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Category: Announcements

Announcement of LibreOffice 6.4.6

Berlin, August 13, 2020 – The Document Foundation announces the availability of LibreOffice 6.4.6, the 6th minor release of the LibreOffice 6.4 family, targeted at all users relying on the best free office suite ever for desktop productivity. LibreOffice 6.4.6 includes bug fixes and improvements to document compatibility and interoperability with software from other vendors.

LibreOffice 6.4.6 is optimized for use in every environment, even by more conservative users, as it now includes several months of work on bug fixes. Users of LibreOffice 6.3.6 and previous versions should update to LibreOffice 6.4.6, as this is now the best choice in term of robustness for their productivity needs.

For enterprise class deployments, TDF strongly recommends sourcing LibreOffice from one of the ecosystem partners, to get long-term supported releases, dedicated assistance, custom new features and other benefits, including SLAs (Service Level Agreements): https://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-in-business/. Also, the work done by ecosystem partners flows back into the LibreOffice project, and this represents an advantage for everyone.

LibreOffice individual users are supported by a global community of volunteers: https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/community-support/. On the website and the wiki there are guides, manuals, tutorials and HowTos. Donations help us to make all of these resources available.

Availability of LibreOffice 6.4.6

LibreOffice 6.4.6 is immediately available from the following link: https://www.libreoffice.org/download/. Minimum requirements are specified on the download page. TDF builds of the latest LibreOffice Online source code are available as Docker images: https://hub.docker.com/r/libreoffice/online/.

LibreOffice 6.4.6’s change log pages are available on TDF’s wiki: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/6.4.6/RC1 (changed in RC1) and https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/6.4.6/RC2 (changed in RC2).

All versions of LibreOffice are built with document conversion libraries from the Document Liberation Project: https://www.documentliberation.org.

Support LibreOffice

LibreOffice users are invited to join the community at https://ask.libreoffice.org, where they can get and provide user-to-user support. People willing to contribute their time and professional skills to the project can visit the dedicated website at https://whatcanidoforlibreoffice.org.

LibreOffice users, free software advocates and community members can provide financial support to The Document Foundation with a donation via PayPal, credit card or other tools at https://www.libreoffice.org/donate.

TDF Annual Report 2019

The Annual Report of The Document Foundation for the year 2019 is now available in PDF format from TDF Nextcloud in two different versions: low resolution (6.4MB) and high resolution (53.2MB). The annual report is based on the German version presented to the authorities in April.

The 54 page document has been entirely created with free open source software: written contents have obviously been developed with LibreOffice Writer (desktop) and collaboratively modified with LibreOffice Writer (online), charts have been created with LibreOffice Calc and prepared for publishing with LibreOffice Draw, drawings and tables have been developed or modified (from legacy PDF originals) with LibreOffice Draw, images have been prepared for publishing with GIMP, and the layout has been created with Scribus based on the existing templates.

All pictures are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 License, courtesy of TDF Members from Albania, Brasil, Czech Republic, Germany, Italy, Japan, Nepal, Paraguay, Taiwan, Uganda and Turkey. Stock photos are CC0 by Pixabay.

Lothar Becker, Chairman of TDF Board of Directors, has written in the welcome address:

What we have achieved so far goes beyond the most optimistic forecasts of the project’s founders back in 2010. After ten years, the challenge is still to further grow the project by leveraging the contributions of both volunteers and ecosystem members, engage new enthusiastic supporters in both areas, and increase the number of happy users worldwide. Our manifesto, the vision behind all our work, has to evolve in a new era of office productivity, with versions of LibreOffice on the desktop, in the cloud and on mobile devices!

I look forward to another great year for our global community, even with the current challenge of lockdowns in many locations, and the lack of in-person meetings and events because of the pandemic. I’m proud, honored and humbled to be part of this amazing project, and invite you all to keep on contributing to it in one of the many possible ways, and have fun together while achieving our common dream!

Announcement of LibreOffice 7.0

LibreOffice 7.0: the new major release of the best FOSS office suite ever is available on all OSes and platforms, and provides significant new features

Berlin, August 5, 2020 – The LibreOffice Project announces the availability of LibreOffice 7.0, a new major release providing significant new features: support for OpenDocument Format (ODF) 1.3; Skia graphics engine and Vulkan GPU-based acceleration for better performance; and carefully improved compatibility with DOCX, XLSX and PPTX files.

