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Coming up on December 22: Bug Hunting Session for LibreOffice 6.0 RC1

2017 is coming to a close, but our community is still busy preparing for the release of LibreOffice 6.0, which is due in late January 2018. Many new features have been added to this version, and to make it as reliable as possible, we want your help!

On December 22 we will have an international Bug Hunting Session (BHS), testing the RC1 (first release candidate) of LibreOffice 6.0. You can download, try out and test this RC1 version – and if you spot any bugs, let our QA (Quality Assurance) community know.

Mentors will be available to help you file bugs from 11:00 UTC to 15:00 UTC on that day. All assistance is greatly appreciated – together we can make LibreOffice 6.0 the best release ever, for millions of people around the world! For full details on the Bug Hunting Session, and how to get involved, see our wiki:

Click here for full details about the Bug Hunting Session

In addition, there will be a local event in Ankara, organised by the Turkish LibreOffice community. Here are the details:

  • Date: Dec 22 Friday
  • Time: 14:00-17:00 (UTC+3)
  • Location: TUBITAK ULAKBIM, 7th Floor, Meeting Room 2
  • Registration form: https://goo.gl/forms/paVTg3ExZDn0Oytj1
  • Attendees will bring their own laptops. Registration until Thursday 17:00 (UTC+3) is required. There will be snacks, tea, and some swag!

Document Liberation Project: 2017 in review

While most of the posts on this blog are about LibreOffice, another project overseen by The Document Foundation is DLP – the Document Liberation Project. Whereas LibreOffice is an end-user application, DLP is a collection of free and open source software libraries that help to convert document formats. Developers can use these libraries in their programs, in order to import and export a large variety of files – including proprietary formats. Many well-known applications use DLP libraries, including Inkscape, Scribus, Calligra and of course LibreOffice.

So, what happened in DLP throughout 2017? Read on for our round-up of the year’s news…

New import filter: QuarkXPress

Aleksas Pantechovskis, as part of the Google Summer of Code, worked on a new import filter for QuarkXPress documents: libxqp. It currently supports QuarkXPress 3.1 – 4.1 documents, and this image shows it in action (original QuarkXPress file on the left, and how it’s converted into OpenDocument on the right):

Big improvements to Lotus 123 import

Laurent Alonso made some major improvements to the Lotus 123 filter, adding support for many formatting and layout options. Check out these pictures as an example – the top shows a Lotus 123 file in LibreOffice 5.3, missing almost all of its formatting. Underneath, however, you can see how it’s rendered in LibreOffice 5.4, with much more of the formatting present (click for bigger):

New library releases

Throughout the year, many libraries were updated as well. Here’s a summary:

  • 2 Aug – libepubgen 0.0.1 – This fixes escaping of HTML entities, and the code has been updated to C++11
  • 12 Sep – libwpd 0.10.2X – Also updated to C++11, and includes various fixes from OSS-Fuzz
  • 12 Sep – libwpg 0.3.2 – Improves performance of reading image data from WPG2 files
  • 14 Sep – libzmf 0.0.2 – Minor code cleanups and some fixes from OSS-Fuzz
  • 15 Sep – libcdr 0.1.4 – Fixes issues found by Coverity, and require C++11 for build
  • 16 Sep – libfreehand 0.1.2 – Parses more features, including text on paths, stroke patterns, arrows, and custom line and fill styles
  • 21 Oct – libvisio 0.1.6 – Various improvements to import of MS Visio files, plus Coverity and OSS-Fuzz fixes
  • 23 Oct – libetonyek 0.1.7 – Improves support for gradients, cell styles, non-RGB colours, and table border lines
  • 13 Dec – libepubgen 0.1.0 – EPUB3 support, plus support for embedded fonts, cover images and footnotes
  • 13 Dec – writerperfect 0.9.6 – Adds support for StarOffice Writer and Zoner Draw documents, and includes universal conversion tools

Find out more!

For details on the libraries mentioned above, see the projects page on the site. And check out the contribute page to see how you can help – because even if you’re not a developer, you can prepare sample documents for testing. Oh, and to learn more about DLP, watch this short video!

