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Community Member Monday: Dante Doménech

(This image shows some LibreOffice community members from our map. If you’re not there, or want to get your location on the map, let us know!)

Today we’re talking to Dante Doménech, who’s helping to improve LibreOffice Math…

Hi Dante – tell us a bit about yourself!

I’m from Spain – the biggest city in the area is Valencia. I’m a physics student, and my hobbies are coding and reading about other scientific fields.

What are you doing in the LibreOffice project right now?

I’m working on updating the suite’s formula editor to be fully compatible with MathML. This would increase the strength of our formula editor, by backing it with a solid standard.

Additionally, I’m working on adding support for Kahan summation, for handling sums in LibreOffice Calc. This would increase the accuracy of statistical operations – in particular sum, average, standard deviation …

How did you originally get involved, and what was the experience like?

There was no way of using custom RGB colors in Math formulas – so I added the feature myself. It was easier than expected, because the people in the community directly pointed me to the code I was looking for.

Is there anything else you’d like to work on?

Once I’m finished with the formula editor, I may improve the collection of numerical calculus functions in Calc. I also may help with making a new Math guide.

Many thanks to Dante for all his contributions! Some of them will arrive in LibreOffice 7.2, due this summer. Stay tuned to the blog for more updates…

LibreOffice monthly recap: April 2021

Check out our summary of what happened in the LibreOffice community last month…

  • Meanwhile, the Council of the German city of Dortmund announced that it’s moving to free and open source software, where possible. This is great news: in the future, the city administration will have to justify why open source software cannot be used for every proprietary software application.

  • Our New Generation project, aimed at bringing new (and especially younger) contributors into the community, announced its first work: flyers to hand out in schools and universities. They’re available in many languages, and encourage younger people to not just use LibreOffice, but also get involved with it too.

  • Later in the month, we chatted with Necdet Yücel, who has been mentoring students and helping them to get involved with LibreOffice.

  • LibreOffice’s Macro Team wrote a progress report, listing documentation updates and code contributions from many community members. A big thanks to everyone who’s helping to improve LibreOffice’s macro support.

  • Our French community has been working on translations for LibreOffice user guides, so we thanked them with special Open Badges, containing custom metadata, recognising their achievements!

Keep in touch – follow us on Twitter, Facebook and Mastodon. Like what we do? Support our community with a donation – or join us and help to make LibreOffice even better for everyone!

Starting today: the Month of LibreOffice, May 2021!

If you’ve been using LibreOffice for a while, you may be wondering: who makes it? Well, the answer is: people like you! LibreOffice is a worldwide, community open source project – and many people who help to improve it, actually started out as regular users of the software.

So in May, we want to encourage you to get involved, join our community, and have fun. You can build up valuable skills for a future career – and you don’t need to be a programmer. There are many ways to help make LibreOffice awesome, as we’ll see in a moment.

And best of all: everyone who contributes to LibreOffice in May 2021 can claim a cool sticker pack, and has the chance to win extra LibreOffice merchandise such as mugs, hoodies, T-shirts, rucksacks and more (we’ll choose 10 participants at random at the end):

How to take part

So, let’s get started! There are many ways you can help out – and as mentioned, you don’t need to be a developer. For instance, you can be a…

  • Handy Helper, answering questions from users on Ask LibreOffice. We’re keeping an eye on that site so if you give someone useful advice, you can claim your shiny stickers.
  • First Responder, helping to confirm new bug reports: go to our Bugzilla page and look for new bugs. If you can recreate one, add a comment like “CONFIRMED on Windows 10 and LibreOffice 7.1.2”.
  • Drum Beater, spreading the word: tell everyone about LibreOffice on Twitter or Mastodon! Just say why you love it or what you’re using it for, add the #libreoffice hashtag, and at the end of the month you can claim your stickers.
  • Globetrotter, translating the user interface: LibreOffice is available in a wide range of languages, but its interface translations need to be kept up-to-date. Or maybe you want to translate the suite to a whole new language? Get involved here.
  • Docs Doctor, writing documentation: Whether you want to update the online help or add chapters to the handbooks, here’s where to start.

We’ll be updating this page every day with usernames across our various services, as people contribute. So dive in, get involved and help make LibreOffice better for millions of people around the world – and enjoy your sticker pack at the end as thanks from us! And who knows, maybe you’ll be lucky enough to win bonus merch as well…

Let’s go! We’ll be posting regular updates on this blog and our Mastodon and Twitter accounts over the next four weeks – stay tuned!

Open Badges for French Math Guide translators!

Thanks to localisation volunteers around the world, LibreOffice’s documentation is available in many languages. Today, we want to say thanks to the French community of translators, who localised the guide for LibreOffice Math 7.0 – great work, everyone!

Each translator gets an Open Badge from The Document Foundation, the non-profit behind LibreOffice. These are special, custom images with embedded metadata, confirming the contributions.

So, if you got a badge, feel free to share it on your blog, social media, Git page and other places! And indeed use it as proof of your abilities, when joining another project or looking for work! You can verify your badge here.

The recipients:

  • Sango BARKER-GILES
  • Maëlle GONZALEZ
  • Ornella NGUENANG LOWE
  • Célian LIMOUSIN
  • Baptiste LECUYER

Enjoy, and thanks again! Stay tuned to this blog for more Open Badges in coming months…

Community Member Monday: Necdet Yücel

Today we’re talking to Necdet Yücel from the Turkish LibreOffice community, who has been mentoring students and helping them to get involved with LibreOffice…

Tell us a bit about yourself!

I have been working as a lecturer at a university for more than 20 years. I teach programming and computer networks courses in the computer engineering department. My main area of interest is free software. My personal contribution to the free software world is mostly by making Turkish translations of free software – and I try to explain the free software world to my students, and guide them through it.

What are you doing in the LibreOffice project right now?

I’m one of the old translators of LibreOffice. I have translated hundreds of thousands of words, but I have no motivation to work on translations for a while.

Since 2015, the year Gülşah Köse become a LibreOffice developer, more than 15 of my students made contributions to LibreOffice. One of them is Mert Tümer’s, who is an active LibreOffice developer. Gülşah’s work was a major influence for LibreOffice developments in Turkey. I am very proud of my students, who started with her and continued until Gökçe Küler.

Do you have any tips/thoughts to share from bringing people into the community?

I think we have no choice but to direct students to free software in universities. Because it’s the only chance to to study how the programs work. Reading well-written code, changing it, compiling and redistributing it are the main requirements for being good developers. If we can explain them to students, they will become free software developers.

Is there anything else you plan to do in the project

The only thing I think I know well is mentoring students to free software. My short term plan is to continue translating and consulting students for free software.

Many thanks to Necdet for all his contributions! And to everyone reading this who uses LibreOffice and is interested in getting more involved: find out what you can do here. We’d love to have you on board, in our community!

LibreOffice flyers for schools and universities – Help us to hand them out!

Our New Generation project is encouraging new – and especially younger – people to join the LibreOffice community, improve the software, and gain valuable skills.

We’ve created a flyer that can be handed out in schools and universities, and here it is:

Now, we need your help to spread the word! If you study or work in a school or university, we can send you some flyers that you can give to interested people. We also have versions of the flyer in other languages, translated from the source file (Vegur font required) by our community:

Want some flyers?

We’re happy to send them to you – just send us an email with some details, such as the school/uni where you work or study, how many you want, and in which language. Then we’ll get them printed and posted to you.

Thanks for helping to spread the word! To learn more about LibreOffice New Generation and share your ideas, join our Telegram group.

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