Led by Peter Schofield, the LibreOffice Documentation Team is proud to announce the release of the LibreOffice Draw Guide 7.1, the ultimate guide for LibreOffice Draw.
LibreOffice Draw produces anything from a quick sketch to a complex plan, and gives the means to communicate with graphics and diagrams. With a maximum page size of 300cm by 300cm, Draw is an excellent package for producing technical drawings, brochures, posters and many other documents. Draw manipulates graphical objects, group them, crop them, use objects in 3D and much more.
“The Draw guide update is long due in the set of LibreOffice Guides and I am happy to have coordinated the effort to bring it to the community. LibreOffice Draw is a powerful vector drawing tool plenty of resources and the Guide is the most comprehensive text on the features. I hope the Draw community will thrive with this book.”
LibreOffice’s documentation team is driven by volunteers around the world. Today, we want to say a special thanks to members of the Brazilian Portuguese community, who’ve worked hard to translate and update user guides.
So we’re sending out Open Badges – special, customised badges with embedded metadata, describing their achievements. The badges can be verified using an external service, and are a great way to show off contributions and use as proof of participation.
So, here are the badge recipients – we’ve sent them out personally:
Vera Cavalcante – For her volunteer collaborations to produce an excellent Portuguese revision of the LibreOffice 7.x User Guides, and her long-time commitment to LibreOffice from the LibreOffice Magazine times.
Luciana Mota – For her valuable contributions to the translation of LibreOffice Help, and the Portuguese revision of the LibreOffice 7.x User Guides.
Marcia Buffon Machado – For her contribution to the Portuguese revision of the LibreOffice 7.x User Guides.
Felipe Viggiano – For his excellent and successful global coordination of the LibreOffice 7.0 and 7.1 User guides; team management; valuable addition to the other LibreOffice 7.x guides; and active collaboration with the Brazilian Documentation Team.
Tulio Macedo – For his active participation in the design of the online User Guides and revision of the LibreOffice 7.x User Guide in Brazilian Portuguese.
Rafael Lima – For his active contributions to ScriptForge library development, testing and documentation; his coordination of the LibreOffice 7.0 Math Guide, including the translation to Brazilian Portuguese; and his active translation of the LibreOffice Help to Brazilian Portuguese.
Timothy Brennan Jr. – For his active participation in the Portuguese revision of the LibreOffice 7.x User Guides.
Raul Pacheco – For his revisions of the translation of the LibreOffice 7.x User Guides to Brazilian Portuguese, and refactoring of the guide’s screenshots and graphics.
Jackson Junior – For his active participation in the Portuguese revision of the LibreOffice 7.x User Guides.
Huge thanks to all recipients – check your inbox for your badges!
Our LibreOffice New Generation project aims to bring new – and especially younger – contributors into the LibreOffice community. Earlier in the year, we created a flyer for schools and universities, and we’ve sent out printed versions to many people around the world.
Now, here’s an alternative design, thanks to Rizal Muttaqin and the Indonesian community! Click the image to get the original SVG file, if you want to make updates and translations (Vegur font required). And if you’d like some printed flyers to hand out in a school or university, drop us a line and let us know…
On June 10, LibreOffice 7.1.4 Community was made available for download, with 80 bugfixes and compatibility improvements. Thanks as always to our volunteers and certified developers for their work on it!
Hossein Nourikhah joined the TDF team as Developer Community Architect. He’ll help to onboard new developers in the project, give them code pointers, and assist them as they add new features. Welcome, Hossein!
Meanwhile, ODF 1.3 was announced as an OASIS standard. ODF (OpenDocument Format) is the native format of LibreOffice, and is a fully open standard that other productivity tools can implement.
The LibreOffice Conference 2021 is coming up in September – and you can design the logo for it! Here’s the one from 2020 (the joint conference organised with the openSUSE project) for inspiration…
LibreOffice’s Japanese community reported from their Kaigi 2021 Online event. Speakers from around Japan (and Asia) talked about their work and projects. Hopefully in-person events will be possible soon!
