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LibreOffice contributor interview: Stanislav Horáček

Next up in our regular series of interviews with LibreOffice developers and contributors is Stanislav Horáček, who helps with localization in the Czech native language community.

LibreOffice contributor Stanislav HoráčekWhere are you from, and what is your nickname on IRC?

I am from the Czech Republic, and you can find me on IRC using the nicknames “horacek” or “strepon”.

Do you work for a LibreOffice-related company or just contribute in your spare time?

Just in my spare time – and that’s why there is a gap between my plans and reality 🙂

How did you get involved with LibreOffice?

Several years ago, I tried to set up custom page numbering in Writer, which was described in the built-in Help – but the Help page was written in half Czech, half English. Because I was glad that I discovered the solution of my problem, I decided to complete the page translation. As I found translating quite relaxing, that page was just a beginning…

What areas of the project do you normally work on?

Czech localization mainly; plus some corrections or bug reports for issues that I find when translating. Some time in the future, I would also like to go deeper into coding of extensions. They can be extremely helpful and it’s a pity that they are not widely promoted currently. For instance, I see a nice opportunity to use LibreOffice as a convenient front-end to another tools.

What was your initial experience of contributing to LibreOffice like?

From the beginning, I met helpful and encouraging people and I really appreciate that most of the discussions are constructive, with facts more important than feelings. I think these are the most precious properties that the community has; they made LibreOffice become my number one open source project. On the other hand, whenever I see a lack of them, I image that one more potential contributor could be demotivated…

Moreover, LibreOffice has a great advantage in that it is so widespread. I was – and still I am – impressed that you can really easily make improvements which will appear on screens of millions of people.

Which is your preferred text editor?

For LibreOffice related stuff, I use a universal text editor called Geany. But in general, I like also specialized editors or IDEs.

What do you do when you’re not working on LibreOffice?

I would say my hobbies are typically Czech, like beer drinking 🙂 You can also see me during the holidays in some of the European mountains, amongst lots of other Czech tourists. And who knows, maybe one day contributing to free software will be our national interest as well…

Thanks Stanislav. And to anyone reading this who wants to help out with translation and localisation of LibreOffice, get involved! Your contributions can make a huge difference, and will help to bridge digital divides across the globe.

LibreOffice contributor interview: Tamás Bunth

LibreOffice developers, testers, translators and documentation authors are working hard on LibreOffice 5.3, which is due for release in early February. One contributor to the project, Tamás Bunth, has been helping to improve Base, the database front-end of the suite. We caught up with him to ask how he got involved with LibreOffice and what the community is like…

Where do you live, and are you active on IRC channels or social media?

I’m Hungarian, and I live in Budapest. My IRC nickname is Wastack (the name comes from the game Heroes of Might and Magic, one of my favourite games from childhood – Wastack is a barbarian hero). I’m on Facebook too: https://www.facebook.com/btomi96.

Do you work for a LibreOffice-related company or just contribute in your spare time?

I did some work for Libreoffice as a Google Summer of Code (GSoC) student last year. In the future I’ll contribute in my spare time.

How did you get involved with LibreOffice?

One of my roommates in my student hostel suggested that we should try GSoC. I was searching for an end user application written in Java or C++, since these are the languages I’m comfortable with. As I looked at the Easy Hacks I realised that I may be able to solve some of these, and the developer community was helpful as well.

What areas of the project do you normally work on? Anything else you want to tackle?

My GSoC project was to upgrade the internal Firebird database management system, which is used by LibreOffice Base, and solve related bugs, which makes Firebird an experimental feature. Therefore, I got to know the drivers in some detail, and I think I’ll stick to this area in the future.

What was your initial experience of contributing to LibreOffice like?

When I first looked at the C++ code in the repository, it was scary, since even a simple string is called OUString. After that I found some UNO interfaces, and I really don’t know what was going on there. Of course, after some time and guidance from my mentor things got much clearer.

Which is your preferred text editor – and why?

Vim is my favourite. Well, I don’t now many other editors, but Vim is highly customisable. I like the recording feature too.

What do you do when you’re not working on LibreOffice?

I am a 2nd year Bachelor of Science student of Budapest University of Technology and Economics. In my free time I go rowing. This year I got 4th place on the National Championship of Hungary in eights crew. I’ve achieved two first places there, but I’ve never been in an international race. It is one of my future goals.