  • Support for ODF 1.3. OpenDocument, LibreOffice’s native open and standardised format for office documents, has recently been updated to version 1.3 as an OASIS Technical Committee Specification. The most important new features are digital signatures for documents and OpenPGP-based encryption of XML documents, with improvements in areas such as change tracking, and additional details in the description of elements in first pages, text, numbers and charts. The development of ODF 1.3 features has been funded by donations to The Document Foundation.
  • Skia graphics engine and Vulkan GPU-based acceleration. The Skia graphics engine has been implemented thanks to sponsorship by AMD, and is now the default on Windows, for faster performance. Skia is an open source 2D graphics library which provides common APIs that work across a variety of hardware and software platforms, and can be used for drawing text, shapes and images. Vulkan is a new-generation graphics and compute API with high-efficiency and cross-platform access to modern GPUs.
  • Better compatibility with DOCX, XLSX and PPTX files. DOCX now saves in native 2013/2016/2019 mode, instead of 2007 compatibility mode, to improve interoperability with multiple versions of MS Office, based on the same Microsoft approach. Export to XLSX files with sheet names longer than 31 characters is now possible, along with exporting checkboxes in XLSX. The “invalid content error” message was resolved when opening exported XLSX files with shapes. Finally, there were improvements to the PPTX import/export filter.
    LibreOffice offers the highest level of compatibility in the office suite arena, starting from native support for the OpenDocument Format (ODF) – with better security and interoperability features over proprietary formats – to almost perfect support for DOCX, XLSX and PPTX files. In addition, LibreOffice includes filters for many legacy document formats, and as such is the best interoperability tool in the market.

Summary of Other New Features [1]

GENERAL

  • New icon theme, the default on macOS: Sukapura
  • New shapes galleries: arrows, diagrams, icons and more…
  • Glow and soft edge effects for objects

WRITER

  • Navigator is easier to use, with more context menus
  • Semi-transparent text is now supported
  • Bookmarks can now be displayed in-line in text
  • Padded numbering in lists, for consistency
  • Better handling of quotation marks and apostrophes

CALC

  • New functions for non-volatile random number generation
  • Keyboard shortcut added for autosum

IMPRESS & DRAW

  • Semi-transparent text is supported here too
  • Subscripts now return to the default of 8%
  • PDFs larger than 500 cm can now be generated

LibreOffice Technology

LibreOffice 7.0’s new features have been developed by a large community of code contributors: 74% of commits are from developers employed by companies sitting in the Advisory Board, such as Collabora, Red Hat and CIB, plus several other organizations, and 26% are from individual volunteers.

In addition, there is a global community of individual volunteers taking care of other fundamental activities, such as quality assurance, software localization, user interface design and user experience, editing of help content and documentation, along with free software and open document standards advocacy.

A video summarizing the top new features in LibreOffice 7.0 is available on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XusjjbBm81s and also on PeerTube: https://tdf.io/lo70peertube

Products based on LibreOffice Technology are available for all major desktop operating systems (Windows, macOS, Linux and ChromeOS), for the cloud and for mobile platforms. They are released by The Document Foundation, and by ecosystem companies contributing to software development.

LibreOffice for End Users

LibreOffice 7.0 represents the bleeding edge in term of features for open source office suites, and as such is targeted at technology enthusiasts, early adopters and power users. The Document Foundation does not provide any technical support for users, although they can get help from other users on mailing lists and the Ask LibreOffice website: https://ask.libreoffice.org

For users whose main objective is personal productivity and therefore prefer a release that has undergone more testing and bug fixing over the new features, The Document Foundation maintains the LibreOffice 6.4 family, which includes some months of back-ported fixes. The current version is LibreOffice 6.4.5.

LibreOffice in Business

For enterprise-class deployments, TDF strongly recommends sourcing LibreOffice from one of the ecosystem partners, to get long-term supported releases, dedicated assistance, custom new features and other benefits, including SLA (Service Level Agreements): https://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-in-business/. The work done by ecosystem partners is an integral part of LibreOffice Technology.

For migrations from proprietary office suites and training, professional support should be sourced from certified professionals who provide value-added services which extend the reach of the community to the corporate world, and offer CIOs and IT managers a solution in line with proprietary offerings. Reference page: https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/professional-support/.

