The LibreOffice Engineering Steering Committee (ESC) has appointed Prof. Rafael Henrique Palma Lima, from Federal Technological University of Paraná (UTFPr) as the newest certified LibreOffice developer.
Prof. Lima has been contributing new code to LibreOffice since 2020, and the committee has attested to the quality and value of his contributions to LibreOffice for this certification. We interviewed Prof. Lima, who tells us about the process and what areas of the code he works on.
(more…)
I live in Delhi, India, where I’m working my way towards a bachelor’s degree in IT with a focus on network security at Netaji Subhas University of Technology.
My journey into programming began with QBASIC in school, sparking a love for coding. Since then, I’ve explored everything from game development to operating system internals, embedded systems to mobile apps – anything that catches my interest. My hobbies include learning random science-y things, binge-watching sitcoms, and working late nights only to fall asleep in the middle of the next day 😛
Before the Google Summer of Code (GSoC), my open-source experience was mostly limited to personal projects. Now, I’m much more comfortable filing bug reports, submitting patches, and engaging in code reviews. I also feel more confident in discussing problems and solutions with people I consider far more knowledgeable than me.
I recently completed upgrading the .NET Bindings for UNO as part of GSoC 2024.
Currently, I’m on a short hiatus for exams and personal projects, but I’ve been chipping away at the next item on my future work checklist: adding support for in-process bridging, thus enabling LibreOffice extensions to be created with the new .NET Bindings.
Since switching to Linux a while back, I’ve almost become dependent on the LibreOffice suite to get me through university, having used it for everything from assignments to presentations. The chance to give back to this amazing project, to gain the experience of participating in GSoC, and to tackle a complex .NET and C++ project all at once was too good to pass up.
My experience with the LibreOffice community has been nothing but positive, especially with my mentors, Mr. Hossein Nourikhah and Mr. Thorsten Behrens. Their guidance, paired with the freedom they gave me to make my own decisions on the bindings, was integral to the project’s success.
I’m planning on continuing the .NET Bindings project. While the core of the bindings was completed in time for GSoC, there’s still more features, documentation, and examples to work on.
Additionally, I believe LibreOffice needs more documentation, especially for legacy code. Much of my GSoC time was spent understanding the existing bindings before I could start work on the new ones. Using what all I’ve figured out, I want to try and help the Docs team document the bindings better. I might also consider working on introducing more languages bindings in the future.
Big thanks to Ritobroto for all his contributions! Everyone is welcome to join our community, build new skills, and help to make LibreOffice even better for the whole world 😊
Our Taiwanese community reports back from a recent event:
The LibreOffice Asia Conference 2024 was held in Taipei from 2 – 3 August. This conference was suspended for several years due to the pandemic and was relaunched in Indonesia last year.
In addition to the local community, there were many partners from the Japanese and Indonesian communities, as well as experts from Germany and Italy, representing The Documentation Foundation and the Open Document Format Technical Committee, who attended this conference.
The main visual design of the conference was developed by students at the Open Design Club in National Chengchi University. They boldly adopted the theme of “rice” since that’s a common staple food in Asian countries, and created a series of exquisite logos, icons and merchandise.
Staff in Government Day and the main poster
There were two main topics in this conference: Government Day and Community Day.
The first day, “Government Day”, focused on Open Document Format (ODF) policy and “Public Money, Public Code” (PMPC). Six scholars and experts along with LibreOffice community members were invited to give talks, which covered topics from policy theory to practical practices when adopting ODF and PMPC in government. The audience was mostly made up of users from central and local government units.
The first speaker was Lothar Becker, co-chairman of TDF’s Certification Committee and also a board member of Open Source Business Alliance in Germany. This talk summarized lessons learned from 25 years of migration experiences to LibreOffice Technology in governmental organizations, from famous ones like the “LiMux” project in Munich, to up-to-date migration projects for 30,000 PCs in the government of the German state Schleswig-Holstein.
The second speaker was Prof. Naiyi Hsiao, the chair of Department of Public Administration, National Chengchi University. This session explored what and why the PMPC practice has encountered legal and administrative concerns among the diverse stakeholders.
