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Build up your skills, and learn exciting new things!

LibreOffice is made by a worldwide community of volunteers, certified developers and many other people. Every summer, we participate in the Google Summer of Code programme: this is focused on introducing contributors to open source software development, and last year LibreOffice received a bunch of new features and improvements thanks to the work of several contributors.

We’re super happy to announce that LibreOffice, once again, is part of this year’s Summer of Code (GSoC). If you’re a contributor, want to improve your programming skills and receive a financial stipend to implement new features in LibreOffice, get involved! You can get in contact with us, show us that you’ve learnt the basics by working on an Easy Hack from the category “difficultyInteresting”, and then propose your project(s). We’re looking forward to hearing from you and seeing your work!

Click here to get started

Tender to clean up and further improve ODF conformance (#202202-01)

The Document Foundation (TDF) is the charitable entity behind the world’s leading free/libre open source (FLOSS) office suite LibreOffice.

We are looking for an individual or company to clean up and further improve ODF conformance.

The default file format of LibreOffice is ODF, the Open Document Format. We have successfully tendered two projects on the current version 1.3 recently:

The scope of this tender is to further improve the ODF conformance in LibreOffice. Note however that the majority of the items mentioned below are unrelated to ODF version 1.3, and have existed before support of this version was introduced in LibreOffice.

Deliverables

  1. Get ODFAutoTests (https://gitlab.com/odfplugfest/odfautotests) to run again. Note: This item does not ask to setup a publicly available website.
  2. Address one or more of the following high priority issues:
    1. “svg gradient” – Bugs 48392, 76682. Bug 48392 is prerequisite for Bug 76682.
    2. “list indent” – Bugs 78510, 92762, 114287, 83532, 82179, 145318
    3. “Math inline in text box” – Bug 129061. From user point of view it has highest priority.
    4. “numbered paragraph” – Bug 62032, 108868. The internal work is done. But a UI is missing. The expected UI needs to be specified.
    5. “ODF conformance part 1” – These are those errors, which are in most cases not visible for users, and therefore likely never included in a customer contract. Bug 53992, 101758, 103602.

    Please propose a subset and prioritization of these bugs, that do not exceed the person days factored in for this tender, see below.

  3. Address one or more of the following lower priority issues:
    1. “ODF conformance part 2” Bug 106934, Bug 91472, 97706, 107253, 108536, 113404, 113554, 116321, 131148
    2. “Trailing space in cell text not encoded as <text:s/>” – Bug 113726
    3. “FILEOPEN PPTX: equation not displayed because Impress doesn’t support inline formulas”, in particular the as-char embedded object – Bug 129061
    4. “ODF database mime-type confusion” – Bug 45854
    5. “table: evaluates <text:variable-set> in body of float and void cells, but not of string cells” – Bug 68024
    6. “Implement ODF attribute fo:hyphenate to exclude a portion of text from hyphenation” – Bug 106733
    7. “FILESAVE: Form: incorrect ‘time’ type” – Bug 131127
    8. “FILESAVE: Date form: unexpected attribute ‘form:input-required’ – Bug 131148, cf. also https://issues.oasis-open.org/browse/OFFICE-4121

    Please propose a subset and prioritization of these bugs, that do not exceed the person days factored in for this tender, see below.

The work has to be developed on LibreOffice master, so that it will be released in the next major version.

A key item of the deliverables for this tender is extensive documentation, about the approach chosen to implement the above items. We expect bidders to provide documentation on both the code and the non-code parts of this tender, e.g. methodology, structure and technical aspects. The Document Foundation will publish this under a free and open source license and make it available to the general public.

Required skills

  • Extensive knowledge of C++
  • Experience working on the LibreOffice source code

Other skills

  • English (conversationally fluent in order to coordinate and plan with members of TDF)

We use free, libre and open source (FLOSS) software for development wherever possible, and the resulting work must be licensed under the Mozilla Public License v2.0.

TDF welcomes applications from all suitably qualified persons regardless of their race, sex, disability, religion/belief, sexual orientation or age.

Bidders will get a preference for including a partner or independent developer who has not been involved in a successful tender before.

As always, TDF will give some preference to individuals who have previously shown a commitment to TDF, including but not limited to certified developers and/or members of TDF. Not being a member, or never having contributed before, does not exclude any applicants from consideration.

The task offered is a project-based one-off, with no immediate plans to a mid- or long-term contractual relationship. It is offered on a freelance, project basis. Individuals and companies applying can be located anywhere in the world.

