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LibreOffice Documentation Team Activities in 2020

In 2020, the documentation community released many updated guidebooks, translated them into several languages, and participated in the Google Season of Docs

(This is part of The Document Foundation’s Annual Report for 2020 – the full version is here.)

New and translated guides

In January 2020, just before release of LibreOffice 6.4, the Documentation Team was proud to announce the Math Guide 6.4, an update of the previous version (4.0), updated to cover all of the innovations included in the latest release of the software. The guide was updated by Roman Kuznetsov and revised by Dave Barton from the documentation community. This was followed by the Calc Guide 6.2, a long-awaited update of the old Calc Guide 4.4.

In May, the guide to Base for LibreOffice 6.2 was released, covering, LibreOffice’s database component. It was updated by Pulkit Krishna, Dan Lewis, Jean Hollis Weber, Alain Romedenne, Jean-Pierre Ledure and Randolph Gamo. Another update in May was the Getting Started Guide 6.4 – the introductory guide for the latest LibreOffice 6.4, aimed to the general public interested to quickly get familiar with the software. It’s available as a PDF for offline reading, and ODT (OpenDocument Text) for editors and translators.

In summer, the Documentation Team announced the availability of the LibreOffice Draw Guide 6.4, the complete handbook for the drawing tool of LibreOffice. The guide was updated from the existing release (4.3) and include all the improvements developed since early 2014, when the last version of the guide was published.

Then there was the LibreOffice Calc Guide 6.4, the complete handbook for the spreadsheet tool. It was also updated from the existing release (6.2) and included all of the improvements developed in Calc since then.

In October, the Math Guide 7.0 was published – being the first guide based on LibreOffice 7.0. The effort was mostly carried by Rafael Lima and reviewed by Jean H. Weber. The new guide covers were designed by Rizal Muttaqin and Drew Jensen. The final publication was carried by Olivier Hallot. This was followed by the Calc Guide 7.0, a team effort of Steve Fanning, Gordon Bates, Kees Kriek, Annie Nguyen, Samantha Hamilton, Olivier Hallot and Jean Hollis Weber, coordinated by Felipe Viggiano.

Many guides were also translated in to various languages, thanks to our worldwide communities. For more information on their work, and the specific guides that they translated, see the “Native Language “Projects” section of this Annual Report.

Google Season of Docs

For the second year in a row, The Document Foundation was accepted as an organization in the Google Season of Docs, a programme whose goals are to give technical writers an opportunity to participate in contributing to open source projects, and to give open source projects an opportunity to engage the technical writing community.

In 2020, TDF’s documentation community offered a wide range of projects for technical writers, and extended the reach by providing projects for e-learning, mathematical documentation and code-oriented documentation.

TDF received several applications, containing important information including the technical writer’s resumés, proposals for project schedule and suggested deliverables. After a careful evaluation by the project mentors, TDF accepted the application of Ronnie Gandhi, a computer science undergraduate student enrolled at IIT Roorkee, India.

Steve Fanning, who had already worked as coordinator of the Calc Guide, served as mentor with Olivier Hallot as second mentor. Ilmari Lauhakangas and Olivier managed the administrative aspects of the project on behalf of The Document Foundation.

Ronnie worked on improving the descriptions for Calc’s functions, adding statements describing each function’s compliance with the Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) Version 1.2 specification. Each function was also supplemented by extra use cases, illustrations and external references (where applicable).

Access the Extensive Calc Functions Description on The Document Foundation’s wiki. Thanks to Ronnie for all his work, and the mentors for assisting him on his journey.

Like what we do? Support the LibreOffice project and The Document Foundation – get involved and help our volunteers, or consider making a donation. Thank you!

TDF Annual Report 2020

The Annual Report of The Document Foundation for the year 2020 is now available in PDF format from TDF Nextcloud in three different versions: low resolution (4.7MB), medium resolution (18MB) and high resolution (24.7MB). The annual report is based on the German version presented to the authorities in April.

The 54 page document has been entirely created with free open source software: written contents have obviously been developed with LibreOffice Writer (desktop) and collaboratively modified with LibreOffice Writer (online), charts have been created with LibreOffice Calc and prepared for publishing with LibreOffice Draw, drawings and tables have been developed or modified (from legacy PDF originals) with LibreOffice Draw, images have been prepared for publishing with GIMP, and the layout has been created with Scribus based on the existing templates.

All pictures are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 License, courtesy of TDF Members from all over the world. Stock photos are CC0 by Pixabay.

