Now that the LibreOffice Conference has finished, we’re back to our regular contributor interviews. This week it’s the turn of Regina Henschel who helps LibreOffice users by answering questions, testing new features and working on bug reports.
What is your IRC nickname / location / social media page?
I live in Dortmund (Germany). You can best contact me via the mailing lists. I don’t have any account on Twitter or Facebook or similar, and I seldom use IRC (nickname pppregin).
Do you work for a LibreOffice-related company or just contribute in
your spare time?
I do all of my work for LibreOffice in my spare time. In my daily job I’m teacher of mathematics.
How did you get involved with LibreOffice?
That is a wide range: I’m member of the Open Document Format Technical Committee (ODF TC), I answer questions on ask.libreoffice.org and on the mailing lists, I discuss and test new features and work on Bugzilla issues, and sometimes I contribute code.
What areas of the project do you normally work on? Anything else you want to tackle?
Currently I watch the development of some new features coming in from the Google Summer of Code, including testing, and I need a lot of my time for to prepare me for ODF TC meetings.
I would like to do much more coding. But especially in Draw, which I like most, the code is complicated and I don’t have enough spare time to learn it quickly. My special interest is in the 3D features of Draw.
What was your initial experience of contributing to LibreOffice like?
I started with user support for StarOffice in Usenet newsgroups more than sixteen years ago, and have got a lot of product experience with OpenOffice.org. A really surprising aspect of LibreOffice was how much easier it has become to build on Windows. Using Gerrit was unfamiliar for me, but help on IRC or mailing list was always there.
What areas of LibreOffice do you think need to be improved?
We need more volunteers to look after the increasing amount of users, and manage the growth of questions and bug reports. Also, we need more testers for new features and people to document user interface changes and new features.
Which is your preferred text editor? And why?
A lot of my work is creating test files and examining file formats. For that I use XML Notepad 2007, where I can work directly on the nodes, without need for all the quotes and angle brackets, which are needed in a simple editor. And I use Notepad++. It has syntax highlighting for XML and C++ (among lot of other languages), folding, it reformats XML, and makes diffs. Sometimes I use PSPad, mostly as a notepad, because of its quick starting, or I use its HexViewer. That is all on Windows, as you might have noticed.
What do you do when you’re not working on LibreOffice?
Besides my daily job, all the other time goes to my family.
Thanks Regina! And thanks indeed to our whole community – if you’re reading this and want to get involved, join us today and help to make LibreOffice even better.
LibreOffice has a time-based release schedule (
Let’s take the just-released LibreOffice 5.2 as an example of the many activities which have been carried out during five full months – from early March to early August – by several members of the team, and a very large number of community members in every geography.
At the same time, the Quality Assurance team – with volunteers active in many geographies on many different language version of the office suite – start testing nightly builds to discover bugs and regressions over previous LibreOffice releases. As soon as Alphas and Betas are available, Quality Assurance volunteers organize global bug hunting sessions (
At the same time, the launch documents go from draft to final: a press release, a technical backgrounder for the classification feature, the image visually explaining classification levels, an infographics for the top feature list, and a slide deck which is going to be used for press briefings.
