We’ll be posting regular updates on this blog from the conference in Tirana – in the meantime, check out some pics of the city, the conference venue, the pre-meeting dinner, and the community meeting…
Category: LibreOffice
Four ways you can make LibreOffice even better
Every new major release of LibreOffice includes new features and updates – but they don’t happen by magic! They’re created by a worldwide community, and you too can join in and help to improve the software. See the graphic below for some ideas – and then visit our site to learn more!
LibreOffice Conference 2018 – over 100 attendees already registered!
Yes, the LibreOffice Conference takes place later this month in Tirana, Albania – and over 100 people have already registered! It’s going to be a great event, with talks about new technologies in LibreOffice, community discussions, plans for the future of the project… And fun evening events as well!
Come join us – if you haven’t registered yet, you can still do so here. The website has additional information about the venue, accommodation and transport.
Oh, and if you’ve never been to a LibreOffice Conference before, we’re a friendly bunch – here we are at the 2016 conference in Brno, for instance:
See you there!
Community Member Monday: Battsengel Ichinnorov
It’s time for another LibreOffice contributor interview! Today we speak to Battsengel Ichinnorov, a new TDF member, who helps to localise LibreOffice for Mongolian users…
Where do you live, and are you active on any social media?
I live in Munich, Germany, and I follow The Document Foundation and LibreOffice on Telegram. You can find some of my work on GitHub.
In which areas of the LibreOffice project are you active?
I am translating the wiki and LibreOffice itself into Mongolian (for instance, I made the keyboard layout for Mongolian for Windows: German and English. After this, I will create them for Linux.)
How did you get involved with LibreOffice?
A friend of mine, Dennis Roczeck is a helper and admin on the wiki.
What was your initial experience of contributing to LibreOffice like? What else do you plan to work on?
Everybody has a goal to reach, and mine is a free office for Mongolian people! Firstly I want to build a team and finish the user interface translation, then maybe get involved in development and/or ops and/or devops 🙂
What tools do you use for your work?
So I know many tools, but the best is for me for programming, to save time and be productive, is IntelliJ IDEA. Other tools which I use: Atom, Notepad++, ConEmu for WSL in Windows.
What do you do when you’re not working on LibreOffice?
Meet my friends and go hiking in the Alps, and study programming languages or test new technologies. At the moment I’m looking at Docker, Kubernetes and Terraform in the cloud.
Thanks to Battsengel for all his contributions! If you’re reading this and also want to join our friendly community, and help to make LibreOffice even better, we’ve made a page just for you. There are lots of ways to get involved – we look forward to meeting you!
LibreOffice monthly recap: August 2018
August was a big month for our project, with the release of a brand new version of LibreOffice! And surrounding the release, there was lots of activity in our development, documentation, design, QA and translation communities…
- LibreOffice 6.1 was announced early in the month, with many new features and updates including new icon themes, improved EPUB support, a revamped image handling engine, and the ability to sort anchored images in Calc. Check out the announcement for more details, and this video for a demonstration of the new features:
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- The day after the release, we organised an “Ask us Anything” session on Reddit. TDF team and board members, along with community participants, answered questions, responded to ideas, and shared feedback about the new release. The Reddit post has over 33,000 views at the time of writing, so a big thanks to everyone who took part!
- One week later, we looked at some statistics relating to the new version. LibreOffice 6.1 had been downloaded 373,758 times (for comparison, it’s 649,158 now). We had 274,916 visits to our website, 192,232 visits to our blog, and 21,347 impressions of the announcement tweet.
- Meanwhile, the LibreOffice 6.0 branch continues to be maintained, and is recommended for enterprise deployments. Our hard-working documentation community released the LibreOffice 6.0 Writer Guide, with a general introduction to Writer followed by chapters about specific features. It’s available in ODT and PDF formats, and also in hard-copy (printed). If you find the documentation useful, you can give the community a hand!
- Also in August, we showcased the results of the tender to implement of a HSQLDB binary format import in LibreOffice. Tenders are aimed at improving LibreOffice in several strategic areas, and documenting the approach and work carried out, to foster sharing of knowledge and inclusion of the wider volunteer community. Collabora was assigned this specific tender, and our blog post links to technical explanations from developer Tamás Bunth.
