Open Document Format (ODF) 1.2 published as International Standard 26300:2015 by ISO/IEC

odf12Berlin, July 17, 2015 – The Open Document Format for Office Applications (ODF) Version 1.2, the native file format of LibreOffice and many other applications, has been published as International Standard 26300:2015 by ISO/IEC. ODF defines a technical schema for office documents including text documents, spreadsheets, charts and graphical documents like drawings or presentations.

“ODF 1.2 is the native file format of LibreOffice. Today, ODF is the best choice for interoperability, because it is widely adopted by applications, and is respected by applications in every area”, says Thorsten Behrens, Chairman of The Document Foundation. “ODF makes interoperability a reality, and transforms the use of proprietary document formats into a relic of the past. In the future, people will tell stories about incompatible document formats between two releases of proprietary office suites, as a bygone problem”.

ODF is developed by the OASIS consortium. The current version of the standard was published in 2011, and then was submitted to ISO/IEC in 2014. The standard is available – in three parts: schema, formula definition and packages – from the repository of Publicly Available Standards as a free download from the following links:

  1. Schema: http://standards.iso.org/ittf/PubliclyAvailableStandards/c066363_ISO_IEC_26300-1_2015.zip

  2. Formula Definition: http://standards.iso.org/ittf/PubliclyAvailableStandards/c066375_ISO_IEC_26300-2_2015.zip

  3. Packages: http://standards.iso.org/ittf/PubliclyAvailableStandards/c066376_ISO_IEC_26300-3_2015.zip

The standard is also available from the OASIS ODF TC website, from the page at the following address: http://docs.oasis-open.org/office/v1.2/OpenDocument-v1.2.html.

ODF 1.2 is supported by all the leading office suites, and by a large number of other applications. It has been adopted by the UK Cabinet Office as the reference for all documents exchanged with the UK Government, and is currently proposed as the reference standard by the Référentiel Général d’Interopérabilité 1.9.9 of the French Government. In addition, ODF 1.2 has been adopted by many European public administrations. In Brasil, ODF is part of the Progranma do Governo Eletrônico (e-PING) and can be accessed at this link: http://eping.governoeletronico.gov.br/#p2s3.

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Registration for the LibreOffice Conference is now open

Berlin, Juli 1st, 2015 – Registration for the LibreOffice Conference, which will be hosted by the Danish city of Aarhus from September 23 to September 25, 2015, is now open at: http://conference.libreoffice.org/2015/registration/.

Call for Papers is still open until July 15, 2015. Details on the tracks and the call for papers are available at: http://conference.libreoffice.org/2015/call-for-papers/. Tracks are about Development, Quality Assurance, Localization, Documentation and Native Language Projects, Ease of Use, Design and Accessibility, Migrations and Deployments, Certifications and Best Practices, ODF, Document Liberation and Interoperability, and Building a Business around LibreOffice.

The conference website (http://conference.libreoffice.org/) is also including some practical info (http://conference.libreoffice.org/2015/practical-info/) about VISA, transportation and accommodation.

Of course, do not forget to pay a visit to the sponsors who have made the event possible with their generous support: CIB, Collabora, Google, Magenta and RedHat (http://conference.libreoffice.org/2015/our-sponsors/).

The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 4.4.4

Berlin, June 30, 2015 – The Document Foundation (TDF) announces LibreOffice 4.4.4, the fourth minor release of the LibreOffice 4.4 family, with over 70 fixes over LibreOffice 4.4.3. New features introduced by LibreOffice 4.4 are listed on this wiki page: .

The Document Foundation suggests to deploy LibreOffice in enterprises and large organizations with the backing of professional support by certified people (a list is available at: http://www.documentfoundation.org/certification/).

People interested in technical details about the release can access the change log here: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/4.4.4/RC1 (fixed in RC1), https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/4.4.4/RC2 (fixed in RC2) and https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/4.4.4/RC3 (fixed in RC3).

Get involved: LibreOffice 5.0 and LibreOffice Conference

The LibreOffice community is actively working at next major release, LibreOffice 5.0, expected in early August 2015. After two successful bug hunting sessions, developers are putting the finishing touches to the software. Preliminary release notes are available at: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleaseNotes/5.0.

