FOSDEM Call for Papers: Open Document Editors DevRoom

fosdemFOSDEM is one of the largest gatherings of Free Software contributors in the world and happens each year in Brussels (Belgium) at the ULB Campus Solbosch. In 2017, it will be held on Saturday, February 4, and Sunday, February 5.

As usual, the Open Document Editors DevRoom will be jointly organized by Apache OpenOffice and LibreOffice, on Saturday, February 4, in room 4.401 in Building K (from 10:30AM to 6:30PM). The shared devroom gives every project in this area a chance to present ODF related developments and innovations.

We are now inviting proposals for talks about Open Document Editors or the ODF document format, on topics such as code, extensions, localization, QA, UX, tools and adoption related cases. This is a unique opportunity to show new ideas and developments to a wide technical audience.

Length of talks should be limited to a maximum of 30 minutes, as we would like to have questions after each presentation, and to fit as many presenters as possible in the schedule. Exceptions must be explicitly requested and justified. You may be assigned LESS time than you request.

All submissions have to be made in the Pentabarf event planning tool: https://penta.fosdem.org/submission/FOSDEM17.

While filing your proposal, please provide the title of your talk, a short abstract (one or two paragraphs), some information about yourself (name, bio and photo, but please do remember that your profile might be already stored at Pentabarf).

To submit your talk, click on “Create Event”, then make sure to select the “Open Document Editors” devroom as the “Track”. Otherwise, your talk will not be even considered for any devroom at all.

If you already have a Pentabarf account from a previous year, even if your talk was not accepted, please reuse it. Create an account if, and only if, you don’t have one from a previous year. If you have any issues with Pentabarf, please contact ode-devroom-manager@fosdem.org.

The deadline is Monday, December 5th, 2016. Accepted speakers will be notified by Sunday, December 11th, 2016. The DevRoom schedule will be published on the same day.

Recording Permission

The talks in the Open Document Editors DevRoom will be audio and video recorded, and possibly streamed live too.

In the “Submission notes” field, please indicate that you agree that your presentation will be licensed under the CC-BY-SA-4.0 or CC-BY-4.0 license and that you agree to have your presentation recorded. For example: “If my speech is accepted for FOSDEM, I hereby agree to license all recordings, slides, and other associated materials under the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 4.0 International License. Sincerely, Name”.

Announcement of LibreOffice 5.2.3

noun_21602_ccBerlin, November 3, 2016 – The Document Foundation (TDF) announces the availability of LibreOffice 5.2.3 “fresh”, the third minor release of the LibreOffice 5.2 family, representing the bleeding edge in term of features and as such targeted at technology enthusiasts, early adopters and power users.

For all other users and especially for enterprise deployments, TDF suggests LibreOffice 5.1.6still”, with the backing of professional support by certified people (a list is available at: http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/professional-support/).

People interested in technical details about the release can access the change log here: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/5.2.3/RC1 (fixed in RC1), https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/5.2.3/RC2 (fixed in RC2), and https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/5.2.3/RC3 (fixed in RC3).

Road to LibreOffice 5.3

With the availability of the LibreOffice 5.3 Alpha, the project has entered the road to LibreOffice 5.3, which will be announced at the end of January 2017. The next step in the process will be the release of LibreOffice 5.3 Beta around the end of November, and the announcement of the user interface concept.

Users can start learning about the new exciting features on LibreOffice 5.3 Release Notes page (https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleaseNotes/5.3). The page will be updated for the next month, when the feature set will be frozen for the final quality assurance activity and the preparation of launch materials.

Download LibreOffice

LibreOffice 5.2.3 is immediately available for download from the following link: http://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-fresh/.

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

Several companies sitting in TDF Advisory Board (http://www.documentfoundation.org/governance/advisory-board/) are providing either value added Long Term Supported versions of LibreOffice or consultancy services for migrations and trainings, based on best practices distilled by The Document Foundation.

LibreOffice 5.1.6 available for download

noun_666442_ccBerlin, October 27, 2016 – The Document Foundation (TDF) announces LibreOffice 5.1.6, the sixth minor release of the LibreOffice 5.1 family launched in January 2016, targeted at individual users and enterprise deployments. Users of previous LibreOffice releases should start planning the update to the new version.