When budgeting, we anticipated that this project (all items combined) to take in the region of 40 days of work. Should bidders’ assessment result in a significantly different number, please reach out to us before sending your bid, so we can clarify upfront.

TDF is looking forward to receiving your applications for one or more of the aforementioned tasks, your financial expectations and the earliest date of your availability, via e-mail to a committee at tender20220201@documentfoundation.org no later than March 31, 2022.

Applicants who have not received feedback by April 29, 2022 should consider that their application, after careful review, was not accepted.

All bidders are invited to ask their questions on this tender until March 24, 2022. Questions and answers will be made public in a collected and anonymized form.

Update on tender to implement Curl based HTTP/WebDAV UCP (#202104-01)

In April last year, The Document Foundation posted a tender to implement Curl based HTTP/WebDAV UCP in LibreOffice. Now we have an update from allotropia, the company that won the tender:

This is to report the recent activities we performed.

  • We held a presentation during this year’s FOSDEM conference, giving an in-depth account of what we did, why we did it, and the problems we’ve met. Both video and slides are available, licensed as CC-BY 2.0 BE currently.
  • We’ve accompanied that with a blog post, going into detail.
  • Additionally, we’ve fixed a number of additional bugs; all told, we believe the implementation is now definitely production-ready (and likely quite better than the old ones).

All included, we provided a total of 126 commits, that went into this development work (there were also 7 community contributions), which includes the previous work by Giuseppe. You can see the full list from the core repo, via:

git log --grep='webdav-curl'

…or see this link. From our side, this now concludes work on this tender. We hope the services rendered were satisfactory, and both The Document Foundation and the LibreOffice users will enjoy the new implementation!

LibreOffice ecosystem interview: Thorsten Behrens at allotropia

LibreOffice is developed by a worldwide community, made up of volunteers, certified developers and companies in the wider ecosystem. Today we’re talking to Thorsten Behrens, who serves on The Document Foundation’s Board of Directors and works for allotropia…

Tell us a bit about yourself!

I’m Thorsten Behrens, living in Hamburg, Germany. With a great team of LibreOffice experts, I run allotropia software GmbH, which specialises in Open Source and Open Standards consulting and products.

The code and the project itself had me involved from 2001 on (then still called OpenOffice.org).

What does allotropia provide in the LibreOffice ecosystem?

We strive to be a full-service shop for all things LibreOffice. Just to list a few examples, we have helped companies to train their internal development team alongside a LibreOffice migration; we’re regularly developing bug fixes and new features for the office suite, and we’re also maintaining a number of extensions for the benefit of the entire ecosystem (e.g. the LibreOffice Eclipse development plugin, the Edit in LibreOffice Nextcloud plugin, or the LibreOffice Starter Extension).

Additionally, we’re offering LTS (long-time supported) versions of LibreOffice, via our partner CIB software GmbH. In the same vein, we also maintain customer-specific LTS branches, in case a larger organisation has decided to stick with one particular version of the suite.

And not to forget, allotropia also sponsors Michael Stahl, one of the editors of the OpenDocument Format, to keep the ODF standard evolving and keeping up with all the new LibreOffice features that need saving to disk.

What has allotropia been working on in LibreOffice 7.3?

Besides lots of smaller additions for LibreOffice 7.3, one of the highlights we’re currently working on is a port of LibreOffice to directly run in a browser – without any need for a server installation. We’re provisionally calling it LOWA – LibreOffice WebAssembly, since WebAssembly (WASM) is the underlying browser technology this is using.

 

Another feature we’re quite proud of, is the rewrite of LibreOffice’s old network file access code. That work was sponsored by The Document Foundation, has landed in 7.3, solved a number of long-standing problems, and at the same time got rid of over 17,000 lines of (pretty old) code.

Looking beyond this release, what else are you planning to do?

There’s just a ton of work still to do, to make the LOWA LibreOffice really usable, so that will keep us pretty busy this year. Beyond that, we’re always eager to help making the overall developer experience for LibreOffice better – that helps us too, in our daily work! Along those lines, there’s another project currently underway, called CoverRest, to bring better and nicer integration with code coverage, static analysis and general code checking into the LibreOffice development process.

