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FOSDEM 2020: Open Document Editors DevRoom Call for Papers

FOSDEM is one of the largest gatherings of Free Software contributors in the world and happens each year in Brussels (Belgium) at the ULB Campus Solbosch. In 2020, it will be held on Saturday, February 1, and Sunday, February 2.

The Open Document Editors (OFE) DevRoom is scheduled for Saturday, February 1, from 10:30AM to 7PM. Physical room has not yet been assigned by FOSDEM. The shared devroom gives all project in this area a chance to present ODF related developments and innovations.

We are now inviting proposals for talks about Open Document Editors or the ODF document format, on topics such as code, extensions, localization, QA, UX, tools and adoption related cases. This is a unique opportunity to show new ideas and developments to a wide technical audience.

Length of talks should be limited to a maximum of 20 minutes, as we would like to have questions after each presentation, and to fit as many presenters as possible in the schedule. Exceptions must be explicitly requested and justified. You may be assigned LESS time than you request.

All submissions have to be made in the Pentabarf event planning tool: https://penta.fosdem.org/submission/FOSDEM20.
While filing your proposal, please provide the title of your talk, a short abstract (one or two paragraphs), some information about yourself (name, bio and photo).

To submit your talk, click on “Create Event”, then make sure to select the “Open Document Editors” devroom as the “Track”. Otherwise your talk will not be even considered for any devroom at all.

If you already have a Pentabarf account from a previous year, even if your talk was not accepted, please reuse it. Create an account if, and only if, you don’t have one from a previous year. If you have any issues with Pentabarf, please contact ode-devroom-manager@fosdem.org.

The deadline is Saturday, November 30, 2019. Accepted speakers will be notified by Sunday, December 8th, 2019. The DevRoom schedule will be published by Tuesday, December 12, 2019.

Recording permission

The talks in the Open Document Editors DevRoom will be audio and video recorded, and possibly streamed live too.
In the “Submission notes” field, please indicate that you agree that your presentation will be licensed under the CC-BY-SA-4.0 or CC-BY-4.0 license and that you agree to have your presentation recorded. For example: “If my speech is accepted for FOSDEM, I hereby agree to license all recordings, slides, and other associated materials under the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 4.0 International License. Sincerely, Name”.

Coming up on October 21: First Bug Hunting Session for LibreOffice 6.4!

LibreOffice 6.4 is being developed by our worldwide community, and is due to be released in early February 2020 – see the release notes describing the new features here. Of course, we’re still early in the development cycle, so many more features are still to come!

In order to find, report and triage bugs, the LibreOffice QA team is organizing the first Bug Hunting Session for LibreOffice 6.4 on Monday October 21, 2019. Tests will be performed on the first Alpha version, which will be available on the pre-releases server a few days before the event. Builds will be available for Linux (DEB and RPM), macOS and Windows, and can be installed and run in parallel along with the production version.

Mentors will be available from 07:00 UTC to 19:00 UTC for questions or help in the IRC channel #libreoffice-qa and the Telegram QA Channel. Of course, hunting bugs will be possible also on other days, as the builds of this particular Alpha release (LibreOffice 6.4.0 Alpha 1) will be available until mid November. Check the Release Plan.

All details of the first Bug Hunting Session are available on the wiki. We look forward to seeing you soon – thanks so much for your help! Together we’ll make LibreOffice 6.4 a super solid release.

LibreOffice has a new Macro Team

Power users often implement macros in their documents, and LibreOffice’s volunteer contributors are typically power users, so it makes sense to ensure the tools they need are in excellent shape. We are excited to announce the creation of a dedicated team for macro improvements in the LibreOffice contributor community.

The team composition is currently as follows:

  • Andreas Heinisch, a new contributor who has improved the user interface of macro editing
  • Tomoyuki Kubota, a contributor for 1.5 years who has done bug and build system fixes and code cleanups
  • Luane, a new contributor who is improving the documentation related to macros and extension development as well as analysing macro-related bug reports
  • Alain Romedenne, a veteran documenter of macro matters

To make sure the macro team can work efficiently, the LibreOffice quality assurance team has cleaned up the collection of macro issues. The QA team will offer help to all macro team members to the best of its ability.