For enterprise deployments, The Document Foundation suggests the backing of professional support by certified developers, migrators and trainers (the full list is available at: http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/professional-support/).

People interested in technical details about the release can access the change log here: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/5.1.6/RC1 (fixed in RC1) and https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/5.1.6/RC2 (fixed in RC2).

Download LibreOffice

LibreOffice 5.1.6 is immediately available for download from the following link: http://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-still/.

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

Several companies sitting on TDF Advisory Board (http://www.documentfoundation.org/governance/advisory-board/) are providing either value added Long Term Supported versions of LibreOffice or consultancy services for migrations and trainings, based on best practices detailed by The Document Foundation.

First LibreOffice 5.3 BugHunting Session

noun_83830_ccLibreOffice is approaching the 5.3 release season with the first bug hunting session, on Friday, October 21, 2016. Tests will be performed on the Alpha version of LibreOffice 5.3, which will be available on the pre-releases server (http://dev-builds.libreoffice.org/pre-releases/) a few days before the event. Builds will be available for Linux (DEB and RPM), MacOS and Windows, and will run in parallel with the actual installation.

Mentors will be available on October 21, 2016, from 8AM UTC to 10PM UTC. Of course, hunting bugs will be possible also on other days, as the builds of this particular Alpha release (LibreOffice 5.3.0 Alpha) will be available until the end of November.

During the day there will be two dedicated sessions: the first to chase bugs on the four main LibreOffice modules – Writer, Calc, Impress and Draw – between 3PM UTC and 5PM UTC, and the second to test the top 10 features between 5PM UTC and 7PM UTC. The list of the top 10 features will be decided during the week before the session, and will be added to the wiki page.

During the dedicated sessions, we will concentrate all efforts to chase and reproduce the bugs, in order to confirm and file them in a more comprehensive way. Of course, the more comprehensive will be the bug report, the easier will be for the developers to solve the bugs in time for the final release.

As usual, there is a page on the wiki (https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/QA/BugHuntingSession/5.3.0Alpha) with all the details about the bug hunting session. You should visit the page before October 21, 2016, as further details will be added while getting closer to the date of the event.

TDF Presentation Gallery

downloadWe have created a number of slide decks which can be re-used by community members as a basis for their presentations at events. For the time being, slide decks are based on the old 4:3 format, as this is still the most common, but in the future will also be available in the new 16:9 format. Needless to say, the file format is ODP, and fonts are those installed by LibreOffice.

Slide decks will be updated regularly, and the date will be featured on the wiki page (at the moment, the date is September 30, 2016 for all slide decks). If you plan to use a slide deck and you feel that some slides are outdated (or should be updated), please ask on LibreOffice marketing mailing list with the subject “Slide Decks” (marketing@global.libreoffice.org).

The gallery is available on TDF wiki at the following address: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Gallery_Presentations.

LibreOffice 5.2.2 available for download

birthday_banner_smallBerlin, September 29, 2016 – Just one day after the project 6th anniversary (https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2016/09/28/happy-6th-birthday-libreoffice/), The Document Foundation (TDF) announces the availability of LibreOffice 5.2.2, the second minor release of the LibreOffice 5.2 family.

LibreOffice 5.2.2, targeted at technology enthusiasts, early adopters and power users, provides a number of fixes over the major release announced in August. For all other users and enterprise deployments, TDF suggests LibreOffice 5.1.5 “still”, with the backing of professional support by certified people (a list is available at: http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/professional-support/).

A summary of the most significant new features of the LibreOffice 5.2 family is available on the website: http://www.libreoffice.org/discover/new-features/.

People interested in technical details about the release can access the change log here: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/5.2.2/RC1 (fixed in RC1) and https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/5.2.2/RC2 (fixed in RC2).

Download LibreOffice

LibreOffice 5.2.2 is immediately available for download from the following link: http://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-fresh/.

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

Several companies sitting in TDF Advisory Board (http://www.documentfoundation.org/governance/advisory-board/) are providing either value added Long Term Supported versions of LibreOffice or consultancy services for migrations and trainings, based on best practices distilled by The Document Foundation.