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LibreOffice and Google Summer of Code 2017: The results

The Google Summer of Code (GSoC) takes place every year, and provides university students with funding to work on free and open source software. For 2017, nine LibreOffice projects were accepted into GSoC, and as developers finish their work, let’s take a look at some of their achievements…

Grzegorz Araminowicz – Improve SmartArt import

SmartArt graphics are used in Microsoft Office to “easily make a visual representation of your information”. LibreOffice already had the ability to import SmartArt, with file parsing code and basic layout features, but Grzegorz started to extend it, taking Office 2007 test files one-by-one and implementing missing features to load them correctly.

Throughout GSoC, Grzegorz worked on many fixes and improvements, as described in this mailing list post. At the end, he summarised his results:

I am happy with project results. Now LibreOffice is able to load and correctly render many types of basic diagrams. However, there is still much to be done to support more complex SmartArts. If anyone would be interested in contributing in this area, feel free to contact me for any help.

Muhammet Kara – Revamp the customization dialog

LibreOffice’s “Customize” dialog box, under the Tools menu, is very versatile but could also be improved in terms of design and user friendliness. Muhammet started his work by adding a search feature for the Functions pane of the Keyboard tab, as search was described as “the killer feature” by the design team.

He then started cleaning up the source code (most of the dialog was implemented in a single file with over 5,000 lines of code), before moving on to layout and design improvements. In the end, he had 19 patches integrated into LibreOffice, and made a video demonstrating the updated dialog in action:

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Aditya Dewan – LibreOffice online

Aditya is a third-year undergraduate student at the Indian Institute of Information Technology in Allahabad, specialising in Information Technology. Throughout GSoC he worked on LibreOffice Online, the cloud-based version of the suite. He started with small features and fixes to get familiar with the codebase, such as compression on startup and extra graphs in the admin console.

Then he moved on to a bigger job: adding an interactive horizontal ruler, as seen in the desktop version of the suite. Here’s Aditya’s demonstration of the new feature:

With that done, he extended the current WOPI implementation to support “Save as” functionality. Summarising GSoC, he said:

It was a very good experience for me. I have done a lot, and learned a lot this summer. Thank you to all LibreOffice developers, especially my mentors, for your support.

Gautam Prajapati, Alex Pantechovskis, Mohammed Abdul Azeem, Ximeng Zu, Akshay Deep and Varun Dhall – various improvements

Meanwhile, other GSoC developers did great work fixing bugs, adding new features and boosting compatibility. Gautam Prajapati made significant improvements to the Android Viewer build system, as described in his report, while Alex Pantechovskis helped to create a QuarkXPress import filter for the Document Liberation Project (see our recent blog post).

Mohammed Abdul Azeem produced many patches for migrating from the legacy parser to FastParser, and Ximeng Zu fixed various “most annoying bugs” in the Android Viewer (see here). Finally, Akshay Deep worked on updates for the special characters dialog, while Varun Dhall replaced the EditEngine binary clipboard with an ODF filter.

Wrapping up

So 2017’s Google Summer of Code was a terrific success, and has helped to improve LibreOffice in many different areas. We’ll all get to enjoy these changes and new features in LibreOffice 6.0, due early next year. Thanks to all of the developers for their excellent work – and thanks to Google for their support and initiative. We look forward to GSoC 2018!

The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 5.4.1 “fresh” and LibreOffice 5.3.6 “still”

Berlin, August 31, 2017 – The Document Foundation (TDF) announces LibreOffice 5.4.1, the first minor release of the new LibreOffice 5.4 family, which was announced in early August, and LibreOffice 5.3.6, the sixth release of the mature LibreOffice 5.3 family, which was announced in January 2017.

LibreOffice 5.4.1 represents the bleeding edge in term of features, and as such is targeted at technology enthusiasts and early adopters, while LibreOffice 5.3.6 is targeted at conservative users and enterprise deployments.

TDF suggests deploying LibreOffice 5.3.6 with the backing of certified professionals (updated list available at: https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/professional-support/).

LibreOffice 5.4.1 includes approximately 100 bug and regression fixes, along with document compatibility improvements. Technical details about the release can be found in the change logs here: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/5.4.1/RC1 (fixed in RC1) and https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/5.4.1/RC2 (fixed in RC2).

LibreOffice 5.3.6 includes approximately 50 bug and regression fixes. Technical details about the release can be found in the change log here: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/5.3.6/RC1 (fixed in RC1).

Download LibreOffice

LibreOffice 5.4.1 and LibreOffice 5.3.6 are immediately available for download from the following link: https://www.libreoffice.org/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 organise events such as the LibreOffice Conference, with the next one taking place in October in Rome (http://conference.libreoffice.org).