Lothar Becker, Chairman of TDF Board of Directors, has written in the welcome address:

You will learn that our jubilee year was one of the most successful in our history. With all activities that took place, despite the situation that we could rarely meet in-person, it is really really incredible how the local communities and all supra-national activities carried on. And furthermore we grew in every aspect: our community base has more contributors than ever, and we had an impressive number of releases of LibreOffice, with a lot of code contributions – especially for the new major release of LibreOffice 7.0. And last but not least, the financial report of the foundation shows a year better than ever.

Certainly, we also had some shortfalls last year, starting with the lack of personal meetings and the consequences in the relationships between members – but also with changes and moves in the community and its ecosystem within. And let’s not forget the members of the community who suffered from bad health because of the pandemic situation. But overall, we could feel lucky and proud coming out of this year strengthened as described in this annual report. For all shortfalls, we are working hard in all TDF bodies (the Board, the old and new Membership Committee, the Advisory Board, the team led by Florian Effenberger), with the whole membership as well as national and international parts of the community.

So for all these activities, code and non-code contributions, personal engagements and donations we truly say a big THANK YOU, thank all of you for being with TDF in such a special year for every one of us.

Tender to implement the new TDF Membership Committee’s web-based tooling (#202105-01)

Introduction

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

The main activity of the Foundation’s Membership Committee (MC) is to administer membership applications and renewals following the criteria defined in the Foundation’s statutes.

Tender description

We are looking for an individual or company to implement the new TDF Membership Committee’s web-based tooling.

The tasks consists of developing and implementing this tooling. All of the mentioned features and requirements are explained in detail in the provided document “MC tooling specifications”, which is to be considered a part of this tender. The document lists which items are a part of the deliverables and therefore have to be part of the bid.

Note that this tender also contain some optional items, which are marked respectively. All items that are not explicitly marked as optional are to be considered mandatory.

The solution we seek, and as such the scope of this tender, is to implement the new TDF Membership Committee’s web-based tooling that will support the Membership Committee during the daily business.

Decision criteria

All technology standards of relevance, as well as their targeted versions for this tender should be declared or defined in the offer’s description of implementation.

Amongst the decision criteria for the bids are qualification, references, price, and completeness of fulfillment, as well as documentation. We expect bidders to provide documentation on the code, optionally also on the system administrator part.

Requirements

We prefer the use of a secure programming environment. As such, we strongly prefer Python/Django or Ruby on Rails over PHP. The use of server-side Java has to be discussed with TDF’s infrastructure team before bidding. In order to do so, please get in touch with us using the e-mail address below.

We strongly prefer the use of FOSS software and libraries, i.e. for DBMS, crypto and mailing.

The delivered software, code, documentation and all associated parts shall be published under an OSI approved license (see https://opensource.org/licenses) with TDF as owner of the copyright as well as all transferable rights. TDF intends to make the deliverables available to the general public.

Proposed milestones

Milestone #1 – Defining of the architecture; initial prototype with testing and knowledge sharing (with the Membership Committee) about the new solution; usability improvements. Main process elements like voting are tested and work fine. Implementation of the database and the management back-end user interface to interact with it. Import of member information from the old database.

Access to the current production database can be granted to the successful bidder after signing a privacy and non-disclosure agreement. Otherwise, and less preferred, a database with anonymized sample data will be provided.

Milestone #2 – Handling of a new request to become a member of TDF.

Milestone #3 – Have the membership renewal process working.

Milestone #4 – Move the full daily work of the membership committee to the new platform; all voting can be done directly with the new platform. The implementation of reporting and mail system must be completely functional for:

  • Receipt of application
  • Mail for accepted applicants
  • Mail for denied applicants
  • Mail for pending applicants
  • Quarterly report on accepted members in English
  • Quarterly report on accepted members in German

Milestone #5 – Implement and test:

  • Reminders for MC members
  • All time-triggered jobs
  • Quarterly report as CSV file
  • Database integrity check by checking the signature and re-reading this file
  • Deleting of obsolete records cleanup

Required skills

  • Extensive knowledge of Python/Django or Ruby on Rails
  • Extensive knowledge of front-end and back-end development of web-based applications
  • Extensive knowledge of design and implementation of accessible web-based applications
  • Experience in working on open source projects

Other skills

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

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.

TDF is looking forward to receiving your applications for the aforementioned tasks, your offer in form of a fixed-time, fixed-budget approach, and the duration period for the implementation in calendar weeks of the mentioned milestones after the final awarding of the tender, via e-mail to a committee at tender20210501@documentfoundation.org no later than June 23, 2021.

Applicants who have not received feedback by July 21, 2021 should consider that their application, after careful review, was not accepted.

All bidders are invited to ask their questions on this tender until June 11, 2021. Questions can be sent informally to the above e-mail address, and answers will be made public in a collected and anonymized form.