- In the middle of the month, we chatted to Sam Tuke, a long-time Free Software supporter and campaigner, who helps the LibreOffice project in marketing and QA (quality assurance). We plan to post regular “Community Member Monday” interviews on this blog, so stay tuned!
- Finally, our Taiwanese community reported back from the “LibreOffice Asia Meetup”, an event held in Taipei. The attendees included LibreOffice and other Free Software community members from Japan, Korea, Indonesia and Taiwan. Franklin Weng, TDF board member and one of the organisers, said: “Besides sharing our experiences of adopting ODF and using LibreOffice, we can also learn from many different countries and help each other”.
Keep in touch – follow us on Twitter, Facebook and Google+. Like what we do? Support our community with a donation – or join us and help us to make LibreOffice even better!
LibreOffice Asia Meetup in A+A Space, Taipei, Taiwan
Community members from five different countries had a good time, and talked about holding a LibreOffice Asia Conference in the future
Event report by: Wally Lian, PR & Marketing Consultant, Software Liberty Association Taiwan
This summer is hot in Taiwan, and so are the FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) communities! From the end of July to the middle of August, there were several big FOSS events in Taiwan. The first one coming on stage was the Debian Conference, which was held in Taiwan and Asia for the first time, and lasted for two weeks. Then, this year three big Asian FOSS events of COSCUP, Gnome Asia Summit, and OpenSUSE Asia Summit decided to merge together and held an event at the National Taiwan University of Science and Technology on 11 and 12 August.
Besides these global and Asian FOSS events, there were also many interesting opportunities and plans going on. One of them was: LibreOffice community members in Asia planned to have a meetup during the joint COSCUP/Gnome Asia/OpenSUSE Asia event, and discussed holding a LibreOffice Asia Conference.
Before the meetup started, SLAT and A+A Space prepared a lot of food
This meetup was held in the evening on 11 August in A+A space, which is a nice and friendly space for FOSS communities, also a community made up of several artists who use FOSS as their tools to create their artwork. The attendees included LibreOffice and other FOSS community members from Japan, Korea, Indonesia and Taiwan.
The organizer, Franklin Weng, the current President of Software Liberty Association Taiwan and current board member of The Document Foundation, said that this meetup was an important milestone. “Now the Taiwanese government is going on adopting the Open Document Format and related office suites. It is very important to link our government and our people with international communities. Besides sharing our experiences of adopting ODF and using LibreOffice, we can also learn from many different countries and help each other,” said Franklin.
At the meetup, Franklin introduced the 30-second animation for LibreOffice Android Viewer, which was generated by LibreOffice Taiwan and A+A Space. He explained that the original idea was to raise the awareness of visual design in FOSS communities. Then he explained the meaning and special Easter eggs hidden in the animation, and showed a “behind the scenes” documentary for it. Then, the host of A+A Space, Michael Wu, introduced the wonderful work from A+A Space, including 3D graphs, 3D models, VR work, classes in universities, and so on.
During the meetup
Then everyone started to share their work and experiences. Rania Amina, who was responsible for visual design in the LibreOffice Conference Indonesia, showed his wonderful artwork to attendees. Ahmad Haris also shared his experiences holding LibreOffice Conference Indonesia, which was a huge success. Shinji Enoki shared the current status of Japanese support in LibreOffice, and many events held in Japan. Daehyun Sung introduced himself and shared some interesting things in Korea, including the system North Korea is using.
Also, Bobby Tung, a senior FOSS member in Taiwan who also contributed a lot to W3C standards, shared the current status of Unicode support for CJK. Kevin Lin, a LibreOffice Migration Professional in Taiwan, showed his work on LibreOffice Online and Web form API usage. Shelandy Ting shared his interesting artwork using Gimp.
After sharing, attendees split into different groups and talked with each other. During this meetup, members from Japan and Indonesia showed interest in holding a LibreOffice Asia Conference. Besides conferences, attendees also exchanged experiences migrating to LibreOffice in organizations and public administrations. We believe that the adoption of the Open Document Format and migrations to LibreOffice will advance hugely in Asia.
Mark Hung (Left 1st), Bobby Tung (Left 2nd) from Taiwan, Shinji Enoki (Right 2nd) from Japan, and Daehyun Sung (Right 1st) from Korea.
A big thanks to the LibreOffice communities in Asia for organising this event! If you love LibreOffice and want to help spread the word in your location or language, check out our native language communities. Together we can help to spread the word about free software and open standards!