Any other hobbies or projects you’re working on?

When I still have some free time, I like writing little computer games. I started with a simple snake game using Flash several years ago, which was followed by a Tetris with Java Swing and a multiplayer Tron game using TCP (still Java). Currently, I have an incomplete project of a browser game, where you have to move simultaneously with figures on a map. It is written in JavaScript, with Node.js on the server side.

Thanks Tamás! And thanks to everyone else who’s working on making LibreOffice 5.3 the best release yet. If you’re reading this and want to join a friendly and busy community promoting open standards and document liberation, get involved!

LibreOffice contributor interview: Hazel Russman

A new year begins, and we kick off with our first LibreOffice contributor interview of 2017. This time we’re talking to Hazel Russman who helps out with documentation and translations…

Where do you live, and are you active on social media?

I’m British and live in North London. I don’t do social media but I have a web page at www.hrussman.entadsl.com.

Do you work for a LibreOffice-related company or just contribute in your spare time?

I’m retired. I help out the documentation team mainly as a translator and proofreader.

How did you get involved with LibreOffice?

I wrote a novel some years ago and used OpenOffice.org to get it into shape for self-publishing. I wanted to give something back, and the OOo site suggested that time might be more valuable than money. When LibreOffice forked off, I moved over to their team.

What areas of the project do you normally work on? Anything else you want to tackle?

I’ve done quite a bit of translation from German into English, especially for Base, which has an excellent German handbook. Until I translated it, there was hardly anything on Base in English. English is my native language, but I grew up in a German-speaking home. My parents were refugees from Hitler. I’m also quite well known on the team as a proofreader.

What was your initial experience of contributing to LibreOffice like?

Interesting and very satisfying. But I’ve never been much interested in socialising online.

Which is your preferred text editor, and why?

For plain text, I like gVim. It has all the Vim keyboard commands but also graphical controls. The best of both worlds, you might say. I do a bit of coding in my spare time and for that I use Geany. Both Vim and Geany do syntax checking, which is a great help.

What do you do when you’re not working on LibreOffice?

Lots of things! I have a dog who takes up a lot of my time. I am active in my local church and play the cello as part of an instrumental group attached to the church’s gospel choir. I am also quite active on Linux Questions, which is the only social networking that I can be bothered with.

Thanks Hazel! We’ll be posting more interviews over the coming weeks and months, so if you want to join the LibreOffice community, pop over to tdf.io/joinus and choose how you want to get involved. We look forward to your input and contributions!

LibreOffice contributor video interviews

Our “join the LibreOffice community” video includes snippets from interviews with LibreOffice contributors. Want to see the three interviews in full? Here’s the playlist – click the icon in the top-left to switch between the videos…

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LibreOffice contributor interview: Leif Lodahl

With the Month of LibreOffice nearly over (stay tuned for a wrap-up!) we now return to our regular interviews with contributors to the project. This week it’s the turn of Leif Lodahl, who helps out with localization…

 

What do you do in the LibreOffice project?

I am the lead of the Danish localization team, and I live and work in the Copenhagen Area in Denmark. You can find my LibreOffice contributions and social media accounts here:

I live with my wife Marianne (with whom I have just celebrated our 25th wedding anniversary) in the suburbs to Copenhagen. My two sons are both adults and have left our home.

 

Do you work for a LibreOffice-related company or just contribute in your spare time?

Until September 1st I was working as project manager and business developer in the company Magenta. From September 1st I’m working as IT architect at City of Ballerup (Ballerup Municipality). My work for (and with) LibreOffice has, until recently, been both professional and in my spare time.

 

How did you get involved with LibreOffice?

Many years ago, when OpenOffice.org was at version 1.1.0, I accidentally found the project and complained about the machine-translated graphical user interface (GUI). I then started improving the GUI and when Sun Microsystems was preparing OpenOffice.org 2.0 we managed to translate both the GUI and the Help content.

 

What areas of the project do you normally work on?

I’m primarily working as the country and language lead, but have also been involved in LibreOffice as member of the Membership Committee. As one of the founding members I have been with The Document Foundation from the beginning.

Over the years I have been involved in implementation projects in various public organizations in Denmark, and back in 2006 I was engaged in the public and political discussions in Denmark about open standards.

