Home » LibreOffice » Page 170

Category: LibreOffice

LibreOffice and Google Summer of Code 2017 – 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 11 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:

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.

YouTube privacy policy

If you accept this notice, your choice will be saved and the page will refresh.

For 2017, LibreOffice is once 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 from March 20 to April 3, 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 2017 page on our wiki, which provides more information on the GSoC programme and tells you how to apply. You will have to complete an Easy Hack (simple programming challenge) to be accepted, which demonstrates that you’re comfortable modifying the LibreOffice source code, building it, and submitting a patch.

So, check out the ideas, talk to the mentors, and good luck with your projects!

57 video presentations from LibreOffice Conference 2016

It has taken a while, but we’ve finally edited and uploaded the last batch of presentations (for which we have video) from last year’s LibreOffice Conference in Brno, Czech Republic. You can see all of the videos in the embedded playlist below – click the list button in the top-left corner to navigate through the videos.

Alternatively, scroll on for a full list of presentations. You can do a search in your browser for topics of interest (eg “ODF” or “LibreOffice Online”), or for presenters. Happy viewing, and we look forward to seeing you at this year’s conference in Rome!

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.

YouTube privacy policy

If you accept this notice, your choice will be saved and the page will refresh.

Full list of presentations:

LibreOffice contributor interview: Stanislav Horáček

Next up in our regular series of interviews with LibreOffice developers and contributors is Stanislav Horáček, who helps with localization in the Czech native language community.

LibreOffice contributor Stanislav HoráčekWhere are you from, and what is your nickname on IRC?

I am from the Czech Republic, and you can find me on IRC using the nicknames “horacek” or “strepon”.

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

Just in my spare time – and that’s why there is a gap between my plans and reality 🙂

How did you get involved with LibreOffice?

Several years ago, I tried to set up custom page numbering in Writer, which was described in the built-in Help – but the Help page was written in half Czech, half English. Because I was glad that I discovered the solution of my problem, I decided to complete the page translation. As I found translating quite relaxing, that page was just a beginning…

What areas of the project do you normally work on?

Czech localization mainly; plus some corrections or bug reports for issues that I find when translating. Some time in the future, I would also like to go deeper into coding of extensions. They can be extremely helpful and it’s a pity that they are not widely promoted currently. For instance, I see a nice opportunity to use LibreOffice as a convenient front-end to another tools.

What was your initial experience of contributing to LibreOffice like?

From the beginning, I met helpful and encouraging people and I really appreciate that most of the discussions are constructive, with facts more important than feelings. I think these are the most precious properties that the community has; they made LibreOffice become my number one open source project. On the other hand, whenever I see a lack of them, I image that one more potential contributor could be demotivated…

Moreover, LibreOffice has a great advantage in that it is so widespread. I was – and still I am – impressed that you can really easily make improvements which will appear on screens of millions of people.

Which is your preferred text editor?

For LibreOffice related stuff, I use a universal text editor called Geany. But in general, I like also specialized editors or IDEs.

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

I would say my hobbies are typically Czech, like beer drinking 🙂 You can also see me during the holidays in some of the European mountains, amongst lots of other Czech tourists. And who knows, maybe one day contributing to free software will be our national interest as well…

Thanks Stanislav. And to anyone reading this who wants to help out with translation and localisation of LibreOffice, get involved! Your contributions can make a huge difference, and will help to bridge digital divides across the globe.

LibreOffice @ FOSDEM ’17

FOSDEM banner

FOSDEM is the biggest gathering of free and open source software (FOSS) developers in Europe. It takes place every year in early February, at the Université Libre in Brussels, and it’s a great event for discovering new technology, exchanging ideas and generally enjoying the community around FOSS.

This year, the Open Document Editors devroom was home to many talks and presentations about LibreOffice – including development, design, documentation, LibreOffice Online and other topics.

We have now uploaded all of the videos to our YouTube channel, so click play below to start watching (and use the icon in the top-left to choose others in the playlist). Alternatively, scroll on for a full list of presentations and links to the videos.

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.

YouTube privacy policy

If you accept this notice, your choice will be saved and the page will refresh.

Full list of presentations:

Like what you see? Click here to get involved – you too could be presenting awesome new technology in the future!

Updates from events: Turkey, Taiwan and Japan

Today marks five years since The Document Foundation (TDF) was legally incorporated in Berlin, Germany. We want to celebrate this anniversary by highlighting some recent activities and events from our Native Language Projects. These communities have been instrumental to the growth of TDF and LibreOffice, and are one of our most important assets.

Turkey

The Turkish community recently attended the Academic Informatics Conference 2017 in Aksaray, from 8 to 10 of February, with several LibreOffice related activities.

A general presentation was done by Muhammet Kara and Gökhan Gurbetoğlu in the first session (first half of the first day).

In the second half of the first day, the attendees were introduced to the LibreOffice development environment, and the tools used in the process (Gerrit, Vim, Git…). The attendees were walked through the process of joining the LibreOffice community, and building the LibreOffice source code for the first time.

Attendees who had relatively older computers were provided with SSH access to a 32-core machine, courtesy of TUBITAK ULAKBIM. The last session (first half of the second day) was held like a hackfest. Questions from attendees were answered by the speakers.

LibreOffice community members were pleased to see that the participants were eager to learn about the software, and together they established a WhatsApp group for further communication. A more detailed presentation about LibreOffice development activities in Turkey was given by Gülşah Köse and Muhammet Kara on the last day (morning) of the conference.

Taiwan

The first LibreOffice QA Sprint in Taiwan – organized by Software Liberty Association Taiwan and supported by two professors of the Department of Computer Science and Engineer, National Cheng-Kung University: Professor Joseph Chung-Ping Young and Alvin Wen-Yu Su – was held in Tainan City on December 17, 2016. In this four-hour sprint the attendees found and reported many issues. Attendees were students, teachers, employees of enterprises and governments, LibreOffice developers and lecturers, and all four TDF members in Taiwan.

Early in the afternoon, a live video-session with Italo Vignoli, one of the core members of The Document Foundation, gave most of the attendees exposure to the international community for the first time.

Han Lu, a student in NCKU, summarized the issues found by attendees. After the summary, Franklin Weng explained how to report bugs on the LibreOffice Bugzilla. Also, Cheng-Chia Tseng introduced the Pootle translation platform for LibreOffice and gave some tips on how to translate LibreOffice.

Japan

LibreOffice Kaigi 2016.12, Japan’s annual LibreOffice conference, was organized in early December 2016 with great success! The word Kaigi is the Japanese word 会議, which means conference. The name means not only Japanese regional, but also Japanese users-specific.

Around 25 people gathered and enjoyed several talks (migration to Open Document Format in Taiwan, by Franklin Weng, LibreOffice/ODF and styles, maintaining Math and Japanese translation), along with a few lightning talks and a panel discussion.

LibreOffice 5.3 triggers a record of donations

In this case, one image is better than 1,000 words, as the histogram represents donations during the first 10 days of each month, since May 2013, and doesn’t need any further comment. LibreOffice 5.3 has triggered 3,937 donations in February 2017, 1,800 more than in March 2016, and over 2,000 – sometimes over 3,000 – more than any other month. Donations are key to the life and the development of the project. Thanks, everyone.

 

Press Releases

Announcement of LibreOffice 25.8.4

Berlin, 18 December 2025 – LibreOffice 25.8.4, the fourth minor update to the free office suite developed by volunteers for…

Open Document Format

The Role of ODF in the Era of Digital Identity and Authentication

Digital identity has become an integral part of everyday life. We use it to access work tools and sign documents…