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Community Member Monday: Pierre-Yves Samyn

Today we’re chatting with a member of the French-speaking LibreOffice community, Pierre-Yves Samyn, who helps our marketing and documentation projects with videos and translations:

Where do you live, and what do you enjoy in your spare time?

I live in metropolitan France. Outside of LibreOffice, I like to read, listen and play music.

In which areas of the LibreOffice project are you active?

Thesedays, my main activities for the project are:

  1. Following up the French part of the wiki (translation of the release notes mainly)
  2. The creation of videos, posted on the French TDF channel (click the playlist button in the top-left to see other videos):

     

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    I started with a more-or-less weekly rhythm, with the idea of making “videos of the week”, like the tips of the week we have on the Twitter account. I have kept that pace for around three to four years. Today, I make videos more according to the inspiration of the moment, or following a question that was asked. I also try to add English subtitles.

  3. The other thing I do in the project is to respond punctually to questions on English-speaking Ask LibreOffice site (not as often as I would like).

How did you get involved with LibreOffice?

I get involved through my work, at the time with OpenOffice.org version 1.1.3 if my memory is good. The software imported less than the ODF format for this project, consisting (in part) of using the software conversion features. I was immediately seduced, and reported to the project my experience in creating training support, user support, etc.

What was your initial experience of contributing to LibreOffice like?

Helping first: I was active member on the OpenOffice.org forum, then on all the French mailing lists (discuss, users, QA etc.) Then I moved on to testing new versions (reports or comment on Bugzilla). I also participated in making content for the wiki (creation/update of FAQs, macros, release notes…). And I participated in the documentation project (proofreading).

What tools do you use for your work?

Eclipse, Vim, Notepad++, Atom, VLC…

Finally, what does LibreOffice need most right now?

I probably do not have a sufficient overall vision of the project, but here are some topics that resonate in me (in no order of priority):

Many thanks to Pierre-Yves Samyn for all his help and contributions! Learn more about the French LibreOffice community here, and then get to know us – we’re a friendly, growing free software project, so by taking part you can meet new people and build up valuable experience. Join us today!

LibreOffice 6.2 community focus: Quality Assurance

LibreOffice’s worldwide community of volunteers and certified developers has been working hard on the many updates in LibreOffice 6.2. But while shiny new features are great for users, it’s important that they’re well-tested too! That’s where our QA (Quality Assurance) community comes into play. So today we talk to Xisco Fauli, The Document Foundation’s QA engineer, about the upcoming release…

What new features in LibreOffice 6.2 are you most excited about?

Obviously I’m very happy to see the NotebookBar finally moving out of experimental status, after some years under development. Kudos to the UX (user experience) team and the devevelopers who helped them. However, I’d like to highlight two major improvements done in two different areas of LibreOffice, that help to improve its quality and clean some old bugs in Bugzilla.

The first one is the work done by Muhammet Kara with regards to the personalization dialog. Support for Firefox persona was added in LibreOffice 4.0 and quickly became popular amongst users. However, it was slow to download themes, and from time to time it broke because Mozilla changed its API. At some point, we even discussed removing it in the ESC (Engineering Steering Committee) meetings. Fortunately, Muhammet decided to give it some love, and now will have a new, shiny, fast and reliable personalization dialog. Kudos to Muhammet for his work!

The second one is the work done by Mark Hung with regards to the .PPTX animations. At least 20 bugs have been fixed in this area. Besides, since OpenOffice times, there were many documents that couldn’t be opened in Microsoft Office after saving them as .PPTX in LibreOffice. Most of these problems are gone now – so thanks to Mark Hung.

What has the QA community been working on in preparation for this release?

A great milestone we achieved recently is the LibreOffice QA blog coming to life. We publish monthly reports where we highlight what happened during that month in QA and development, which gives an idea of what’s going on in the project (here’s an example). The report has some nice charts, like how the number of unconfirmed bugs evolves over time or how many bugs were reported every day, among others.

Besides, the QA community worked very hard to find regressions, triage new bugs, create UItests and test new features – just to mention some of the tasks the community does.

Last but not least, three Bug Hunting Sessions were organized in the last six months, plus one live session with 70 students in Taiwan, and another live session with eight participants in Ankara. Thanks to all the QA community and Franklin Weng, Cheng-Chia Tseng, Jeff Huang and Muhammet Kara for organizing the live events.

Looking further ahead, what else are you planning – or want to achieve – in the community?

Knowing that the next LibreOffice Conference will take place in Almeria, Spain, I would like to organize an online meeting for the Spanish community. It’s very active in the Telegram channel, with more than 450 members, so I think it’s about time to have these meetings in order to get to know each other better, share community ideas, organize events, talk about the Conference, etc… Personally I would love to see many of them coming to Almeria and meet them in person.

Finally, why should people get involved in QA, and how?

Joining our QA community is a good way to build up valuable experience in a well-known open source project, which can be useful if you want to go down that career path in the future. It looks good on a CV – and helps to keep LibreOffice reliable too!

The easiest way to join us to show up in the IRC channel #libreoffice-qa or join the Telegram channel and say hi! We’ll be happy to talk with you and get you started. On the other hand, if you are shy and you don’t want to say anything, we have a list of tasks waiting for someone willing to help. You just need to go to the get involved page and choose the one you like. As soon as you will start to use Bugzilla, you will get an email from me with different links to the QA documentation, in case you want to learn things more in detail.

Coming up on 24 January: next C++ workshop – set and maps

After three successful C++ workshops, where you can learn about the language and put questions to experienced developers, we’re organising another one! This time, the topics are set and maps. Start by watching this presentation:

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Also take a look at this document and then this section. Here are some Easy Hacks to work on too.

