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Taming the LibreOffice Help System

LibreOffice’s help system needs to evolve and be more effective for users.

LibreOffice’s help system was designed in 2003-2004 and released in 2005. Since then it has not evolved, except for the introduction of an online version hosted in a wiki server (and accessible from LibreOffice when the local help is not installed).

I worked recently to transform our ancient help system into a modern browser-based version. The partial result is available in the (temporary) website at https://helponline.libreoffice.org – please be advised that this is still work in progress.

The XML help pages are transformed into pure, almost static and responsive HTML. This approach has some advantages:

  • Works in every browser
  • Provides the current functionality of the help system
  • Preserves the current development, help authoring, release engineering and translation process as it is
  • You can read the help pages in your mobile phone or tablet
  • It’s easy to add extra markup for better search engine indexing

The disadvantage is an increase in disk storage on the server.

Transforming XML into HTML for every browser

The help pages were designed when the minimal standard HTML was version 3.2 and, since then, many developments have brought us HTML5 in all major browsers. There is little advantage now to keep the current XML, and all of its designed functionality can be replaced and improved by HTML, CSS and JavaScript, for example, adding better navigation and multimedia contents.

The new Help page layout benefits of many modern technologies

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LibreOffice and Google Summer of Code 2017 – get involved!

Google Summer of Code (GSoC) is a yearly programme in which Google funds university students to work on free and open source software projects. LibreOffice has benefited from this – last year 11 students were accepted into GSoC to do various programming jobs, helping to improve the software.

GSoC students are assisted by experienced “mentors” in the LibreOffice community, as 2016 student Jaskaran Veer Singh explains:

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For 2017, LibreOffice is once again an organisation in the GSoC programme, so if you’re a university student and want to get experience working on a well-known free software project, while also being paid for your efforts, get involved! But don’t delay: the application period runs from March 20 to April 3, so it’s not far off.

To get started, check out some ideas for projects you can work on. Each project describes what’s involved, the skills required, and the mentor you can contact to get help. If you see something you’d like to work on, contact the mentor as soon as possible! Then you can discuss how to proceed.

After that, read the general GSoC 2017 page on our wiki, which provides more information on the GSoC programme and tells you how to apply. You will have to complete an Easy Hack (simple programming challenge) to be accepted, which demonstrates that you’re comfortable modifying the LibreOffice source code, building it, and submitting a patch.

So, check out the ideas, talk to the mentors, and good luck with your projects!

LibreOffice has a new Extensions & Templates website

Berlin, December 14, 2016 – The Document Foundation announces the new Extensions & Templates website, which offers an improved user experience to both developers and end users: https://extensions.libreoffice.org. The resource is now based on the latest version of the Plone open source Content Management System, and has been both coordinated and developed by Andreas Mantke, deputy member of the board at The Document Foundation.

“Two of LibreOffice’s most distinctive characteristics are the possibility of adding features through extensions, and improving quality and consistency of documents thanks to templates”, says Andreas Mantke. “After six years, we decided to refresh the existing resource, to make it easier for developers to upload their files, and for end users to search and download them. I’d love to see an increasing number of contributors uploading extensions and templates”.

extensionsLibreOffice Extensions & Templates website offers 304 extensions, with 678 different releases, and 339 templates, with 376 releases. The three most popular extensions are: “Clipart gallery of danger signs”, “Copy only visible cells” and “LanguageTool”. The three most popular templates are: “Personal Budget Template”, “Simple FAX Template” and “LibreOffice Presentation Templates”. A large number of available resources have been contributed by end users.

LibreOffice users, free software advocates and community members can support The Document Foundation with a donation at http://donate.libreoffice.org.

Second Bug Hunting Session for LibreOffice 5.3

noun_83830_ccLibreOffice 5.3 will be announced at the end of January 2017, with a large number of new features which are summarized on the release notes page: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleaseNotes/5.3. In order to find, report and triage bugs, the QA team is organizing a second bug hunting session on Friday, November 25, 2016. Tests will be performed on the Beta version of LibreOffice 5.3, which will be available on the pre-releases server (http://dev-builds.libreoffice.org/pre-releases/) 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 25, 2016, from 8AM UTC to 10PM UTC. Of course, hunting bugs will be possible also on other days, as the builds of this particular Beta release (LibreOffice 5.3.0 Beta1) will be available until mid December.

During the day there will be two dedicated sessions: the first to chase bugs on the main LibreOffice modules between 3PM UTC and 5PM UTC, and the second to test a set of the top 7 features between 5PM UTC and 7PM UTC. All details of the second bug hunting session are available on the specific wiki page: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/QA/BugHuntingSession/5.3.0Beta1.

During the dedicated sessions, we will concentrate all efforts to chase and reproduce the bugs, in order to confirm and file them in a more comprehensive way. Of course, the more comprehensive will be the bug report, the easier will be for the developers to solve the bugs in time for the final release.

Second ever LibreOffice Hackfest in Italy, with 15 participants

Development mentor Jan Iversen writes:

“Italy has a very big LibreOffice community but with only a few developers, so when LibreItalia had its yearly conference this weekend, we tried to start changing the situation. The second hackfest in Italy was only around four hours – but the time was well spent.

After a short introduction from Marina (Chairwoman of The Document Foundation) our development mentor gave a presentation, explaining how everybody can help LibreOffice. Slides were in Italian, the talk was in English, and comments were in Spanish.

There were in total 15 people including power users, contributors, source code committers and certified developers – a broad range to address. There was less interest in getting a build done, and much more interest in two other aspects:

  • How can we grow a local development community, ranging from people helping QA to “hard-core” developers?
  • The ladder to enter development is too high, so what can we do do make development attractive for new people?

Jan presented our toolbox, which is actually quite extensive. Opengrok surprised everybody. None of the fast developer notebooks could match the fast search times. A search for “jani” took 15ms and was called cheating, so we did another search for “Ponzo” which took just 16ms.

The online editing feature in Gerrit made even the skilled developers look up. We had a longer discussion about when not to use this feature, but everybody saw the clear advantage.

In the end, there was only one question: when do we have a full two-day Hackfest? Osvaldo promised to arrange one in his University during the first quarter of 2017.

No visit to Italy is complete without pizza. LibreItalia arranged dinner in a nice pizza restaurant (sorry, not the typical European style, but real pizza!). It was amazing to feel and see, how big the hospitality is there, and how eager people were to learn.

So in all, a big thank you to LibreItalia for giving me this chance to promote developers. I am sure it will not be last time I visit Italy.”

FOSDEM Call for Papers: Open Document Editors DevRoom

fosdemFOSDEM 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 2017, it will be held on Saturday, February 4, and Sunday, February 5.

As usual, the Open Document Editors DevRoom will be jointly organized by Apache OpenOffice and LibreOffice, on Saturday, February 4, in room 4.401 in Building K (from 10:30AM to 6:30PM). 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 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 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/FOSDEM17.

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 5th, 2016. Accepted speakers will be notified by Sunday, December 11th, 2016. The DevRoom schedule will be published on the same day.

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”.

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