In 2015 I was in charge of organizing the LibreOffice Conference in Aarhus, Denmark.

 

What was your initial experience of contributing to LibreOffice like?

Back in the OpenOffice.org days I found that contributing to the project by translating was pretty easy and I could see my own contributions in later releases, which was very encouraging.

 

What do you do in your spare time?

“Run, Forrest, Run.” I usually run at least twice a week. Not because of the completion – just for the health benefits. Also, once a week I have the pleasure of taking care of a six year-old child with both physical and mental disabilities.

 

Thanks Leif! And to all blog readers: if you want to improve the localization of LibreOffice in your language or location, you can get involved here. Thanks in advance for your contributions!

Document Liberation Project interview: Alex Pantechovskis

Alexis Pantechovskis LibreOffice developer

While most of our recent interviews have been focused on LibreOffice, this week we’re talking to someone involved in our sister project, the Document Liberation Project (DLP). If you’ve never heard of DLP before, watch our short video for an overview.

Alex Pantechovskis is a new contributor to the DLP, and has been working on libzmf, a library for importing Zoner Callisto/Draw documents.

Where are you based, what’s your IRC nickname, and GitHub profile?

I live in Lithuania, Vilnius. My IRC nick is AlexP11223, and my GitHub profile is at https://github.com/AlexP11223.

What prompted you to start work on libzmf?

It was a Google Summer of Code (GSoC) project. I thought that this project is interesting for me and the most suitable for my skills, so I contacted the mentor (David Tardon) via IRC and started working on it.

What was the biggest challenge working on the library?

ZMF4 is not the most complex file format (ZMF2 for example is much more complex, and this is one of the reasons why only ZMF4 is supported in libzmf so far), so working with it was not very difficult. But still there were some challenges, mostly related to reverse engineering: in binary formats it is often difficult to understand the exact structure of each element. Some small pieces such as vertical text align in tables are still not covered. Sometimes first attempts are found to be wrong as more details are uncovered, requiring rewrites of related code in the library.

Another challenge is: in some cases, when a feature doesn’t work as expected, it may be difficult or time-consuming to determine what causes this: wrong format understanding, wrong implementation, incorrect usage of librevenge and other libraries, bugs in libodfgen, bugs in LibreOffice…

What do you want to do next? (Either with libzmf or another library)

I don’t know – currently I am busy with studying at university, and some other things. It is possible that I will continue working on libzmf later, to add some of the missing features, or one of the other libraries.

What does the Document Liberation Project mean to you?

A great community doing important work.

How can others help to contribute to the DLP and open up proprietary files?

There are many ways to help. The most obvious is of course development: creating a new import library for some file format or improving one of the existing libraries or tools.

Also, most proprietary file formats do not have published specifications, so in order to work with them the structure needs to be reverse engineered and documented (preferably by contributing to OLE Toy project).

Another way, that does not require any programming skills, is creating and contributing sample documents for regression testing. It is an important but time-consuming task, because the documents should cover all format features (such as all parameters that can be set for a shape in a drawing application, or all text formatting options) and also many formats have more than one versions, so a separate set of documents is needed for each version.

What’s your favourite text editor and why?

For simple text, config files etc. I usually use whatever is available such as gEdit and Vim – on Windows I usually use Notepad++.

For coding I prefer IDEs like Visual Studio (C/C++, .NET) or JetBrains products (web development, Python, Java). I like the features offered by IDEs such as powerful refactoring, code completion, error/warning highlighting, convenient integrated debugging etc., and I have a powerful PC with SSD and a lot of RAM, so performance is usually not an issue. But I understand why many developers prefer editors like Vim (better text editing productivity, consistency, available everywhere), and it is especially relevant for big projects with complex build systems like LibreOffice, where it is hard/impossible to fully integrate (and maintain) an IDE.

During libzmf development I worked on Linux because it would be much more difficult to set up the needed environment on Windows (acquiring/building dependencies like Boost, librevenge, libtool, Autotools), so I used Qt Creator IDE. It allows developers to easily create a non-Qt C++ project from source files – and it worked fine most of the time.

Thanks Alex! And to anyone reading this who wants to get involved, join us and help to free the world from closed, proprietary file formats.

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