In fact, LibreOffice – thanks to its mature codebase, rich feature set, strong support for open standards, excellent compatibility and long-term support options from certified partners – represents the ideal solution for businesses that want to regain control of their data and free themselves from vendor lock-in.

Availability of LibreOffice 7.0

LibreOffice 7.0 is immediately available from the following link: https://www.libreoffice.org/download/. Minimum requirements for proprietary operating systems are Microsoft Windows 7 SP1 and Apple macOS 10.12. Builds of the latest LibreOffice Online source code are available as Docker images from TDF: https://hub.docker.com/r/libreoffice/online/

LibreOffice Technology based products for Android and iOS are listed here: https://www.libreoffice.org/download/android-and-ios/, while for App Stores and ChromeOS are listed here: https://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-from-microsoft-and-mac-app-stores/

LibreOffice users, free software advocates and community members can support The Document Foundation with a donation at https://www.libreoffice.org/donate

LibreOffice 7.0 is built with document conversion libraries from the Document Liberation Project: https://www.documentliberation.org

[1] A more comprehensive list of LibreOffice 7.0 new features is available on the Release Notes wiki page: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleaseNotes/7.0

Press Kit

The press kit with press release and high-resolution images and screenshots, is available here: https://tdf.io/lo70presskit

Update on marketing and communication plans for the LibreOffice 7.x series

From the Board of Directors at The Document Foundation, the non-profit entity behind LibreOffice:

Dear fellow Community members,

Time has now come to decide how to proceed with some of the proposed changes taken from the Marketing/Communication Plan for 2020-2025 with the regards of the 7.0 release, due in some weeks.

We really appreciated ideas and thoughts coming from our Community and we want to thank everyone who actively participated in the discussion, providing different points of views and sharing different scenarios, and proving themselves as passionate and caring members of the Community. Many contributions found on the board-discuss mailing list and/or via other channels are thoughtful, interesting and worthy of a much more profound discussion, in the common effort to overcome the challenge we have at hand: providing even better sustainability to the Project and its Community.

All those ideas, objections and insights will require more time to digest, merge and distill than the short time that separates us from the 7.0 release, the major release for the 10th anniversary of our beloved project, LibreOffice.

As such, the Board of Directors decided that the Marketing/Communication Plan for 2020-2025 has to undergo further investigations and refinements, that we hope to carry on with the support of Community members, with the goal of implementing in a future release some clear, discussed and agreed changes on branding and Marketing that will help improving the sustainability of the project without lessening or hindering the role of LibreOffice and its Community inside the free software panorama.

Because of the importance of the topic at hand and the need of a worthy and compelling discussion with the Community, we will provide a time plan in a few days as well as some guidelines, with the goal of streamlining the process and coming to some good conclusions in a quick and effective way.

As such, the 7.0 release of LibreOffice will not see any of the tagline/flavor text proposed inside the release candidate (RC) versions, the Marketing/Communication Plan for 2020-2025 or any of the alternatives proposed during the discussion, specifically inside the splash-screen, the start center and the about box; to explain it with other words, the modifications put in the RC versions with the regards of branding will be reverted to a previous state, so there will be seamless continuity from the 6.4 version to the 7.0.

As stated before, 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.

Yet again, we renew our encouragement to contribute actively in the discussion about the Marketing/Communication Plan for 2020-2025 in the next weeks, to allow for a more effective branding/Marketing ideas for the LibreOffice product and sustainability of its Community.

LibreOffice is celebrating its tenth birthday this year. We wouldn’t be where we are today without you, our worldwide amazing Community and all of its members, no matter their profession or background. Thank you truly, to all of you, for the passion, energy and creativity you put into this joint and thriving project. We’re looking forward to the next ten years to come!

20 Years of the FOSS Office Suite

Twenty years ago, on July 19, 2000, Sun Microsystems announced at O’Reilly Open Source Convention in Monterey, California, the release of the source code of its StarOffice Suite to the open source community. Thus began the history of the community that helped grow the OpenOffice project for nearly ten years, until the announcement of the acquisition of Sun by Oracle.

In September 2010, the same community created The Document Foundation – an organization promised by Sun’s press release, which was always postponed for some reason – to drive the LibreOffice project forward, and continue the story of the best open source office suite while remaining true to the original copyleft license.

Today, we are celebrating 20 years of activity, while preparing for the announcement of LibreOffice 7.0, which will be the first to support Open Document Format 1.3. The passion that we continue to put into all the things we do, including discussions about the future of LibreOffice, is a testament to a daily commitment that has never waned in the last 20 years, and will remain unchanged in the next 20.

