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…
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!
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:
Spanish (Daniel Armando Rodriguez and Ever Medina)
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.
Today we’re talking to Gökçe Kuler from our Turkish LibreOffice community…
Tell us a bit about yourself!
I’m from Aydın, Turkey. Currently I’m studying in my final years at the Computer Engineering department of Çanakkale Onsekiz Mart University. I’m interested in free software – and enjoy working with free software projects and learning new things aboutthemit. I met free software when I started university via my advisor Necdet Yücel.
I like playing the guitar and the kalimba. Also, I recently started painting with acrylic paints. I’m vegetarian, and actively participate in animal protection and gender equality projects.
You recently solved your first bug in LibreOffice. How did that go?
In our final years at the university, we work on a project together with an advisor. My advisor Necdet Yücel offered to work on LibreOffice as a graduation project, and then Gülşah Köse mentored me to get involved.
Firstly, I prepared my working environment – then we decided to work on an unit test instead of a bug. I completed it, and sent it to Gerrit. I was very happy when I got my first “merged” email. After that, we selected a new bug, about a dialog. I solved it too and wrote a blog post. It’s a really good feeling, to contribute to such a big free software project.
Recently, I’ve started working on a new bug in Impress and progressing with it. I will continue contributing to LibreOffice.
Do you have any tips for other people new LibreOffice contributors?
Instead of starting with a complex bug, I suggest starting with small things like a missing unit test, or they can even fix a typo. In this process, we get the opportunity to learn about LibreOffice development tools like Git, Gerrit, Jenkins etc…
In this way, the mechanisms in the project can be better understood, and self-confidence is gained to solve a bug. In addition, LibreOffice is a huge project and I think it is very important to read the project code in detail to understand what we work on.
Thanks to Gökçe for all her contributions to LibreOffice! Anyone with C++ knowledge can dive in and explore our codebase. There’s lots to learn, but we’re making it easier to get involved with Easy Hacks and channels for communication. Join us!
The LibreOffice documentation team is happy to announce the immediate availability of the Writer Guide 7.1
The book is a complete guide for users who want to explore the best resources of LibreOffice Writer, the word processor of the LibreOffice suite. Covering advanced topics such as styles, illustrations, indexes and table of contents, master documents, form design, document automation and more, this guide will bring your word processing skills to a professional level.
The Writer Guide 7.1 is a joint effort of Jean Weber and Kees Kriek, who reviewed and updated The LibreOffice 6.4 Writer Guide with the new features of LibreOffice 7.1, released last February.
“I enjoy writing user documentation for LibreOffice because it gives me an excuse to learn about new and improved features that I might otherwise not know about. The team members are good to work with, friendly and helpful. I especially want to thank Kees Kriek for reviewing all the chapters of this book.”
The Brazilian LibreOffice community is pleased to announce availability of the LibreOffice 7.0 Getting Started Guide in Brazilian Portuguese.
Guia de Introdução 7.0
The guide is intended for Portuguese speaking users who wants to begin their first contact with LibreOffice and needs a manual that expounds all the software’s features and allows them to immediately start some sophisticated tasks.
The Getting Started Guide describes the important concepts that guided the development of LibreOffice and presents each of its modules: spreadsheets (Calc), presentations (Impress), vector drawings (Draw), texts (Writer), equations (Math), and databases (Base). In addition to these modules, there are several chapters describing important concepts common to all modules such as styles, printing, electronic signature, macros, exporting in various formats, redacting, and document classification.
Making the Getting Started Guide available is the teamwork of Brazilians LibreOffice enthusiasts who have gone to great lengths to produce a comprehensive and accessible guide. The guide is a translation of the guide from English, this time using automatic translation, but with a thorough review of the result by the team, who put in great effort to confirm the concepts presented, but also to improve the Portuguese generated by the automatic translation. The next editions of the Getting Started Guide will be done without translation, but by writing directly in Portuguese the new information introduced in the new versions of LibreOffice.
Vera Cavalcante
“I have dedicated myself intensely in the LibreOffice community, putting effort into the LibreOffice Magazine project of which I was one of the publishers. This edition of the Getting Started Guide was a great opportunity to get back to interacting with LibreOffice and meet new people with the same interest, in a voluntary work context.”, stated Vera Cavalcante, a member of the Brazilian LibreOffice community. “I am very meticulous, and helped correct some translations and (a few) inconsistencies in the software during the process of revising the Guide. In the end, we have better software ”, she added.
Jackson Cavalcanti Jr.
“Joining the translation and proofreading team for the Getting Started Guide was an opportunity to get back to interacting with the LibreOffice community, returning to my participation I had started years ago. The opportunity was very rewarding, not only for self-improvement in the use of the LibreOffice suite but also to learn a lot about document writing.”, said Jackson Cavalcanti Jr. “I used the opportunity to instigate debates about the terms used and the technical vocabulary in Brazilian Portuguese, which allowed me to review some terms used in the software and improve the translation of the LibreOffice suite.” he added.
Timothy Brennan Jr.
“I participated as a novice in the effort of the Getting Started Guide and could see the seriousness of the work and the good spirit of collaboration in the Brazilian team. It has been a teamwork lesson where questions were answered promptly and, at the same time, I learned a lot about elaborating complex documents.”, said Timothy Brennan Jr., a team member. “I have dedicated myself to reviewing some chapters of the Getting Started Guide (Chapters 8, Getting Started with Base and, 10, Print, Export, Send, and Sign). Now I consider myself an expert in LibreOffice as well as any other office suite. It has also been an important professional gain”.
Flávio Schefer
“I am also new to free software projects and revieweing the GettingStarted Guide was an opportunity to team up with the Brazilian team and acquire knowledge,” said Flávio Schefer. “I was in a career transition and the knowledge and practices acquired in the team’s work was important during this period”, he added.
Felipe Viggiano, Raul Pacheco da Silva, Túlio Macedo and Olivier Hallot also participated in the effort.
Felipe Viggiano, Raul Pacheco da Silva, Túlio Macedo e Olivier Hallot