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LibreOffice contributor interview: Gautam Prajapati

Gautam has been working on the LibreOffice Viewer for Android, as part of the Google Summer of Code. We caught up with him at our recent conference in Rome, to talk about progress in the Android app, his experiences of joining the community, and how others can get involved.

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Second Bug Hunting Session for LibreOffice 6.0

After the first Bug Hunting Session for LibreOffice 6.0, which was held on October 20th 2017, we’re glad to announce the Second Bug Hunting Session on November 27th – this time being held on a Monday, for the first time!

LibreOffice 6.0 will be announced at the end of January 2018, and so far, almost 800 bugs have been fixed in this version, with more than 700 people reporting, triaging or fixing those bugs. More info can be found here. Besides that, a large number of new features, which are summarized in the release notes, have been added.

In order to find, report and triage bugs, the tests during the Second Bug Hunting Session will be performed on the first Beta version of LibreOffice 6.0, 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 will run in parallel with the production version.

Mentors will be available on November 27th 2017, from 8AM UTC to 10PM UTC for questions or help in the IRC channel: #libreoffice-qa (connect via webchat). Of course, hunting bugs will be possible also on other days, as the builds of this particular Beta release (LibreOffice 6.0.0 Beta1) will be available until mid December.

And it’s still the Month of LibreOffice!

Throughout November we’ve been running a Month of LibreOffice, awarding cool stickers to contributors across the project. The Bug Hunting Session is your chance to get a sticker for your laptop or PC – so get involved and help us make LibreOffice 6.0 the best release yet! See here for more about the Month of LibreOffice.

And there’s more information about how to hunt bugs in LibreOffice 6.0 Beta1 in this wiki page.

Call for Papers Open Document Editors DevRoom at FOSDEM 2018

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 2018, it will be held on Saturday, February 3, and Sunday, February 4.

As usual, the Open Document Editors DevRoom will be jointly organized by Apache OpenOffice and LibreOffice, on Saturday, February 3 (from 10:30AM to 6:30PM, room AW1.120). The shared devroom gives every 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 standard document format, on topics such as code, localization, QA, UX, extensions, tools and adoption related cases. This is a unique opportunity to show new ideas and developments to a wide technical audience. Please do keep in mind, though, that product pitches are not allowed at FOSDEM.

Length of talks should be limited to a maximum of 30 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/FOSDEM18.

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, but please do remember that your profile might be already stored at Pentabarf).

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 Monday, December 4th, 2017. Accepted speakers will be notified by Monday, December 11th, 2017. The schedule will be published by Friday, December 15, 2017.

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 to have your presentation recorded and published under the same license as all FOSDEM content (CC-BY). For example: “If my speech is accepted for FOSDEM, I hereby agree to be recorded and to have recordings – including slides and other presentation-related documents – published under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) 4.0 International License. Sincerely, Name”.

Coming up on Friday: first Bug Hunting Session for LibreOffice 6.0 Alpha 1

The LibreOffice community has returned from a great conference in Rome (more on that later this week), and we’re now working eagerly on LibreOffice 6.0, which is due to be released at the end of January 2018. This version will include a large number of new features – and those already implemented are summarised on the release notes page.

In order to find, report and triage bugs, the LibreOffice QA team is organizing the first Bug Hunting Session on Friday October 20, 2017. Tests will be performed on the first Alpha version of LibreOffice 6.0, 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 will run in parallel with the production version.

Mentors will be available from 08:00 UTC to 22:00 UTC. Of course, hunting bugs will be possible also on other days, as the builds of this particular Alpha release (LibreOffice 6.0.0 Alpha 1) will be available until mid November.

During the day there will be two dedicated sessions: the first to chase bugs on the main LibreOffice modules between 15:00 UTC and 17:00 UTC, and the second to test a set of the top 5 features between 17:00 UTC and 19:00 UTC. All details of the second bug hunting session are available on the wiki.

During the dedicated sessions, we will concentrate our efforts to chase and reproduce bugs, in order to confirm and file them in a more comprehensive way. Of course, the more comprehensive the bug report, the easier it will be for developers to solve the bugs in time for the final release. Thanks in advance for your help, and we look forward to your input!

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