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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!

Document Liberation Project: New releases

LibreOffice’s native file format is the fully standardised OpenDocument Format. This is ideal for long-term storage of data, but many of us have to work with other file formats as well, including those generated by proprietary software. The Document Liberation Project (DLP) develops libraries to help us access these files, and there have been various updates in the last two weeks, so let’s see what’s new:

  • libfreehand 0.1.2 – This is a library for importing Aldus/Macromedia/Adobe FreeHand documents. In this release, the library can import more elements, such as text on paths, text effects, stroke patterns, arrows and paragraph attributes.
  • libzmf 0.0.2 and libcdr 0.1.4 – libzmf is a library for importing Zoner drawing and bitmap files, currently supporting Callisto/Draw 4-5 and Bitmap, while libcdr is a library that parses the file format of CorelDRAW documents of all versions. Both have been made more secure thanks to OSS-Fuzz, which we talked about recently, and there have been build fixes as well.
  • libwpg 0.3.2 and libwpd 0.10.2 – The former is for importing WordPerfect Graphics images, and has performance improvements when reading image data from WPG2 files, while the latter has had build system improvements and also fixes from the aforementioned OSS-Fuzz.

These improvements will be included in future major releases of LibreOffice, and indeed other open source programs that use Document Liberation Project libraries.

Meanwhile, DLP developer Laurent Alonso sent us this great before-and-after picture, showing recent improvements to the import of Lotus 123 spreadsheets. At the top you can see a Lotus 123 file (that contains lots of formatting) being displayed in LibreOffice 5.3 – but the formatting is missing. Thanks to improvements in DLP libraries, though, LibreOffice 5.4 can read and display the spreadsheet much more accurately, as you can see underneath (click for bigger):

The DLP community appreciates all contributions, and even if you’re not a coder, there are many ways to help – such as documenting file formats, or preparing sample documents. To learn more about DLP, check out our short video:

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Call to Action: Hackfests “The New Generation”

LibreOffice’s development community has been growing steadily for seven years, thanks to the great enthusiasm demonstrated by several core members. They have mentored an entirely new generation of LibreOffice developers, also thanks to Hackfests and other face-to-face meeting opportunities such as FOSDEM and the LibreOffice Conference.

After seven years is now the right time to start thinking about the new generation of Hackfests. For several reasons, their number has decreased over the last couple of years, and they have never really gone beyond European borders (even with core developers flying over the Atlantic to attract potential new developers).

Bjoern Michaelsen will be hosting a conference call to discuss HackFests “The New Generation” on Sunday, September 17, at 4:30PM CEST (Berlin time, or UTC +2). Everyone interested is warmly invited to participate, especially from LibreOffice native language communities around the world.

If you cannot connect, make your voice heard by sending a couple of ideas by email to the Projects mailing list: projects@global.libreoffice.org.

Press Releases

The Document Foundation Releases LibreOffice 26.2.1 with Contributions from Community and Ecosystem Partners

Videos describing new features available on YouTube and PeerTube Berlin, 26 February 2026 – The Document Foundation today announced the…

Open Document Format

IMPORTANT ODF Template added to CRA Guidance feedback

Last week, the European Commission published the draft guidelines for the CRA and opened a comment session open to all…