HAPPY 20TH BIRTHDAY, FOSS OFFICE SUITE !!!

Announcing elections for the next TDF Membership Committee

Franklin Weng from The Document Foundation’s Board of Directors writes:

Dear Community,

we hereby officially announce the upcoming elections for the next Membership Committee of The Document Foundation.

As per § 12 II of our statutes (binding version in German and non-binding translation), the Membership Committee’s term lasts two years. The current Membership Committee started its duty on September 19, 2018. Therefore, the old Membership Committee remains in charge until the end of September 18, 2020, so the new MC will be in charge the day after that, which is September 19, 2020.

That upcoming term will then (regularly) end on September 18, 2022, so the next election of the Membership Committee will take place before.

As per § 6 III, only members of the Board of Trustees of The Document Foundation, as well as current members of any of its bodies, are eligible to be elected into the Membership Committee, and the election is overseen by the Board of Directors (§ 12 II).

The active electoral right is reserved to those who have been members of the Board of Trustees before this announcement (§ 12 II).

§ 6 III also states that members of the Board of Directors or their substitute members may not be members of the Membership Committee and vice versa.

There is one more notable limitation: Per § 8 IV of the statutes, a maximum of 1/3 members of the Membership Committee is allowed to work on an employment basis for the same company, organization, entities, affiliates or subdivisions.

Nomination of candidates fulfilling the above requirements, as well as self nomination is welcome. In total, at least five members of the Membership Committee are required, and given there are enough candidates, up to four substitute members can be elected based on the last board decision on this matter.

Re-election of current members of the Membership Committee is explicitly permitted (§ 12 II).

Please send nominations and self-nominations via e-mail to elections@documentfoundation.org (which reaches the Board of Directors in private) and also (!) to board-discuss@documentfoundation.org (which is a public mailing list).

We kindly ask nominees who would like to stand for elections to provide a statement of up to 75 words – longer statements will be cut off at the maximum – on their candidacy as continuous text (so no bullet lists or multiple paragraphs). In addition, you have to provide your full name, e-mail address and your corporate affiliation, if any, and please announce that you will provide information on all future changes as soon as possible. Specifically, it is necessary to indicate all information regarding § 8 IV of the statutes.

Discussions with the candidates and questions to them as well as questions about the elections should take place on the public board-discuss@documentfoundation.org mailing list. For details on how to use the mailing list, see https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/

Eligible voters will receive further details via e-mail prior to the start of elections, including a summary of the candidates, details on how to access the voting system, and instructions on how to independently verify the vote count. Please ensure we have your recent and correct e-mail address on file. For questions, you can reach the Board of Directors in private at elections@documentfoundation.org

Following the time line set forth in § 12 II, requiring a 45 day advance notice, we hereby announce the following time line for the elections:

(00:00 is beginning of the day, 24:00 is end of the day)

  1. (no later than) Friday, 2020-07-17: announcement of the election; and start of the nomination phase
  2. Thursday, 2020-08-27, 24:00 CEST/UTC+2: end of the nomination phase (one week before the election starts, as per § 12 II)
  3. Friday, 2020-09-04, 00:00 CEST/UTC+2: official start of the elections (at least 45 days after announcement of the election, as per § 12 II)
  4. Thursday, 2020-09-10, 24:00 CEST/UTC+2: end of the election
  5. Friday, 2020-09-11: announcement of the preliminary results and acknowledgement of role
  6. Saturday, 2020-09-12, 00:00 CEST/UTC+2: start of the challenging phase
  7. Tuesday, 2020-09-15, 24:00 CEST/UTC+2: end of the challenging phase
  8. afterwards: official announcement of the final results
  9. Saturday, 2020-09-19: new Membership Committee officially in charge, and election of a Chairperson from among its members

Be advised that the newly elected Membership Committee will only be in charge beginning from September 19, 2020.

Challenges to this election announcement with respect to the deadlines outlined have to happen no later than seven (7) days after this announcement, via e-mail to elections@documentfoundation.org (which reaches the Board of Directors in private).

Challenges to the preliminary results of the election have to happen until the deadline set forth above, via e-mail to elections@documentfoundation.org (which reaches the Board of Directors in private).

On behalf of the Board of Directors,
Franklin Weng

Press Releases

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