Millions of people around the world use LibreOffice every day – but there are still some people who haven’t heard about our free, powerful, open source, Microsoft-compatible office suite. So here are some ideas for spreading the word – and click the image to learn more about our marketing projects:
Last week, we talked to the design community about their preparations for the upcoming LibreOffice 6.2 release. Today we hear from Sophie Gautier, who helps out with localisation (l10n) – that is, translating the software’s user interface, documentation and website into other languages…
What new feature(s) in LibreOffice 6.2 are you most excited about?
The many improvements and new features added to the online version will push it a step further and speed up its adoption. I think it’s a key asset for our project and its visibility, and I hope it will bring many more people to contribute to development, design or translation of the software.
What has the localisation community been working on in preparation for this release?
New features have a lot of new strings; the Design project has worked on the user interface and the Documentation project has made a lot of updates and completions in the help files. All this is reflected in localization work. Moreover, the l10n community is also maintaining the strings of the en_US version, so whenever a typo exists there, it triggers the localization process again. If you add the preparation needed for the press release, all in all the team has done incredible work!
Looking further ahead, what else are you planning – or want to achieve?
If it’s compatible with our workflow, I would like to give Weblate a try and see if it eases the work of our l10n team. Pootle is a great tool, but we lack some features, one of which is very important for me: an easy way to credit contributors and value their work through the tool.
Finally, how can people get involved with localisation?
If you are a translator, it’s very easy to participate by helping on translating press releases, and videos for marketing purposes. If you are more interesting on producing documentation, either translating into your language or in English would bring a great help to the project. A bit more technical – but still easy – is to translate the software UI and the help in your language, bringing LibreOffice in their language to many many people. For all topics, we have a page to get started, so join us on the mailing list!
Thanks Sophie – and coming up next week, we’ll talk to Xisco Fauli from the QA (quality assurance) community…
LibreOffice 6.2 is due to be released at the end of this month, and many communities in the project have been working hard on new features. Today we talk to Heiko Tietze, The Document Foundation’s UX designer, about the upcoming release…
What new feature(s) in LibreOffice 6.2 are you most excited about?
Two years ago, The Document Foundation announced the MUFFIN concept, that is supposed to give users the freedom to change the user interface to what they are familiar with, and to adopt to any usage scenarios. Now, with the upcoming LibreOffice 6.2 release, we finally made this feature available for everyone, not only the brave users who enable experimental features.
We present the “Tabbed” and “Groupedbar” variants in the first stage (View > User Interface in the menu). The Tabbed variant aims to provide a familiar interface for users coming from Microsoft Office. It is supposed to be used primarily without the sidebar. Here’s a quick animation of it in action:
Please confirm that you want to play a YouTube video. By accepting, you will be accessing content from YouTube, a service provided by an external third party.
If you accept this notice, your choice will be saved and the page will refresh.
Meanwhile, the Groupedbar design follows the mantra “Simple by default, powerful when needed” with the basic principle to access “first-level” functions with one click, and second-level functions with a maximum of two clicks.
What has the design community been working on in preparation for this release?
We also made massive changes and improvements to icon themes, in particular Elementary and Karasa Jaga. Here’s Elementary:
Plus, the icons are now shipped as SVG vector graphics. If the rendering is stable and accurate we plan to switch completely in one of the upcoming releases. Read more on the technical background on this blog.
Another great step ahead has been made regarding the personalization feature (Tools > Options) that took ages in the past to show results. Now it brings up the Firefox personas within a second or two. Read more about this here.
Looking further ahead, what else are you planning – or want to achieve – in the community?
We will continue the work on the Notebookbar variants. Some concepts are almost ready for publication. Ideally, users load the Notebookbar variants as an extension. And we are aware that a lot of work has to be done in this regards.
Other than that, we discuss the ideas from the community on a daily basis. Some would be great enhancements; others are probably not suited to an office suite. The evaluation of this input takes some resources. And last but not least, we have many “creaking doors” that might benefit from a redesign: bullets and numbering, outlines, bezier curves, bibliography…
So how can people get involved?
Everybody is welcome to join the design group. Most of us are active on Telegram and you can just lurk around there and listen. But your input on tickets on Bugzilla with keyword needsUXEval is also very welcome. We pick some of those topics and discuss it in the weekly meeting, biweekly either on Wednesday evening (7pm UTC) or Thursday afternoon (1pm UTC).
All information about who we are, how we work, and how to get in contact are provided on the LibreOffice wiki.
Thanks to Heiko and the whole design community for their great work. We’ll be talking to other communities over the next few weeks, so keep an eye on this blog for more…
LibreOffice is the work of hundreds of volunteers and certified developers across the globe. Today we speak to two members of the community about their activities and experiences in the project!
Where do you live, what do you love, and can we follow you on social media?
I’m from Valdivia, Chile. I’m active on Twitter: @josegatica. I’m a musician, so that’s my second job 🙂
In which areas of the LibreOffice project are you active?
I love to help people on the Ask LibreOffice community support website, but my “LibreOffice Life” is about migrating computers from MS Office to LibreOffice, and teaching people about how to use it. Nowadays I’m looking for time to contribute with code too.
How did you get involved with the community?
I started to use LibreOffice a long time ago, but with my active work with ParrotSec GNU/Linux and something for the Free Software Foundation came the need (yeah, the need) to get involved with LibreOffice too.
What was your initial experience of contributing to LibreOffice like?
First I wanted some support from The Document Foundation or something like that, then came the news about the LibreOffice certification program. My initial experience was during my project redaction and application, and for people that work here with me.
Thanks José! And now on to…
Where do you live, what do you love, and can we follow you on social media?
I live in Bandung, Indonesia, but I quite often go to Jakarta for projects and work. I sometimes lurk in IRC, rarely on Twitter, daily on Facebook, and maybe weekly in Google+. When I’m not working on LibreOffice, one of my hobbies is translating other open source projects 😀
In which areas of LibreOffice are you active?
Localization – mostly translation.
What was your initial experience of contributing to LibreOffice like?
Good! I can work independently via Pootle.
What does LibreOffice need most right now?
I don’t know – maybe better compatibility with Microsoft Office.
What tools do you use for your work?
Poedit, a cross-platform gettext catalogs editing tool.
Cheers Andika – thanks for your help in making LibreOffice a truly universal productivity tool, available in over 100 languages! Anyone can help to translate the software, website and documentation – see here to get started.
We’ve finished editing and uploading all the videos from the main room of the LibreOffice Conference 2018 in Tirana, Albania. To view slides for the talks, find the PDFs in the program here:
Apologies that the audio isn’t great in many cases – that’s due to technical and acoustic limitations of the venue. But try listening with headphones, and follow along with the slides as linked above.
So here are the videos, starting with the opening session; click the playlist in the top-left to choose other ones:
Please confirm that you want to play a YouTube video. By accepting, you will be accessing content from YouTube, a service provided by an external third party.
If you accept this notice, your choice will be saved and the page will refresh.
