2020 is going to be a milestone year for the LibreOffice community, as we are going to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the LibreOffice project on September 28 – the date of the official announcement, with a press release distributed to FOSS media – and the 20th anniversary of the free office suite on July 19 – the date of the announcement issued by Sun for the release of StarOffice source code to the open source community.
It will be a year long celebration. To start it in the right way, four images which can be reused by LibreOffice community members to share their commitment to FOSS and to the best free office suite ever (background images are from Pixabay, and can be used without attribution). By right clicking on the images, it will be possible to download a larger version (2500 pixel wide).
Happy New Year 2020 to all LibreOffice community members and users worldwide.
For our final Community Member Monday of 2019, we talk to Saikeo Kavhanxay, who is helping with the Lao language localisation of LibreOffice…
First, tell us a bit about yourself!
I live in Vientiane, Laos. I am working as a full-time network engineer. My hobbys are reading books, surfing the internet and learning how to code. I also dedicate my free time to the open source community and I have contributed to other open source projects as well.
What are you working on in LibreOffice at the moment?
Currently I am contributing to LibreOffice localization for my locale. In the future I also plan to contribute to other parts of the project as well, like filing bugs, development and assisting people in my community who have questions about using LibreOffice.
How did you get involved in the project?
I’ve been using LibreOffice for a long time, and then I realised that I want to contribute something back, so I decided to contact my locale and the LibreOffice localization community. After that, I got an opportunity to contribute to LibreOffice. I think is quite easy to get involved in the project – you can reach to your locale or the LibreOffice localization team and then they will get back to you shortly.
What do you think LibreOffice needs in the future?
To avoid license issues, and due to limited budgets, some organisations in my country use LibreOffice. So, I think the LibreOffice community in Southeast Asia needs to expand more, and work on LibreOffice Online.
Thanks to Saikeo and the Lao localisation team for their great work! Everyone is welcome to join our friendly community and give us a hand with design, documentation, QA, and many other aspects of the software. It’s a great way to build up experience, meet new people and have fun!
LibreOffice was announced on September 28, 2010, with a positive feedback from tech and business media all over the world (above, two significant titles from eWeek and Linux Gizmos). To celebrate the event, The Document Foundation has organized a year long anniversary project, starting at FOSDEM in Brussels on February 1/2 and ending at POSS in Paris in early December 2020.
LibreOffice community members will attend as many FOSS events as possible, carrying stickers and swag with the anniversary logo. The author is Rania Amina from Indonesia, a member of the LibreOffice community who has already contributed with logos and 2D animations to the success of LibreOffice Indonesia Conference in 2018.
Rania Amina will attend FOSDEM in Brussels, and will also talk about the LibreOffice Theme Changer at the Open Document Editors DevRoom.
So far, in addition to FOSDEM and POSS, events have been confirmed in Nigeria (Open Source Africa), Kosovo (FLOSSK), Croatia (DORS/CLUC), Albania (OSCAL), France (Libre Graphics Meeting and OW2con), Taiwan (COSCUP and LibreOffice Asia Conference), India (Open Source India), Germany (Chemnitzer Linux-Tage, FrOSCon and the LibreOffice Conference), US (All Things Open) and Serbia (PSSOH), but several other are being currently discussed and will be announced as soon as possible.
Stay tuned !!! 2020 will be an exciting time for the LibreOffice community !!!
Love LibreOffice? Want to help spread the word? And do you speak another language than English? Then we’d appreciate your help! We have lots of community-created LibreOffice accounts on Facebook and Twitter, but some haven’t been updated for a while. The full list is below, with the date the account was last active – if you’re interested in helping to maintain one, join our marketing list and let us know!
Or if you’re interested in creating a new account on another social media platform, such as Mastodon, that’s awesome too! This is a great way to help the LibreOffice community, and build up experience with managing a social media channel – who knows, it could land you a job somewhere one day…
Berlin, December 12, 2019 – The LibreOffice Documentation Team announces the immediate availability of the LibreOffice Online Guide, a major work authored by Aaron Peters under the Google Season of Docs 2019 programme. LibreOffice Online is a web-based version of the office suite, that can be deployed on local infrastructure and connected to a file-sharing system for document collaboration.
The guide includes content for end-users – as well as for system administrators – for rapid deployment and start of operation. It covers the basic usage of the word processor, spreadsheet and presentation modules, as well as guides for file handling and – one of the major technological achievements of LibreOffice Online – the collaborative editing capability, that allows several users to work on the same document, spreadsheet or presentation at the same time. Users familiar with LibreOffice on the desktop will quickly grasp the operation of LibreOffice Online, except for some specific differences addressed in the guide.
For the system administrator, the guide covers installation and basic operation, and explains deployment in small and limited environments. Professional support and operation services are strongly recommended for large installations and mission critical deployments, available in the LibreOffice business ecosystem.
“The current version of the Guide is complete and has the necessary information for the targeted audience (technology-savvy enthusiasts and/or small businesses), to be able to get the application, install it alongside a hosting application (NextCloud), use the main modules (Documents, Spreadsheets, and Presentations), and use other desktop and mobile tools to access their LibreOffice Online content,” says author Aaron Peters. “My experience working on this guide was fantastic, and I would urge anyone interested in getting involved with open source to consider documentation as a first step. The Document Foundation’s documentation team in particular has a very well-established process and infrastructure for producing their products, and one of the only things I can think of that would help them is more volunteers.”