Examples of tasks the team members have worked on:

If you are interested in contributing to the macro team (development, testing or documentation), please send an email to ilmari.lauhakangas@libreoffice.org. Thanks!

LibreOffice developers team up to improve PPT/PPTX (PowerPoint) file support

Good news for all users of high quality presentation software: a dedicated team has been formed within the LibreOffice community with the aim of further improving PPT/PPTX (PowerPoint) file format support. The initial developer members are:

  • Bartosz Kosiorek, known for his numerous improvements to Windows Metafile support
  • nd101, a new contributor with a passion for PPT/PPTX support
  • Mark Hung, invited due to his experience in fixing many PPT/PPTX and Impress issues

Team members will be able to support each other through code reviews and advice. We will document the progress here on the TDF blog.

LibreOffice’s Quality Assurance team is currently going through the collections of PPT and PPTX issues and carefully re-analysing and prioritising them. The QA team will continue to provide support in the form of patch testing and verification.

Examples of tasks that the team members have worked on:

Everyone is invited to participate, either in development or testing. If you are interested in joining, please send an email to ilmari.lauhakangas@libreoffice.org. Or if you have a PPT(X) file that doesn’t look quite right in LibreOffice, help us to improve compatibility – attach it to a bug report so that our QA team can investigate!

(PPTX icon: ncrow on DeviantArt)

Annual Report 2018: LibreOffice Hackfests

Most LibreOffice developers are working from their home offices, so hackfests provide a unique opportunity to spend some time working shoulder-to-shoulder with their peers. In 2018, LibreOffice developers and community members met at four hackfests in Brussels, Hamburg, Tirana and Munich.

Brussels (Belgium), February 5-6

The first hackfest of the year was organized at ICAB in Brussels immediately after FOSDEM, the largest European gathering of FOSS developers and advocates, which is organized every year at ULB (Brussels Free University) during the coldest weekend of the winter season. The hackfest was attended by over 30 people, equally split between those focused on development and those taking care of non technical tasks such as localization, documentation, certification and marketing. In term of development, there were achievements in various areas of the office suite and in quality assurance.

Hamburg (Germany), April 6-8

The community gathering started with a walk through the fascinating Hanseatic city of Hamburg, with its river, canals and lake in the centre (Binnenalster), and a sample of local food at the Groeninger Privatbrauerei.

On Saturday, around 45 people attended the hackfest, divided in two groups: the first focused on coding for fixing bugs and working on new features, and the second on the meeting of the German-speaking LibreOffice community. Developers worked on different topics, like making drawing layers ODF conformant, migrating old database to HSQLDB, speeding up VLOOKUP, and improving LibreOffice Viewer on Android, plus other random bits related to bugs, regressions and new features.

German community members discussed about bringing in potential new contributors, developing materials for courses (both online and in schools) about LibreOffice, and creating a new “Get Involved” flyer and page on the website, both in German. And at the end, we relaxed with drinks and food!

Tirana (Albania), September 27

As part of the LibreOffice Conference in Tirana, Albania, this “hacknight” was held at the Destil from 7:30PM to 11PM with over 100 participants, which have covered tasks such as development, localization, documentation, quality assurance, certification and marketing. In fact, the conference brings together a large number of community members from around the globe, and the hackfest is for many contributors the very first opportunity to meet face-to-face after months or even years of interaction on mailing lists and IRC.

Munich (Germany), October 26-28

In late October, CIB hosted a hackfest at modulE in Munich, Germany, with 25 participants over the three days. The meeting started with a few presentations on Friday evening, with Andreas Kainz showing the amazing progress on the NotebookBar design. During the event developers were able to fix several bugs and polish some new features for the upcoming LibreOffice 6.2 major release, while German community members discussed non-technical topics such as marketing and local events. Of course, there was Italian pasta, like in every hackfest in Munich. The meeting ended with a quick city tour and beer at the world-famous Hofbräuhaus.