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

LibreOffice contributor interview: Nguyen Vu Hung

The Document Foundation’s wiki has lots of resources and materials for marketing LibreOffice in English – such as presentations, flyers, stickers and branding guidelines. But we also want to spread the word about free software and open standards in every country, so we really appreciate our international community which promotes LibreOffice in other languages. One such community member is Nguyễn Vũ Hưng who helps with marketing LibreOffice.

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

I live in Hanoi, Vietnam, and you can find me on social media at:

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

I work as an CTO for a game and offshore development company based in Hanoi. The company has nothing related to LibreOffice, but our staff uses LibreOffice at work. I’m a volunteer in the LibreOffice community in my spare time, and have been a long-time contributor to open source projects.

How did you get involved with LibreOffice?

​It goes back about ten years ago, when I contributed to Vietnamese localization and ​community support with OpenOffice.org. When LibreOffice started, I join the new project with nearly the same role, translating the user interface, until recently. The English skills of average users around the world are getting better, which is why I’ve changed my focus to open source and LibreOffice marketing.

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

For a year or two until now, I’ve found that the role most fitting for me is forum and Facebook fan-page content seeding. It works 🙂 For that kind of marketing and content seeding activity, getting people involved is the most difficult part. I’ve been looking at what Slashdot does, and I’m learning about approaches to improve KPIs (key performance indicators) such as the statistics for “seen”, “comments” and “engagement” in Facebook posts.

What was your initial experience of contributing to LibreOffice like?

This is not my first experience with LibreOffice, but I still remember: I was mentoring a student who was finishing an Easy Hack. It was not really “easy” to read so much code and start hacking away on a small improvement – but luckily, he did it 🙂 (Here’s the Bugzilla ticket showing how it went.)

What does LibreOffice need most right now?

It needs to go mobile (more work on Android) and get into the cloud (more work on LibreOffice Online).

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

Playing with my kids takes up most of my time. I balance time spent with my family with other IT/open source activities, including LibreOffice, Agile Vietnam ​and ITEC (IT Experts Clubs in Vietnam). We hold monthly events about Agile/Scrum and an event series named “S* Architecture”. I wish I could do the same with LibreOffice in Vietnam!

Thanks Nguyễn for all your contributions. And for others reading this who’d like to help out with LibreOffice marketing – or indeed translations, design, documentation, QA and other projects – join us and get involved!

LibreOffice at KDE’s Akademy meetup in Almeria

Collaboration is essential within free and open source software projects – but it’s also important between projects as well. For instance, many LibreOffice users and contributors run it on the GNU/Linux operating system, with KDE as the desktop environment. With this in mind, members of the LibreOffice community attended Akademy, the yearly summit of KDE developers, users and supporters. It was held this year in Almeria, Spain.

Gabriele Ponzo from LibreItalia, Teodor Mircea Ionita (TDF’s new Development Mentor) and Xisco Fauli (QA engineer) set up a stand for two days of the event. They answered questions from LibreOffice users, and handed out stickers and promotional flyers:

They were assisted by Franklin Weng and Jeff Huang from the Taiwanese LibreOffice community. Franklin gave two presentations:

He also hosted a Birds of a Feather (BoF) session entitled “Migrating FOSS and KDE – Does KDE have chances?”, while Jeff gave a talk about the challenges faced by translation teams. Gabriele and Xisco ran BoF sessions on the value of becoming a TDF member, and they also discussed the newly-released LibreOffice 5.4.

Teodor summarised the event with: “Being somewhat new to the LibreOffice project, this has been a very lucrative opportunity to learn a lot regarding the community and how it works, meet members in person and get a bit more acquainted on a personal human level. Oh, we also had lots of fun too!”

So that was Akademy – but don’t forget that the LibreOffice Conference in Rome is coming up too, in early October. Register now!

LibreOffice 5.3.5 available for download

Berlin, August 3, 2017 – The Document Foundation (TDF) announces LibreOffice 5.3.5, the fifth minor release of the LibreOffice 5.3 family, targeted at enterprises and individual users in production environments.

TDF suggests deploying LibreOffice in large organisations, public administrations and enterprises with the backing of professional support by certified people (a list is available at: http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/professional-support/).

LibreOffice 5.3.5 includes a number of bug fixes along with improvements to the help content. Technical details about the release can be found in the change logs here: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/5.3.5/RC1 (fixed in RC1) and https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/5.3.5/RC2 (fixed in RC2).

Download LibreOffice

LibreOffice 5.3.5 is immediately available for download from the following link: http://www.libreoffice.org/download/.

LibreOffice users, free software advocates and community members can support The Document Foundation with a donation at http://www.libreoffice.org/donate/. Donations help TDF to maintain its infrastructure, share knowledge, and organise events such as the LibreOffice Conference, with the next one taking place in October in Rome (http://conference.libreoffice.org).

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

LibreOffice 5.4 released with new features for Writer, Calc and Impress

Berlin, July 28, 2017 – The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 5.4, the last major release of the LibreOffice 5.x family, immediately available for Windows, macOS and Linux, and for the cloud. LibreOffice 5.4 adds significant new features in every module, including the usual large number of incremental improvements to Microsoft Office file compatibility.