LinkedIn Pages, an invitation to subscribe

The Document Foundation has launched the foundation and the LibreOffice LinkedIn pages a while ago, followed in late 2020 by the LibreOffice Enterprise LinkedIn page. These resources have never been promoted in a serious and continuous way, so they have grown organically during the years to reach respectively 1,112, 949 and 171 followers. Given the growing importance of LinkedIn as a source of information, it is now time to leverage the effective potential of these content resources for the growth of the project, especially in areas which are tangent to the FOSS ecosystem.

As usual, we need the help of TDF and community members to grow the number of people subscribed to these pages, and to add contents about community activities, product development, migrations, large enterprise deployments, and the open document format. In general, community activities should be published on The Document Foundation page, product development and open document format news on the LibreOffice page, migrations and large enterprise deployments on the LibreOffice Enterprise page. We are happy to receive your content suggestions, and to put them online.

The Document Foundation LinkedIn page
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LibreOffice LinkedIn page
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LibreOffice Enterprise LinkedIn page
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Tender to implement Curl based HTTP/WebDAV UCP (#202104-01)

Note: for questions asked about this tender and their respective answers, please see the bottom of this page

We are extending the application deadline.

The deadline for questions stays as in the original tender: June 15, 2021
The deadline for applications has been extended to: June 24, 2021

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 implement Curl based HTTP/WebDAV UCP.

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

The task consists of addressing two problems. All of the mentioned features and requirements are a mandatory part of this tender and therefore have to be part of the bid. This tender does not contain any optional items.

Problem description #1 – Currently we need to bundle crypto libraries

  • TDF releases of LibreOffice bundle both OpenSSL and NSS, but both libraries have a high number of security issues.
  • On macOS and Windows, neither OpenSSL nor NSS integrate with the crytographic APIs supplied by the operating system, so they will use a bundled hard-coded set of trusted certificate authorities (CAs), that is different from what the operating system itself would trust. This hard-coded set of trusted certificates is also not user-modifiable.
  • Additionally, OpenSSL cannot ever be used from the system because it has no application binary interface (ABI).

Problem description #2 – Currently we duplicate and use different HTTP/WebDAV UCPs

  • One which is used by everybody, including TDF releases, using a bundled Neon WebDAV library. This requires OpenSSL and cannot be used on a hypothetical Apple iOS port.
  • Another (for a hypothetical Apple iOS port) using a bundled Serf library. This requires OpenSSL.
    • Serf does not actually support WebDAV directly, only HTTP, so the UCP itself implements the additional WebDAV protocol features.
    • It is complicated to build, as it drags in two other bundled external libraries.
    • Additionally, this cannot be upgraded to a current version without introducing a new build dependency on the “scons” tool.
  • TDF releases also bundle the Curl library.
    • This can can do HTTP, likely similar to Serf.
    • Also, it can use native operating system cryptographic APIs and trusted certificate authorities (CAs) on Windows, macOS and Linux.
    • It can be used on Apple iOS without problems. (iOS deliverables are not part of this tender.)

The solution we seek, and as such the scope of this tender, is to implement a HTTP/WebDAV UCP with Curl, possibly based on code from the Serf UCP, to solve these issues, by getting rid of four bundled external libraries and one hard OpenSSL dependency. Besides addressing the above issues, the new Curl-based implementation needs to be at least as functionally complete as the existing Neon-based one.

All technology standards of relevance, as well as their targeted versions for this tender should be declared or defined in the offer’s description of implementation (e.g. name and version of the cryptographic API on the respective operating systems).

A key item of the deliverables for this tender, and therefore also a decision criteria – besides qualification, references, price, and completeness of fullfilment – is extensive documentation about the approach chosen to implement the above items, covering more than just the pure implementation. 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. Another criteria for the evaluation of the bids will be the description of the required test activities and the delivery of (automated) tests supporting work items for the described tender implementation or feature specification.

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. For such developers, who have not yet been part of a successful tender bid, we aim on a best-effort basis, but without any guarantees whatsoever, to provide some mentoring in understanding the code base and the process in contributing to the code. We expect that time and efforts on the bidder’s side for this should not be part of the paid work for this tender. Please mention such need of LibreOffice development mentoring in your offer.

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 the aforementioned tasks, your offer in form of a fixed-time, fixed-budget approach, and the duration period for the implementation in calendar weeks after the final awarding of the tender, via e-mail to a committee at tender20210401@documentfoundation.org no later than May 31, 2021.

Applicants who have not received feedback by June 30, 2021 should consider that their application, after careful review, was not accepted.

All bidders are invited to ask their questions on this tender until June 15, 2021. Questions can be sent informally to the above e-mail address, and answers will be made public in a collected and anonymized form.

We received the following question:

“getting rid of four bundled external libraries” – Could you please clarify what these four libraries are?