Also, the Call for Paper for LibreOffice Conference 2015, which will be hosted by the Danish city of Aarhus from September 23 to September 25, is open until July 15, with further details on the website: http://conference.libreoffice.org/2015/call-for-papers/.

The LibreOffice community is growing, and these are exceptional opportunities to join the fun together with over 900 developers who have contributed to the code and over 3,000 volunteers who have localized the suite, chased the bugs, written the manuals, spoken at conferences, and advocated LibreOffice both at global and local levels.

Download LibreOffice

LibreOffice 4.4.4 is immediately available for download from the following link: http://www.libreoffice.org/download/.

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

Second bug hunting session for LibreOffice 5.0

Berlin, June 9, 2015 – The LibreOffice community is getting ready for the next major release – planned for late July or early August – with a second bug hunting session focused on new features, including Windows 10 compatibility, and fixes for bugs and regressions. The session will last 3 full days, from June 19 to June 21, 2015, and check the first release candidate of LibreOffice 5.0.

On those dates, mentors will be available from 08AM UTC to 10PM UTC to help less experienced volunteers to triage bugs, on the QA IRC channel and via email on the QA mailing list.

Those who cannot join during the bug hunting session are always welcome to help chasing bugs and regressions when they have time.

Builds of LibreOffice 5.0.0 RC1 will be available until early July from this link: http://dev-builds.libreoffice.org/pre-releases/. Further information are available here: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/BugHunting_Session_5.0.0_RC1.

Preliminary release notes for LibreOffice 5.0.0 are available on the wiki at the following link: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleaseNotes/5.0.

Read about The Document Foundation achievements in 2014: download the Annual Report!

TDF ReportThe Document Foundation (TDF) is proud to announce its 2014 Annual Report, which can be downloaded from the following link: http://tdf.io/report2014 (3.2 MB PDF). The version with HD images can be downloaded from http://tdf.io/report2014hq (15.9 MB PDF).

TDF Annual Report starts with a Review of 2014, with highlights about TDF and LibreOffice, and a summary of financials and budget.

Community, Projects & Events covers the LibreOffice Conference 2014 in Bern, Certification, Website and QA, Hackfests in Brussels, Gran Canaria, Paris, Boston and Tolouse, Native-Language Projects, Infrastructure, Documentation, Marketing and Design.

Software, Development & Code reports about the activities of the Engineering Steering Committee, LibreOffice Development, the Document Liberation Project and LibreOffice on Android.

The last section focuses on People, starting with Top Contributors, followed by TDF Staff, the Board of Directors and the Membership Committee, the Board of Trustees, or the body of TDF Members, and the Advisory Board.

To allow the widest distribution of the document, this is released with a CC BY 3.0 DE License, unless otherwise noted, to TDF Members and free software advocates worldwide.

[The German version of TDF Annual Report is available from http://tdf.io/bericht2014].

The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice Viewer for Android

Berlin, May 28, 2015 – LibreOffice, the best free office suite on the desktop, is available on Android as a native application for viewing ODF documents. The app can be installed from Google Play Store at http://tdf.io/androidviewer. Direct download of the APK and download from other app stores will be made available at http://www.libreoffice.org/download/android-viewer.

LibreOffice Viewer also offers basic editing capabilities, like modifying words in existing paragraphs and changing font styles such as bold and italics.

Editing is still an experimental feature which has to be enabled separately in the settings, and is not stable enough for mission critical tasks. It will be enhanced to a fully fledged editing solution in the future, with the help of our steadily growing developer community. The editing features provided in the current release have been developed thanks to donations to The Document Foundation.

Feedback and bug reports are very welcome, to help developers improve the quality of the application on its way to a fully-fledged editor. Users are invited to report problems, using the bug tracker and attaching files that have triggered the issue at https://bugs.documentfoundation.org.

LibreOffice Viewer is using the same engine as LibreOffice for Windows, OS X and Linux. This, combined with a new front-end based on Firefox for Android, reads documents similarly to LibreOffice on the desktop.

LibreOffice Viewer has been developed by Collabora and Igalia, backed by Smoose, with contributions from Google Summer of Code students, together with The Document Foundation and the LibreOffice community. SUSE has provided a key foundation of cross platform support, and Mozilla Corporation several core components.