The third speaker was Director Cheng Ming Wang, the general director of Department of Digital Service, Ministry of Digital Affairs, which is responsible for the ODF policy in Taiwan. His talk introduced three aspects of Taiwan’s ODF promotion: why Taiwan promotes ODF; the process and current status of ODF promotionl and the next steps.
The fourth speaker was Svante Schubert, co-chairman and co-editor of the ODF Technical Committee. His talk briefly gave an introduction to ODF and provided an update. In addition, he explained how the TDF-hosted ODF Toolkit is facilitating daily ODF usage (like for automated document translation).
The fifth speaker was Italo Vignoli, Board of Directors member of The Document Foundation. His talk discussed the role of open source software and open standards in digital sovereignty. Today, user-created content – and the ability to share it transparently – is in the hands of a few companies that take advantage of users’ limited digital culture. This situation can only be overcome by moving from proprietary to open source software and from proprietary to open standards.
The last session was from Prof. Tyng-Ruey Chuang, the Associate Research Fellow/Professor of Institute of Information Science in Academia Sinica, Taiwan. In this presentation, he highlighted the important roles of data infrastructure in facilitating the development and sharing of communal digital resources, and related the practice of communal data infrastructure to the Public Money Public Code (PMPC) initiative.
Group photo of Government Day
The second day of the conference was dedicated to the LibreOffice community, and was organized as a COSCUP session track. Community members from Taiwan, Indonesia, Germany, Italy, and Japan shared various topics. Italo Vignoli spoke about the history and evolution of LibreOffice and The Document Foundation. Lothar Becker shared several funny and ridiculous stories from his experiences helping different organizations to adopt LibreOffice. Two LibreOffice Certified Profession Trainers from Taiwan, Kai-Ju Tsai and Teresa Hou, demonstrated advanced applications of Writer and Calc. The Indonesian community focused on visual design, sharing their experiences in creating presentation templates, vector graphics and themes for LibreOffice.
Additionally, a member of the team who organized last year’s LibreOffice Asia Conference in Indonesia discussed the challenges and joys of planning international events. The Japanese community shared their difficult experiences in advocating LibreOffice to local governments and private sectors in Japan, resonating deeply with participants from other countries!
Italo Vignoli introduced TDF to the Asian community
LibreOffice Certified Professional Trainer Kai-Ju Tsai demonstrated advanced usage of Writer
Two young Indonesian community members showed how they learned to make designs using open source tools like Inkscape and LibreOffice Draw
In addition to the two-day main topics, there were also several additional activities.
On 4 August, the Open Design Club of National Chengchi University held a “Design workshop”. In this workshop, students from ODC and Indonesian community members divided into groups, and were challenged to design a movie poster in 30 minutes. Then they shared their experiences and work of designing using open source tools.
Students from Taiwan and Indonesian community members designed a movie poster together
On 5 August, Franklin Weng, the president of Software Liberty Association Taiwan, led a group of ten international community members, including Svante Schubert, Italo Vignoli and Lothar Becker, to visit the Department of Digital Service, Ministry of Digital Affairs, which is responsible for promoting ODF policies.
They were received by General Director Cheng Ming Wang, Senior Analysts Chun-Wei Tsai and Tsung-Yen Wang, and Section Chief of Application Development, Chun-Chieh Chen. The meeting discussed various possibilities for participating in the ODF Technical Committee and collaborating with The Document Foundation’s certification system, as well as exchanging views on future artificial intelligence (AI) trends.
Visit to Department of Digital Service, Ministry of Digital Affairs
During these days, several major Asian community leaders also reached an agreement that next year’s LibreOffice Asia Conference will be held in Japan. We look forward to LibreOffice/ODF/PMPC taking root more deeply in Asia!
Today we’re talking to Gladys David, who is helping out in LibreOffice’s Quality Assurance (QA) project…
Hi! My name is gladys, I’m 41 years old and I’m French. I’ve been living in Espoo (Finland) for about six years – it’s a country where I always wanted to live. Previously I stayed in London for 10 years, and was in France before that.
I work in fashion retail management, and like to hike, read, go to the sauna and my garden. I always wanted to work in IT, but as I had no experience in computer science, I never got the courage to start. So I got involved with LibreOffice through a volunteer platform on the internet.
I learnt about bug triaging, confirmed newly reported bugs, and starting to bibisect. I’m still really new to it. Big thanks to Ilmari for spending time coaching me. I wouldn’t have been able to do it on my own! His help and advice pushed me to go forward.