Then join us on 24 January at 19:00 UTC for a discussion via our #libreoffice-dev IRC channel on Freenode. You can ask experienced LibreOffice developers questions, and learn more about the language. See you then!

New Guide: Conditional Formatting in LibreOffice Calc

Roman Kuznetsov (aka Kompilainenn) from our documentation community has created a Conditional Formatting Guide for LibreOffice Calc. He says:

In this guide I wrote about:

  • How to create, change and delete conditional formatting
  • Multiple conditions for one cell range, and priority of condition processing
  • Creating cell styles for conditional formatting
  • All categories and all types of conditional formatting
  • Copying of conditional formatting

I want to say a very big thank you to Sophie Gautier for reviewing this guide, and to Mike Kaganski for fixing of some bugs in conditional formatting I found when I wrote it. I hope this guide will be helpful for many users of LibreOffice.

Click here to read/download the guide, and a huge thanks to Roman, Sophie and Mike for their great work! Most of LibreOffice’s documentation is produced by volunteers, so if you’re reading this and want to give them a hand, see here to get started.

Updating documentation in a large open source project is a great way to build up experience for a potential technical writing career, so join us!

LibreOffice 6.2 community focus: Localisation

Last week, we talked to the design community about their preparations for the upcoming LibreOffice 6.2 release. Today we hear from Sophie Gautier, who helps out with localisation (l10n) – that is, translating the software’s user interface, documentation and website into other languages…

What new feature(s) in LibreOffice 6.2 are you most excited about?

The many improvements and new features added to the online version will push it a step further and speed up its adoption. I think it’s a key asset for our project and its visibility, and I hope it will bring many more people to contribute to development, design or translation of the software.

What has the localisation community been working on in preparation for this release?

New features have a lot of new strings; the Design project has worked on the user interface and the Documentation project has made a lot of updates and completions in the help files. All this is reflected in localization work. Moreover, the l10n community is also maintaining the strings of the en_US version, so whenever a typo exists there, it triggers the localization process again. If you add the preparation needed for the press release, all in all the team has done incredible work!

Looking further ahead, what else are you planning – or want to achieve?

If it’s compatible with our workflow, I would like to give Weblate a try and see if it eases the work of our l10n team. Pootle is a great tool, but we lack some features, one of which is very important for me: an easy way to credit contributors and value their work through the tool.

Finally, how can people get involved with localisation?

If you are a translator, it’s very easy to participate by helping on translating press releases, and videos for marketing purposes. If you are more interesting on producing documentation, either translating into your language or in English would bring a great help to the project. A bit more technical – but still easy – is to translate the software UI and the help in your language, bringing LibreOffice in their language to many many people. For all topics, we have a page to get started, so join us on the mailing list!

Thanks Sophie – and coming up next week, we’ll talk to Xisco Fauli from the QA (quality assurance) community…

Community Member Monday: Mohamed Trabelsi and Jim Raykowski

LibreOffice’s worldwide community is active in many areas: translations, QA, marketing, design, documentation, coding and more. Today we chat to a couple of community members about their experiences in the project…

Mohamed Trabelsi

Where do you live, and what are your interests?

I’ve been living in Kobe, Japan for three years now. I was Master student at Kobe Institute of Computing for two years, then I did internship for six months at iCRAFT Corp, a Japanese IT company in Kobe. And now I work as a Network Engineer at the same company.

Outside of work, I’m usually playing soccer, watching movies, traveling around Japan with some friends and family, and going for some volunteering activities nearby.

In which areas of the LibreOffice project are you active?

My LibreOffice activities are around QA/bug triaging, the translation projects (to Arabic), and LibreOffice promotion by giving presentations at IT-related events in Japan.

How did you get involved with LibreOffice?

A few years ago I was involved in social volunteering activities like charity events, earthquake clean-ups and so on. In the last year during my internship at iCRAFT Corp, which was supporting the project, I was assigned to contribute to LibreOffice development in any area I wanted or found interesting. I liked the idea, and considered it as a new way of volunteering in my life – let’s call it “Digital Volunteering”.

What was your initial experience of contributing to LibreOffice like?

It was my first experience with open source development, so it took me a while to get adapted to the activities. But seeing the progress of my contributions in numbers, like the LibreOffice Arabic translation improvements, motivated me a lot.

What does LibreOffice need most right now?

I think that all what LibreOffice needs is to keep improving support for other formats than Open Document, like docx and xls from Microsoft Office.

Anything else you want to mention?

I’m looking forward to meeting other LibreOffice members and celebrating all new improvements together!

Jim Raykowski

Where do you live, and what are your interests outside of LibreOffice?

I live in beautiful Kodiak, Alaska, USA. Apart from LibreOffice, I mostly deal with laundry stuff in one way or another, and play guitar – not so good, even though some say different. Oh and I try to catch fish with fair success.

In which areas of the LibreOffice project are you active?

User interface bug fixes and enhancements.

How did you get involved with LibreOffice?

Calc cell protection wasn’t working and I needed it for some macros I made using Basic. I thought I might be able to fix it. It got fixed before I could even see day light through the code jungle I had entered. After a while of hacking my way through the jungle I managed to change a old school pointer to a std::unique_ptr for my first commit.

What was your initial experience of contributing to LibreOffice like?

Truly exciting to be contributing with others from all over this planet.

Finally, what tools do you use for your work (eg text editor)?

I mainly use Qt Creator. Qt is what I’ve used for most of the programming I’ve done.

Thanks to Mohamed and Jim for their time, and contributions to LibreOffice! If you’re reading this and want to help out, and make new contacts in our friendly worldwide community, see this page to get started.

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