Annual Report 2018: LibreOffice development

In 2018, 17,473 commits were made to the LibreOffice source code, from 223 authors. Here’s an overview of what they worked on…

Behind the scenes of LibreOffice 6.2

Throughout the second half of 2018, the developer community worked on a new major release: LibreOffice 6.2. Details about the end-user-facing new features are provided on this page, and in the following video – so in the rest of this blog post, we’ll focus on developer-related changes.

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So, let’s get technical!

In terms of system requirements, the macOS minimum version was bumped up to 10.9 (and will be 10.10 in LibreOffice 6.3). Similarly, binary Linux x86 (32-bit) releases from The Document Foundation were deprecated, so there will be no Linux x86 builds produced by TDF after LibreOffice 6.2. However, this does not mean that Linux x86 compatibility will be removed; Linux distributions can still opt to build 32-bit binaries. See here for more details.

On the user interface front, there were other changes. Two new VCL plugins (qt5 and kde5) were implemented (with the KDE5 plugin extending the Qt5 one), to provide integration with KDE Plasma 5 and other Qt5-based desktop environments. These were mainly implemented by Katarína Behrens (CIB) and Jan-Marek Glogowski (City of Munich).

If the kde5 and the gtk3_kde5 plugins are installed, the desktop detection will now prefer the kde5 one. The qt5 plugin must be explicitly selected via SAL_USE_VCLPLUGIN=qt5, as it’s never selected automatically.

Native copy and paste of spreadsheet data in Writer tables was implemented by László Németh (NISZ): previously, you could paste a copied table as image, object, plain text, and as RTF; the latter resulting in a new table in Writer. In LibreOffice 6.2 you can paste directly in an existing table.

Data Validation now supports custom formulas thanks to Marco Cecchetti (Collabora), while Edit > Track Changes > Show no longer severely impacts performance in documents with many tracked changes. The document view is now capable of hiding the tracked changes, so they do not have to be rearranged in the document model to be hidden – implemented by Michael Stahl (CIB).

LibreLogo, the programming interface for graphic design and education got unit testing, IDE and compiler fixes and improvements (László Németh – FSF.hu Foundation). Meanwhile, work continued on the native GTK3 UI, as demonstrated by Caolan McNamara (Red Hat) at FOSDEM 2018:

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Google Summer of Code

The Google Summer of Code (GSoC) takes place every year, and provides university students with funding to work on free and open source software. For 2018, seven LibreOffice developers were accepted into GSoC, and they worked on various features and updates. These improvements were presented in a session at the LibreOffice Conference in Tirana, Albania.

Daniel Silva showed his work on the revamped print dialog, which reorganised options into two tabs, to make them easier to find: a General tab, covering all components of the suite, and then a separate tab for component-specific features (ie those found in Writer, Calc, Impress and so forth). Altogether, this makes it easier for end users to find the options they need, without having to look through many different tabs.

Meanwhile, Mert Tümer worked on the LibreOffice Android Viewer as part of GSoC: he produced 23 patches, made up of nine new features and 14 bug fixes. Some of the new features include Export to PDF, printing, customising worksheets, and better language support.

Saurav Chirania implemented a logger for user interface testing, which logs interactions and stores them in a file, while Vikas Mahato worked on features for importing data from external sources, along with transformations for the data (38 types of transformation were implemented). Finally, Hrishabh Rajput worked on updating listbox widgets to separate read values from input values, Kshitij Pathania added some improvements to the Notebookbar, and Shobhan Mandal focused on adding support for Python in the LOEclipse plugin.

A big thanks to everyone who contributed code last year! Why not join them?

You don’t need to be the world’s best C++ wizard to get involved – just some C++ knowledge and willingness to explore the codebase is great!

We have Easy Hacks to get your started, so check out this page for inspiration. Cheers!

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