“The Google Season of Docs programme was an opportunity The Document Foundation (TDF) could not have miss to add a valuable content to its documentation portfolio. The LibreOffice Online Guide is a document whose time had just come and is here to help the LibreOffice Online software and its professional and volunteer community to increase its usage and benefit of its incredible value,” says Olivier Hallot, TDF mentor and Documentation Coordinator. “And working with Aaron was a pleasure and all commitments were delivered on time, which was very appreciated. Special thank you to Google for the wonderful initiative and to the Season of Docs 2019 team for the support.”
The outline of the new Guide is as follows and gives a good view on what is inside.
Preface
Chapter 1: Introducing LibreOffice Online
Chapter 2: Installing LibreOffice Online
Chapter 3: Setting Up LibreOffice Online Before Use
Chapter 4: Navigating Your LibreOffice Online Files
Chapter 5: Editing, Saving, and Exporting LibreOffice Online Files
Lin and Wang in the LibreOffice Conference 2019. The Chinese words in the photo in slide marks: “I have to speak Chinese, not local languages.”
Authors: Author: Kuan-Ting Lin and Tanax Yago (Xiao-Wu Wang)
Foreword: At the LibreOffice Conference 2019, two young people from Taiwan, Kuan-Ting Lin and Xiao-Wu Wang, gave a wonderful talk called “Making LibreOffice a lifesaver for dying languages in Asia”. (Video of the talk is at the end of this blog post.) It covered their work and plans for saving indigenous languages in Taiwan, and what an important role LibreOffice can play here.
Like many indigenous or native people around the world, the indigenous Taiwanese people have been excluded from contemporary technology for decades. During the rapid development of personal computers between the 1960s and 1980s, the indigenous people were suffering from the “national language” policy, which banned all indigenous languages and discourse promoting Chinese identity in school. That is the reason that the earliest Chinese input method for computers was invented before 1976, but there were no equivalents for indigenous languages until the late 2000s.
As smartphones boomed in this decade internationally, more and more indigenous people gained access to the internet mobile apps as, like other people do Taiwan. But the majority of the digital resources are still in Chinese: online news articles, educational materials, translation systems, digital government services, medical information, chat forums, and many more. Almost all of them are not available in the indigenous languages.
Maybe Taiwan has done a lot for indigenous rights, but as members of the indigenous community and students of anthropology here, we think there is still huge room for improvement. The input system is the first step. Typing has been difficult for indigenous people as sentences are treated as English – hence tons of red underlines indicating spelling or grammatical “mistakes” identified by various office software brands in the market. Therefore, making indigenous dictionaries for the apps to remove the underlines has become the top priority of our work.
Making it appealing
Furthermore, the system must be appealing for people to type in their own indigenous languages. It needs to be smart enough to correct grammar, if possible, and spelling. Being able to do so can empower the elderly to use new technology and to align their spelling with the official dictionary as long as they want to. New language learners will benefit from this system, since they don’t need to look up in dictionaries when typing as often.
After our research, we understand that Microsoft not only discourages people to type in indigenous languages in Microsoft Office – by failing to implement such support in the software suite – but also distance people from their mother tongue by restricting modifications to Office with its proprietary software license.
On the contrary, the LibreOffice community discovered this problem years ago and has been tackling it thanks to its open source development, and its appreciation of diverse values. For example, LibreOffice was translated to Guarani to address a similar issue in South America. In Taiwan, community members like Mark Hung have started to build databases for indigenous languages, too.
Working with the youth communities of indigenous people, we are able to extend the project to another level: local participation. We want this project to be an important point of revitalization of indigenous culture, and it can be applied in everyday life. We invite youngsters from all the indigenous communities, and connect them with the LibreOffice community. With such an idea, the LibreOffice community can also benefit from new perspectives and views of different people, and can get a huge group of new and enthusiastic users and promoters.
Good for everyone
The project is also good for the government. The central government of Taiwan is both struggling with its OpenDocument Format/LibreOffice policy and the “official documents in indigenous languages” policy. For public servants, everyday tasks seem to have made them reluctant to learn new things – both dying languages and new software. We hope that combining the two will make it easier for people to adapt new and meaningful policies.
We received so many words and a lot of help from our friends in the LibreOffice community around the world before, during and after the LibreOffice Conference 2019 in Almería, Spain. Our Taiwanese folks, including Franklin Weng and Eric Sun, introduced this wonderful opportunity for us to get to know this community. Mark Hung, Gustavo Pacheco, Eike Rathke and Cheng-Chia Tseng generously provided their precious knowledge and experiences. Shinji Enoki, Jeff Huang and many friendly LibreOffice community friends gave us their sincere encouragement and suggestions. We are so lucky to work on this important issue with these lovely people!
If you agree that this is worth doing, please join us! We’d love to see new participants from various backgrounds. For inquiries, participation, questions or suggestions, just send an email to a @ cssjh . com (Kuan-Ting). We appreciate your interest and support!
And as mentioned, here’s the video of the presentation from the conference:
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