployments. This magazine is actually edited on a collaboration basis and is not funded by advertisements or any other means. We recorded an average of 20.000 downloads of the magazine on each edition and we have 449 followers of the magazine twitter account.

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Celebrating the 3rd anniversary of LibreOffice and the 1st of LibreOffice Magazine

Responding to the trend towards social networks, the community also gathered around LibreOffice in FaceBook, Twitter and Google+. In these profiles, we have 1900 followers in the LibreOffice facebook page as well as 1400 more in the LibreOffice Facebook group. On Twitter, we have 1800 followers and 1328 in Google+.

Last, but not least, the year ended with the Document Foundation Board of Director elections where our colleague Eliane Domingos was elected. That will make 2014 even better to follow!

Olivier Hallot

From Brazil to Germany, an Unforgettable LibreOffice Hackfest in Freiburg

José Guilherme Vanz and Marcos Souza, LibreOffice development in Brazil

Our first contact with the LibreOffice was in FISL 2012 (International Forum of Free Software, held in Porto Alegre, Brazil). Since then, we got quickly involved with the LibreOffice development community. Now we attend events in Brazil advocating to people about the better office suite ever done!

Months ago, after some time contributing to the project and participating in LibreOffice community, we, José Guilherme Vanz and Marcos Paulo de Souza were invited to participate in the Freiburg LibreOffice Hackfest. We were very happy and very excited! This invitation showed us that we were recognized for our humble work in the project and because this is a unique opportunity to work with people that we just know by mailing or IRC chats. So, we started the preparations of travel, such as paperwork, funds and a negotiation with our employers.

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We arrived in Germany thinking about how to learn more about LibreOffice code base, and learn some tips and tricks to code while contributing with the project. The guys at the hackfest work full time in the project, so we were very excited to improve our skills, including stuffs about how to make a nice hackfest and try setup one in Brazil!

Our journey in Germany began in the beautiful city of Munich, where we stayed for two days. We met Christian Lohmaier, the current release engineer of LibreOffice project. He and Florian Effenberger were patient and generous to show Munich to us and all nice places of this nice city! Thanks a lot guys!

Then we went to Freiburg, where the Hackfest was to start. The event took three days. We had the opportunity to meet some of the most famous mega developers! It was a very nice experience to link faces and names to IRC nicks, and of course, to question the “pythons” of the project in real time! Surely, we learned a lot in these 3 days!

Marcos did some work in LibreOffice Math. The first was about including tooltips in the new Elements Dock. To solve this bug, we basically need to create some strings with the descriptions of each element in the Elements Dock. These strings are stored inside “.src” files. These files are “compiled” and used by translators to translate each string to a specific language used in the user interface of LibreOffice. This fix was not difficult, just painful!

The second bug that Marcos worked was about to implement a scrollbar in the Elements Dock. We did not finish this fix because he had some doubts and some points that need some other fixes. Still in the event, we talked with some others hackers about other issues.

I was focused trying to execute a static checker to detect some error prone code and fix them.f2-1

After three days of hackfest, we started the “Hamburg Home Hacking Marathon”! We stayed four days in Hamburg, coding in the house of LibreOffice enginners! Again, we had the pleasure to work with Eike Ratke, Michael Stahl, Stephan Bergmann and Bjoern Michaelsen. All of them willing to help us teaching about the code base and showing some tips.

Using our precious time with them, Marcos worked in the issue 60698 (https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=60698). This bug is about unify some shared libraries that are built by few files. Doing this we get a smaller library because these libraries are compiled and built just once, and by this we avoid the dispersion of shared libraries. Working in this bug, Marcos unified all shared libraries of IO module.

Marcos tried yet to solve a bug in Calc, with the help of Eike as mentor. This bug was about ODS files using link to another sheets. By changing the referenced files, Calc was not allowed to update the data inside the file that was referencing. But, this bug was not so easy, and the problem was bigger than we thought. So we couldn’t solve this bug in that time, and Eike removed the bug from the easy hacks.

And I was still working in static checker. I started to look to a bug of Math, about the user interface. After some work, I fixed that bug!

In the third day, we went back to Stephan’s place, trying to solve bugs and learn more! This day Bjoern went to Stephan’s house too, totaling six guys programming in the same table! In this day Marcos worked in a bug(https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=63020) indicated by Bjoern. That bug was related to removing a class from LibreOffice. With Stephan’s help, Marcos could remove that class and use a better approach in the code.

And in the last day, we went again to Eike’s home, where we enjoyed to last moments with the great developers of LibreOffice! We talked a little about their work and how they work daily.

Two rookies and three masters of LibreOffice

For sure, these days were very fruitful, and we learned a lot of things that we’ll use in the future.

We came back to Brazil and we want to say a big THANK YOU for all of you guys! To the  Brazilian community, that welcomed us and keeps helping us. To The Document Foundation, who gave us this opportunity. To all developers that are helping us since we started in the project, specially YOU we met this wonderful German journey, and all people involved directly or indirectly in this amazing project!

Open documents formats and LibreOffice at FISL 14

By Gustavo Pacheco

The 14th edition of the International Forum on Free Software FISL 14, from July 3rd to 6th in Porto Alegre, Brazil, will carry several LibreOffice and OpenDocument Formats (ODF) activities. This year, the good news are the participation of Italo Vignoli (Italy) and Bjoern Michaelsen (Germany) who will talk on the adoption of open standards and free software, respectively. Italo will present a lecture on LibreOffice: the History and A Reference Protocol for Migrations to Free Software and Open Document Standards. Bjoern will conduct the LibreOffice Workshop and will give the lecture LibreOffice Project: Getting Involved and LibreOffice – Continuous community integration.

