LibreOffice monthly recap: March 2018

There’s so much going on in the LibreOffice project – in development, documentation, design, QA, translations and much more. So at the end of each month we’ll be posting summaries of recent activities and updates, to help you get an overview of what’s going on. Here’s what happened in March…

  • LibreOffice 5.4.6 was released, with almost 60 bug and regression fixes. This is part of the 5.4 branch, targeted at mainstream users and enterprises. More information in the press release.
  • The Indonesian community organised a three day conference, supported by The Document Foundation. The website has details (in Indonesian), and below is a video promoting the event – English subtitles are available:

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  • Meanwhile, we’re already getting excited about the main LibreOffice Conference due later this year, in Tirana. But we’re looking even further ahead, and announced a call for locations for the LibreOffice Conference 2019. The deadline for sending proposals is June 30, so if you want to help out, let us know!
  • Buovjaga from the QA community wrote a blog post describing the importance of quality assurance in open source projects. “QA is acting like neurotransmitters in the body of the project”, he writes, explaining that QA is involved in many different areas.
  • This year’s Google Summer of Code (GSoC) is fast approaching, and we reached out to potential participants. In recent years, GSoC students have contributed many great features and updates to LibreOffice, so we look forward to seeing what will happen this year.

  • Olivier Hallot from the documentation community wrote about rich content arriving in the new help system. “The new help can now access external videos on YouTube or similar services, and also open or download OpenDocument files to support the textual explanations of LibreOffice features in the help pages.”
  • Also in blog news, Lera Goncharuk summarised migrations to LibreOffice in Russia on his blog. These include migrations at the federal government level, along with regional administrations.
  • Finally, development continues on LibreOffice 6.1, which is due to be released in early August. You can see some of the new features in the release notes, such as the ability to sort images anchored to cells in Calc:

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TDF announces LibreOffice 5.4.6

Berlin, March 22, 2018 – The Document Foundation (TDF) announces LibreOffice 5.4.6, the sixth minor release of LibreOffice 5.4 family currently targeted at mainstream users and enterprises.

TDF suggests to mainstream users and enterprises to deploy LibreOffice with the backing of certified developers, migrators and trainers (an updated list is available at  https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/professional-support/). This is extremely important for the growth of the LibreOffice ecosystem.

LibreOffice 5.4.6 includes almost 60 bug and regression fixes. Technical details about the release can be found in the change logs: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/5.4.6/RC1 (fixed in RC1) and https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/5.4.6/RC2 (fixed in RC2).

Download LibreOffice

LibreOffice 5.4.6 is immediately available for download at the following link: https://www.libreoffice.org/download/download/.

LibreOffice users, free software advocates and community members can support The Document Foundation with a donation at https://www.libreoffice.org/donate/. Donations help TDF to maintain its infrastructure, share knowledge, and fund the presence of volunteers at events like LibreOffice Conference, where they can meet with free software advocates coming from all over the world.

Several companies sitting in TDF’s Advisory Board (https://www.documentfoundation.org/governance/advisory-board/) provide either value-added LTS versions of LibreOffice or consultancy services for migrations and training, based on best practices distilled by The Document Foundation.

LibreOffice and Google Summer of Code 2018 – get involved!

Google Summer of Code (GSoC) is a yearly programme in which Google funds university students to work on free and open source software projects. LibreOffice has benefited from this – last year 10 students were accepted into GSoC to do various programming jobs, helping to improve the software.

GSoC students are assisted by experienced “mentors” in the LibreOffice community, as 2016 student Jaskaran Veer Singh explains:

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For 2018, LibreOffice is again an organisation in the GSoC programme, so if you’re a university student and want to get experience working on a well-known free software project, while also being paid for your efforts, get involved! But don’t delay: the application period runs until March 27, so it’s not far off.

To get started, check out some ideas for projects you can work on. Each project describes what’s involved, the skills required, and the mentor you can contact to get help. If you see something you’d like to work on, contact the mentor as soon as possible! Then you can discuss how to proceed.

After that, read the general GSoC 2018 page on our wiki, which provides more information on the GSoC programme and tells you how to apply. So, check out the ideas, talk to the mentors, and good luck with your projects!

How LibreOffice and TDF are helping other open source projects

Free and open source software (FOSS) is all about sharing and working together. And while LibreOffice focuses on being the best open source office suite, our community also helps out with other related FOSS projects (just like many other projects help us!). We’ve made an infographic showing “upstream” contributions from LibreOffice developers and The Document Foundation – click to see a bigger version…

Your donations have helped us to achieve much of this – so a big thank you to everyone who has donated to our project and community!

LibreOffice contributor interview: Anxhelo Lushka

This year’s LibreOffice Conference will take place in late September in Albania. One of the organisers is Anxhelo Lushka, a member of the Albanian LibreOffice community – we caught up with him at the last conference to talk about his experiences of building a community, how developers and designers can work together, and what we can look forward to in Tirana…

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The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 6.0.2

Berlin, March 1st, 2018 – The Document Foundation (TDF) announces LibreOffice 6.0.2, the second minor release of the recently announced LibreOffice 6 family in just over a month, with around 50 bug and regression fixes. All LibreOffice users are invited to update either to LibreOffice 6.0.2 or to LibreOffice 5.4.5 to solve potential security-related issues.

TDF suggests to conservative users and enterprises to deploy LibreOffice with the backing of certified developers, migrators and trainers (an updated list is available at: https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/professional-support/). This is extremely important for the growth of the LibreOffice ecosystem.

Technical details about LibreOffice 6.0.2 bug and regression fixes are available in the change log: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/6.0.2/RC1 (fixed in RC1).

Download LibreOffice

LibreOffice 6.0.2 is immediately available for download at the following link: https://www.libreoffice.org/download/download/.

LibreOffice users, free software advocates and community members can support The Document Foundation with a donation at https://www.libreoffice.org/donate/. Donations help TDF to maintain its infrastructure, share knowledge, and fund the activities of local communities, such as the event in Surabaya, Indonesia, on March 23/25 (http://libreoffice.id) or the hackfest in Hamburg, Germany, on April 6/8 (https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Hackfest/Hamburg2018).

Several companies sitting in TDF’s Advisory Board (https://www.documentfoundation.org/governance/advisory-board/) provide either value-added LTS versions of LibreOffice or consultancy services for migrations and training, based on best practices distilled by The Document Foundation.