Answer: the text only indirectly mentions that serf “is complicated to build, as it drags in two other bundled external libraries”, which are apr and its dependency apr_util (both in external/apr/). So the “four bundled external libraries” would be apr, apr_util, neon, and serf. (There are still other dependencies on openssl, like ExternalProject_python3 and ExternalProject_xmlsec, so we will not get rid of it through this tender.)

We received the following question:

Could you please expand a bit on:

1. the meaning of ‘extensive documentation’, e.g. number of pages or words, and level of detail (classes, functions, line-by-line) that would meet the acceptance criteria?

2. the target audience (e.g. certified LibreOffice developers, or more general?) and purpose of the documentation (e.g. teaching, reference, new implementations, maintenance), as well as form (document format) and acceptable publishing location (e.g. inline, separate-but-within-the-code-base, wiki, or elsewhere)?

Answer: There is no fixed criteria for the documentation. Our goal is to share the knowledge about the approach chosen to address the problem and/or implement the feature, in order to make that information available to the general public.

The target audience is a suitably skilled developer. As such, industry-standard inline documentation in the code, targetting experienced and/or certified LibreOffice developers, plus documenting any non-obvious design choices in an accompanying README file, would be sufficient.

Annual Report: LibreOffice in 2020

In 2020, LibreOffice celebrated its tenth birthday. Two new major versions of the suite introduced a variety of new features, while minor releases helped to improve stability as well

(This is part of The Document Foundation’s Annual Report for 2020 – the full version will be posted here on the blog soon.)

The Document Foundation announced two major releases of LibreOffice in 2020: version 6.4 on January 29, and version 7.0 on August 5. In addition, 13 minor releases were made available over the year:

RELEASE DATE
LibreOffice 6.3.5 February 20
LibreOffice 6.4.1 February 27
LibreOffice 6.4.2 March 19
LibreOffice 6.4.3 April 16
LibreOffice 6.3.6 April 30
LibreOffice 6.4.4 May 21
LibreOffice 6.4.5 July 2
LibreOffice 6.4.6 August 13
LibreOffice 7.0.1 September 3
LibreOffice 7.0.2 October 8
LibreOffice 6.4.7 October 22
LibreOffice 7.0.3 October 29
LibreOffice 7.0.4 December 17

Throughout the year, we held three Bug Hunting Sessions in preparation for new major releases. These typically took place on a single day between set times, so that experienced developers and QA engineers could help new volunteers to file and triage bugs via the IRC channels and mailing lists. The Bug Hunting Sessions for LibreOffice 7.0 were held on May 11 and July 6 – while the one for LibreOffice 7.1 took place on October 26.

LibreOffice 6.4

On January 29, LibreOffice 6.4 was officially released after six months of work. Developers at Collabora, CIB, Red Hat, SIL and other companies – along with volunteers – worked on many new features. For instance, a QR Code generator was added to the suite, making it easy to add QR codes (which can be read by mobile devices) to documents.

Hyperlink context menus were unified throughout the software to provide the following menu entries: Open Hyperlink, Edit Hyperlink, Copy Hyperlink Location and Remove Hyperlink.

Meanwhile, a new Automatic Redaction feature was added to hide classified or sensitive data in a document, based on text or regular expression matches, while the help system was reworked to provide faster and more precise search results – and many help pages were given localized screenshots for a better user experience.

TDF produced a video to explain and demonstrate many of the new features in LibreOffice 6.4. This was linked to in the announcement, and embedded into various web news websites that covered the release:

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LibreOffice 7.0

Later in the year, on August 5, TDF released LibreOffice 7.0. OpenDocument, LibreOffice’s native open and standardised format for office documents, was updated to version 1.3 as an OASIS Technical Committee Specification. Important new features included digital signatures and OpenPGP-based encryption of XML documents, with improvements in areas such as change tracking, and additional details in the description of elements in first pages, text, numbers and charts. The development of ODF 1.3’s features was funded by donations to The Document Foundation, and the implementation was done by CIB and other developers in the ecosystem.

Additionally, support for Skia graphics engine was added thanks to sponsorship by AMD, and was set as the default on Windows, for faster performance. Skia is an open source 2D graphics library which provides common APIs that work across a variety of hardware and software platforms, and can be used for drawing text, shapes and images. Vulkan is a new-generation graphics and compute API with high-efficiency and cross-platform access to modern GPUs. Luboš Luňák (Collabora) did a large part of the work to support Skia.

Many other features were added as well, and there were a large number of compatibility improvements.

As with the previous release, TDF staff worked with the LibreOffice community to make a video (PeerTube version here) to demonstrate the new features:

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Like what we do? Support the LibreOffice project and The Document Foundation – get involved and help our volunteers, or consider making a donation. Thank you!

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