Category: Community

Today we’re chatting with Juan C. Sanz, who helps out in many LibreOffice projects: documentation, translations, user help and more…

Tell us a bit about yourself!

I live in the city of Logroño, in the autonomous community of La Rioja (famous for its wines), in the north of Spain. Although I like reading a lot, my main passion is computers in general.

Almost all the time I have been working as a helicopter engineer, but due to my passion, while I was working, I studied to get a degree in Computer Science (Programming) and I was working as a programmer for a while without leaving my main job with helicopters.

When did you join the LibreOffice community, and how was the experience?

I like to say that I have been collaborating with LibreOffice since before LibreOffice existed and it is really true, how is that possible?

Well, my history with LibreOffice started, like many of us, in OpenOffice.

When I discovered the existence of OpenOffice I loved both the program and the possibility of getting it for free (then I didn’t know about FLOSS – I thought only about “gratis”). But at the same time, I realized that there was no documentation available in Spanish. While searching, I came across that phrase, which I don’t remember exactly, but it says something like “if you can’t find what you want, collaborate to make it”, so I joined the OpenOffice documentation team at ODFAuthors and there, together with a mini-team (I don’t think there were more than a couple of active collaborators at that time) I started translating the Getting Started Guide into Spanish.

I don’t know if it was by chance or because there was movement, but soon some more contributors joined and we managed to translate and publish the complete guide.

Shortly after finishing the Getting Started Guide, convulsive times came and ended with the fork that gave birth to LibreOffice.

The few of us who were in the Spanish documentation team at that time, decided that, for the time, we would collaborate with both branches and our first work for LibreOffice was to rebrand the OpenOffice guide to adapt it to LibreOffice, that is, we took advantage of all the previous work in OpenOffice for the first LibreOffice guide in Spanish. That’s why I say that I worked (we worked) on LibreOffice before it existed.

Since those times I haven’t stopped collaborating in the documentation team, but, like almost everyone, I have collaborated in other places, like helping to translate the user interface, the help for users in Ask or Telegram, the wiki, I have even submitted a patch! (Although my skills as a programmer are already quite outdated.)

And here I am, collaborating, hopefully for a long time!

Anything else you plan to do in the future? What does LibreOffice really need?

In all this time that I have been collaborating with LibreOffice, I have missed more collaboration with the project. Although there are many contributors in all fields, I think they are not enough. In my opinion, all of us who use free software should collaborate in its development by contributing our skills (or also economically), but personal collaboration seems to me essential for the improvement and dissemination of the project.

Many thanks to Juan for all his contributions! All LibreOffice users are welcome to get involved, learn new skills – and make LibreOffice even better for millions of users!

Today we’re talking to Peter Schofield from LibreOffice’s documentation community…

Tell us a bit about yourself!

I am Yorkshire bred and born, which was a very long time ago. Left home at 16 to join the Royal Air Force. Served for almost 19 years as an Aircraft Technician, which is where my engineering knowledge started.

Became interested in Technical Writing in the early 80s and became qualified as a Technical Writer in 1985. This has enabled me to work in aviation, defence, mining, plant machinery, construction, electronics, telecommunications, computer peripherals and software. This did involve working in several countries, which has given me a very broad outlook on life.

Now official retired from paid work and have settled down in Poland with my lovely Polish wife.

How did you get involved in LibreOffice?

First came across an early version of LibreOffice in the 90s when I started using Star Office, which then became OpenOffice. I have always been interested in open software being freely available to users to help them save money, not having having to pay the big corporations.

I took to LibreOffice when I retired and realised how good it is, so I decided to help the project. This gave me the chance to create user guides that LibreOffice users could easily understand (I hope). I am now in charge of the Impress and Draw user guides and starting to upgrade both of them to LibreOffice 7.4.

What else are you planning to work on?

My plans for the future is continue being a willing volunteer on the LibreOffice Documentation Team with the hope that I can improve usability of the user guides for the majority of users. I do believe that some parts of the LibreOffice user guides do need improvement because of the poor language used. With this in mind, I am now updating the template to help improve the quality of the user guides. This means that there are hints and ideas in the template on how to improve ones writing.

Eventually I would like to see all the user guides using an easy to understand English. This means it would make the text easier to translate into the languages LibreOffice is available in, and make the English easier to understand for users where English is not their first language. This idea is already in practice with several companies throughout the world. These companies use one of the versions of Simplified English that are available.

Many thanks to Peter for all his help! Everyone is welcome to join the Documentation Team and build up skills for a potential career in technical writing…