The Brazilian LibreOffice community will also be in FISL 14. Klaibson Ribeiro will talk about LibreLogo early in Wednesday 3rd, a new feature included in LibreOffice 4 focusing beguinners-level programming teaching. In the afternoon we will run the panel The importance of of the open source public legal frameworks for the ODF ecosystem, where we will discuss the achievements with existing the open document formats bills, the challenge of the execution and maintenance of these regulations and the strategies for the adoption in administrations. On Friday, July 5th Olivier Hallot will run the workshop Modifying the LibreOffice Interface, and will present the development of the new dialog structures of LibreOffice, an old demand from the LibreOffice community. In the afternoon, Eliane Domingos will coordinate the LibreOffice Community Meeting where José Guilherme Vanz and Marcos Paulo de Souza will present their experience after one year hacking LibreOffice coding. At the end of the day the lecture The Rio Grande do Sul State Migration to Open Document Formats will show the ODF adoption case in the State Cabinet office.

For more details, please visit the official FISL page and register yourself for these full days of knowledge and collaboration!
Wednesday July 3rd
11:00 – 12:00

Room P11

Lecture – LibreLogo – See how easy is to start programming

Klaibson Natal Ribeiro Borges

The Logo programming language, created in the 60’s to help teaching programming by moving a small tortoise in the screen with the command line, will be presented. LibreLogo is an implementation of the Logo programming language inside LibreOffice Writer 4.0. We will show examples on how simple it is to start to program, and how to teach kids, teens and not so young people.

15:00 – 16:00

Room 40T – GNU

Panel – Importance of open documents format public regulation for the ODF ecosystem.

Antonio Augusto Ribeiro Guimarães, Gustavo Pacheco, Italo Vignoli, Klaibson Natal Ribeiro Borges, Vitorio Furusho

In the recent years, the regulation of the preferred use of open document formats for interoperability, specially with respect to the ODF standard, has been a constant issue for IT managers. The goal of this activity is to present and debate with Brazilian and foreign representatives, the challenges of the legal regulation of open formats.

16:00 – 17:00

Room 40T – GNU

Lecture – LibreOffice Project: Getting Involved

Bjoern Michaelsen

LibreOffice is one of the biggest and most important open source projects. Still we actively encourage volunteers to get involved. This talk presents possible entry points for a newcomer to get started and explains how the project takes effort to make your first contribution into the product less intimidating. Building on that, this talk will also showcase what some volunteers managed to archive and finally present you a set of opportunities to easily make your first contribution.
Thursday July 4th
10:00 – 13:00

Room 714

Workshop – LibreOffice Workshop

Bjoern Michaelsen

The LibreOffice workshop will be a hands-on workshop, covering these topics, depending on interest in the audience: – Building LibreOffice on Linux – running test suites – finding and fixing EasyHacks – testing developer builds – using gerrit.libreoffice.org and its build bots – tinderbox.libreoffice.org – bug triage – regression hunting with LibreOffice bibisect (https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Bibisect) – whatever LibreOffice development topics come up during the session.

15:00 – 16:00, Room 40T – GNU

Lecture – LibreOffice: the History

Italo Vignoli

The birth of The Document Foundation and LibreOffice, and the growth of the project during the first three years: the new governance model, the development strategy through the numbers and the new features, and the future of the free office suite.
Friday July 5th
10:00 – 13:00

Room 714

Workshop – Modifying the interface of LibreOffice

Olivier Hallot

In this workshop we will show how to transform the decade-old LibreOffice dialogs into a new and modern open source based on GTK + Glade technology. It will also be a hands-on session for developers with abilities to program in C++ and some knowledge of LibreOffice. We aim to motivate hackers to work on the remaining dialogs that are still available for modernization.

15:00 – 16:00

Room 41A – Tux

Lecture – A Reference Protocol for Migrations to Free Software and Open Document Standards

Italo Vignoli

The Document Foundation has developed a reference protocol to ease migrations to free software and open document standards, targeted to enterprises and organizations, which has been thoroughly tested in Italy for the migration of Regione Umbria (Italia) to LibreOffice.

16:00 – 18:00

Room 701

Community Meeting – LibreOffice and Brazil, passion really matters.

Eliane Domingos de Sousa, José Guilherme Vanz, Marcos Paulo de Souza

Brazil has one of the largest LibreOffice user base. Under the coordination of the new developers generation, the Community Meeting of LibreOffice will present the landmark achievements in almost 3 years of existence. Besides the development, we will discuss other important activities of the project.

18:00 – 19:00

Room 41C

Lecture – Migration to open document formats in the Rio Grande do Sul State Administration

Rogério Alves

We will present the implementation case of LibreOffice as standard office suite inside the Cabinet Office to the ITC managers – ITC Forum.
Saturday July 6th
14:00 – 15:00

Room 40T – GNU

Lecture – LibreOffice – Continuous community integration

Bjoern Michaelsen

The LibreOffice has seen a tremendous growth since it was started 2 1/2 years ago, especially in the number of unaffiliated volunteer contributors. This growth came with a constant challenge to (re-)evaluate the communication and coordination means of the project. This talk gives an insight in how coordination in such a massive and distributed project works, but also tries to give some cautious hints what parts of that might apply to smaller projects.

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