It’s awesome to see how the community is working together to fix issues. And a even greater feeling to be part of it.
My advice to anyone who is not from the field of computer science and would like to contribute to open source: anything can be learned with patience and dedication. I will continue learning new skills and would like to contribute much more to LibreOffice in the future.
Big thanks to Gladys for all her contributions! Everyone is welcome to join our community, build new skills, and help to make LibreOffice even better for the whole world 😊
I live in San Jose, California, USA. I’ve lived around the Bay Area my whole life, after my parents moved away from the Philippines when I was about a year old.
I have had experience as a CRM (customer relations management) administrator, which partially functioned sort of like an internal tech support position, and I’ve also done crowdsourced testing and a11y (accessibility) testing as a side hustle. So I’ve had a lot of experience with troubleshooting and manually testing software.
My hobbies/interests are: reading, walking, video games/board games, and my dog.
Right now, I am attempting to write C++ unit tests in LibreOffice. As someone with rudimentary coding skills, it is quite challenging but interesting to learn.
For the longest time, I’ve been wanting to contribute my technical skills to an open source project and learn about test automation. I saw some forums that suggested LibreOffice, and I thought it may be a good fit because I have also used the product (albeit lightly) in the past. What I like about the LibreOffice project is that there is a dedicated wiki for those interested in QA (not just development). Because of this, it is fairly easy to get started with contributing.
Since I’ve joined the project, I’ve helped the QA team with bug triaging, regression testing, bibisecting, etc. I’ve also submitted patches to Gerrit for some easy code fixes and updated the LibreOffice help documentation. I’ve learned so much and picked up a lot of new skills along the way. But there is definitely a lot more to learn, which is exciting!
I’d also like to say that the people working on the LibreOffice project are fantastic. They acknowledge the work that you do and are more than happy to help you when needed (shoutout to Ilmari Lauhakangas for taking the time to explain how things work to me). So for anyone feeling overwhelmed or hesitant about joining, don’t be! We are all friendly here 🙂
One of these days, I’d like to look into writing UI unit tests with Python, and maybe also unit tests for a11y (accessibility). As for improvements, I think perhaps it would be great if the wiki would be a little more beginner-friendly for those who want to get into writing unit tests, especially if they don’t have much development experience yet.
Many thanks to Kira for all her contributions! Every LibreOffice user is welcome to get involved, find out what they can do in our community, and learn new skills along the way 👍
My name is Adam Seskunas and I currently live in San Diego, California. In my free time I enjoy outdoor activities, hiking, backpacking in the Sierra, rock climbing and surfing with my daughter Sofia. I have a degree in Computer Science from the University of Maryland Global Campus, and I’m an open source software enthusiast.
Currently I’m working on my first “Difficulty Interesting” Easy Hack, a nice description of which can be found on this page.
The Easy Hack involves the ASCII filter for LibreOffice Writer and the way it handles the output of tables. True to its name, the Easy Hack has been interesting! It’s been challenging and rewarding at the same time. I’d like to thank Hossein Nourikhah for providing the code pointers and background information, and Michael Weghorn for help in code review.
I’ve been using LibreOffice ever since I became interested in using Linux, when I was studying for my Computer Science degree, but I never had considered contributing. It’s such a large project, and I had no experience with C++. I just happened to see an advert on VolunteerMatch for bug testing, and answering the ad got me in contact with Ilmari Lauhakangas.
Ilmari would meet with me bi-weekly and he taught me how to verify bugs in Bugzilla and eventually got me into developing. Overall, joining the project been a fantastic experience, from Ilmari’s mentorship to all the people involved – everyone’s been great. I’d highly recommend it to anyone.
My plan is to apply and hopefully get accepted to do Google Summer of Code for LibreOffice. I’ve been talking to Hossein about ideas and I’m excited to get my application written and submitted.
I’d say more contributors. There’s a robust community of contributors, but any project could use more. It’s a great way to meet people and gain some experience. I’d encourage anyone reading this and thinking about contributing to check out the wiki. There’s great information there and you can help in many different ways, not just development.
Many thanks to Adam for all his contributions! Every LibreOffice user is welcome to get involved and find out what they can do in our community 👍