Companies in the LibreOffice ecosystem contribute valuable things to the project: new features, bugfixes, and long-term support options for enterprise users. At the end of the month, German company allotropia announced that it has joined TDF’s Advisory Board – it provides services, consulting and products around LibreOffice and related open source projects.
Daniel A. Rodriguez from the Hispanic LibreOffice community (and TDF’s Board of Directors) writes:
On Saturday June 26, we held the first virtual meeting of the Hispanic community this year. The activity was attended by several members, who are recognized for their participation and collaboration in the project.
We have opted for a new name for the event, although the same spirit as last year has been maintained. We understand that this modification is in line with what we do every day in the different areas we set up for this purpose: talk about LibreOffice.
In addition, we launched the Spanish channel on Fediverse.tv and the #libreoffice-es room on Libera.Chat. The interaction with the speakers was available through the integrated chat on Fediverse.tv, IRC (either with a client or through the web interface), or from the Hispanic group on Telegram.
As always, it was an open activity, free of charge and aimed at anyone interested in the office suite par excellence of free software. The event could be attended live from 16:00 UTC through the Spanish channel on Fediverse.tv.
Almost immediately after each presentation, the video was made available through the chosen platform. Fediverse.tv is based on PeerTube, which is an open source, decentralized, federated web application that uses peer-to-peer technology to reduce the load on individual servers when viewing videos.
I am a son and grandson of American missionaries who moved to Brazil in 1952. Since my mother was born here (my father was a seven month old baby), I was born automatically a Brazilian citizen – even though I was born in the USA. Being brought up in Brazil, I learned both American English in the home, and learned Brazilian Portuguese in parallel. I am fluent in both languages. Computers came into my life as my dad saw the importance and value of them in the eighties. Watching him hack an Apple IIe and a daisy wheel printer to get the tilde accent over the letter “y” was an adventure in and of itself.
I have been on a learning journey for most of my life. Everything I have learned is self-taught, including LibreOffice. My main activity in life is teaching in general. Teaching software to newbies such as the elderly, the underprivileged and young people is a passion I have. LibreOffice is an excellent starting point as it has virtually all the basic areas: text, images, markup languages, programming logic on a very simple scale with macros, databases etc., and much, much, more.
What are you working on in the LibreOffice project right now?
Right now, I am on the Brazilian translation and editing team. I am new, and am still learning how to organize myself better. The Brazilian team lead by Olivier Hallot is wonderful, fun, and at the same time, very serious about their work. Our Wednesday night meetings are in a fun and enjoyable environment – without losing the fine touch necessary for an editing team. I learn a lot from them just by listening to them.
Why did you decide to become a member of The Document Foundation?
Firstly, becoming a member of TDF is a way to begin to know other people, and, secondly, I believe becoming a member adds prestige to a curriculum vitae.
Both contact with people around the globe, and being part of something free, open and serious as TDF will open new doors for me to help “convert” people to LibreOffice, the ideals of TDF and open source software in general.
Anything else you plan to do in the future? What does LibreOffice really need?
There are two main things I would like to do with LibreOffice:
Create a teaching standard for IT.
Convince businesses to adopt more open standards via LibreOffice.
Participating in many different LibreOffice groups, I have noticed a major request for a change in LibreOffice’s appearance. It may seem trivial, but, many non-technical people make a decision of acceptance or rejection based on the look of something. I believe it would be wise to do an overhaul of the visuals.
Personally, I don’t pay too much attention to that since I focus on usability, but I am surrounded by people who reject many things simply because the look isn’t “modern”, “contemporary”, or “cool” enough.
I am 47 years old, so, my age may be a factor that adds into the way I interpret the visual aspects (meaning I don’t care too much about them). On the other hand, as the years go by, I notice that my way of thinking and doing things has somewhat solidified. An older generation can run the risk of not paying attention to the new generation and this generation (my children’s or younger) are a highly visual generation.
Many thanks to Tim for all his contributions! Everyone helping out in the LibreOffice project is welcome to apply for membership of TDF, and help us to steer our projects into the future 👍
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