Shorter, sweeter documents make interoperability easier

Inspired by Leonardo da Vinci’s “simplicity is the ultimate sophistication”, LibreOffice developers have focused on file simplicity as the ultimate document interoperability sophistication. This makes ODF and OOXML files written by the free office suite more robust and easier to exchange with other users than the same documents generated by other office suites.

Thanks to the efforts of developers, the XML description of a new document written by LibreOffice is 50% smaller in the case of ODF (ODT), and around 90% smaller in the case of OOXML (DOCX), in comparison with the same document generated by the leading proprietary office suite. Additional details in the file simplicity backgrounder: https://nextcloud.documentfoundation.org/s/5Oe8guDN0XSS7h8.

LibreOffice 5.4 highlights

  • A new standard colour palette has been included, based on the RYB colour model.
  • File format compatibility has been improved, with better support for EMF vector images. This helps when you’re importing detailed diagrams from other office software.
  • Imported PDF files are rendered with much better quality, also when inserted into a document, while exported PDF files – from Writer and Impress – support embedded videos (and linked videos if opened with Acrobat Reader).
  • LibreOffice 5.4 supports OpenPGP keys for signing ODF documents on Linux. If you already use GPG/PGP for signing emails, it ensures the authenticity of your ODF documents regardless of the mode of transport or storage.

WRITER

  • In Writer, you can now import AutoText from Microsoft Word DOTM templates.
  • When you’re exporting or pasting numbered and bulleted lists as plain text, their full structure is preserved.
  • In the Format menu, you can now create custom watermarks for your documents.
  • New context menu items have been added for working with sections, footnotes, endnotes and styles.

CALC

  • Calc now includes support for pivot charts, which use data from pivot tables. When the table is updated, the chart is automatically updated as well.
  • Comments are now easier to manage, with menu commands to show, hide and delete all comments.
  • When applying conditional formatting to cells, you can now easily change the priority of rules with up and down buttons.
  • Extra sheet protection options have been added, to optionally allow insertion or deletion of rows and columns.
  • Lastly, when you’re exporting in CSV format, your settings are remembered for the next export operation.

IMPRESS

  • In Impress, when you’re duplicating an object, you can now specify fractional angles. In addition, your settings are saved for the next duplication operation.

ONLINE

  • Finally, LibreOffice Online has been improved as well. Performance is better, while the layout adapts responsively to mobile devices. In addition, a read-only mode has been added.

A list of the most significant new features is presented in a short video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBNWOWJul4w). A page with a description of new features – and links to relevant resources – is available on the wiki at https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleaseNotes/5.4.

LibreOffice 5.4 has also been improved “under the hood,” thanks to the work of hundreds of volunteers. This translates into an open source office suite which is easier to develop, maintain and debug. Although this is not visible to users, it is extremely important for enterprise deployments.

LibreOffice Online

LibreOffice Online is fundamentally a server service and should be installed and configured by adding a cloud storage and an SSL certificate. It might be considered an enabling technology for the cloud of ISPs or the private cloud of enterprises and large organizations. Builds of the latest LibreOffice Online source code are available as Docker images: https://hub.docker.com/r/libreoffice/online/. Background document providing the positioning of LibreOffice Online: https://nextcloud.documentfoundation.org/s/uSdCYL2TgPa3yUI.

Enterprise deployments

LibreOffice 5.4 represents the bleeding edge in term of features for open source office suites, and as such is targeted at technology enthusiasts, early adopters and power users. For enterprise class deployments, TDF maintains the more mature 5.3 family – to be updated very soon with the announcement of the 5.3.5 release – which should always be supported by certified professionals (http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/professional-support/).

Several companies sitting in TDF Advisory Board (http://www.documentfoundation.org/governance/advisory-board/) are providing either value added Long Term Supported versions of LibreOffice or consultancy services for migrations and training, based on best practices distilled by The Document Foundation. LibreOffice is deployed by large organizations in every continent. A list of the most significant migrations announced in the media is available on TDF wiki: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/LibreOffice_Migrations.

Availability of LibreOffice 5.4

LibreOffice 5.4 is immediately available from the following link: http://www.libreoffice.org/download/. LibreOffice users, free software advocates and community members can support The Document Foundation with a donation at http://www.libreoffice.org/donate.

LibreOffice 5.4 is built with document conversion libraries from the Document Liberation Project: http://www.documentliberation.org.

Press Kit

The press kit, with background documents and high-resolution images, is here: https://nextcloud.documentfoundation.org/s/pfz28pVIhoZJ7uO.

Press Releases

Germany’s Sovereign Digital Stack Mandates ODF: a Landmark Validation of Open Document Standards

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The German federal government has quietly taken an extremely significant step: hidden amongst the technical specifications of the Deutschland-Stack –…