Find out more

LibreOffice ecosystem interview: Caolán McNamara at Red Hat

LibreOffice is developed by a worldwide community, made up of volunteers, certified developers and companies in the wider ecosystem. Today we’re talking to Caolán McNamara, a long-time LibreOffice developer who works for Red Hat…

Tell us a bit about yourself!

I’m a Principal Engineer at Red Hat, Inc. on the Desktop Team since 2004! And I live on the west coast of Ireland.

What does Red Hat do in the LibreOffice ecosystem?

We try and do a lot of different things, from integration with the GNOME desktop, Calc and UNO work, and porting to architectures such as aarch64 and ppc64le, but I can highlight some of the efforts we make in detecting flaws close to when they get introduced into LibreOffice.

We maintain the regular crashtesting infrastructure, where we import and export 120,000+ documents and typically fix, or identify the triggering commit, any new import/export failures as they are discovered.

Similarly, we maintain the LibreOffice Coverity instance and work to keep the warnings to an effectively zero level in over six million lines of code, as part of that early detection of code flaw process.

In the same theme, we manage the LibreOffice OSS-Fuzz work and work to maintain the level of import related issues to a minimum, especially as a tool to detect potentially security related regressions before they are released, with over 1000 fixed to date.

We recently released LibreOffice 7.3 – what did you work on in that version?

The last user interface feature I did for 7.3 was a little rework of the calc autofilter dropdown, to add “popup on hover” of the color filter submenus and adding color names and some other tweaks, which itself was just an extension of Samuel Mehrbrodt’s (allotropia) more substantial LibreOffice 7.2 work to support color filtering in the autofilter.

Another feature we worked on that landed in upstream 7.3 was extension of the command line conversion of spreadsheets to comma separated value files to additionally support the optional export of each tab of a spreadsheet to a separate output CSV file.

Looking beyond this release, what else are you planning to do?

I’m working on GTK4 version of LibreOffice. It’s not finished by any means, but it’s mostly functional and making progress.

Follow Caolán’s LibreOffice work on his blog, and check out his FOSDEM talk about the GTK4 port.

Using a Matrix Bridge with LibreOffice IRC Channels

Hossein Nourikhah writes:

Ever wondered about using modern chat tools to discuss LibreOffice? Here we will discuss using a Matrix bridge to connect to the LibreOffice IRC rooms, to participate more efficiently in LibreOffice-related discussions.

Traditionally, IRC has been the preferred way of communication for the FOSS communities including the LibreOffice community. There are multiple IRC rooms that you can join, and the one related to the LibreOffice development is #libreoffice-dev at Libera Chat network. A more complete list is in the TDF Wiki:

IRC is an open protocol, and there are many clients for it. With the modern IRC clients, some of the shortcoming of the earlier IRC clients are now resolved. For example, you can use encryption in your connection.

https://libera.chat/guides/connect#accessing-liberachat-via-tls

On the other hand, IRC still has its drawbacks. You have to be online to get the messages, and you will lose the messages that was sent when you were offline. There are solutions like “IRC bouncers” that can help resolve this specific issue, but when compared to the modern chat clients and protocols, IRC still falls behind. So, many people prefer the new tools for chat.

But, is there a way to connect these two worlds, old and new? Fortunately there is a solution: using a Matrix bridge.

Using the Matrix Bridge for the LibreOffice IRC Channels

To use the matrix bridge for the LibreOffice IRC channels, first you need a Matrix account. Then, by clicking on the link below you can connect to the “LibreOffice space“, and see the LibreOffice channels in Matrix:

https://matrix.to/#/#libreoffice-space:matrix.org

"<yoastmark

You don’t have an account? No problem! You can register one at matrix.org. It is as easy as a simple sign up, by entering username, password and your e-mail. You have to verify your e-mail address by opening a link sent to your inbox.

You, or your organization can have your own Matrix home server. If not, you can stick to matrix.org account. In any way, having a Matrix account lets you to join the LibreOffice space.

Join LibreOffice space
Join LibreOffice space

Subsequently, after joining the LibreOffice space you can join separate rooms and enjoy the Matrix bridge!

Join rooms in the LibreOffice space which uses Matrix bridge to IRC
Join rooms in the LibreOffice space which uses Matrix bridge to IRC

Then, if you look at the users list in the IRC rooms, you see several people with [m] after their names. They are usually people that are using Matrix bridge. If you are also using Matrix bridges, you can use the Matrix for private messages and use all the features available in Matrix protocol and client.

Finally, we hope that you enjoy the LibreOffice space on Matrix, and have fun!

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