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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.

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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.

 

LibreOffice 5.3: A week in stats

We announced LibreOffice 5.3 one week ago, and a lot has happened in the meantime! Here’s a summary of downloads, web page views, social media activity and other statistics. We’ve also compared these to the LibreOffice 5.2 first week stats to see how the project and community is progressing…

410,472 downloads of LibreOffice 5.3

This is a 32% increase over the first week of LibreOffice 5.2 – and note that it only includes downloads from our servers and mirrors, and not other sources (such as Linux distribution package repositories).

378,719 unique visitors to our website

Here we have a major 77% increase over the same period for the last release. In addition, there were 834,959 page views.

3,293 donations to The Document Foundation

Donations help our project and community in many ways – infrastructure, documentation, events, marketing, and more. Compared to the first week of LibreOffice 5.2, the number of donations increased by 79%.

77,878 views of our New Features videos

More big growth here – the videos for LibreOffice 5.2 had 37,252 views in comparison, so this is a 109% increase. A lot of this growth can be attributed to the many news articles on the web that embedded the videos for readers to watch.

Now, how about social media?

30,298 people reached by the announcement on Facebook

Our Facebook community is growing steadily, and here we see a 21% increase over the same statistic for LibreOffice 5.2. The announcement was liked by 851 people and shared 213 times. Meanwhile, our Google+ post received 229 likes (up from 115 for the previous version).

So there’s plenty to be happy about, but there are some areas where we can improve as well:

20,203 impressions from the announcement tweet

This is a 42% decrease compared to the tweet for LibreOffice 5.2. There are many possible reasons for this decrease, some out of our control, but we’ll revise our strategy for the next release to ensure that the Twittersphere keeps talking about us. Similarly, Reddit activity around the release wasn’t quite as strong this time: links to the LibreOffice 5.3 announcement on the blog received 486 upvotes, compared to 632 for last time, so that’s something to work on as well.

But on the whole, we can see that the project and community is growing well. Thanks to everyone who helped out with marketing, promotion and social media activity around the release!

Download LibreOffice 5.3 here

Announcement of LibreOffice 5.2.5

Berlin, January 26, 2017 – The Document Foundation (TDF) announces LibreOffice 5.2.5 “still”, the fifth minor release of the LibreOffice 5.2 family. Based on the upcoming announcement of LibreOffice 5.3, all users are invited to update to LibreOffice 5.2.5 from LibreOffice 5.1.6 or previous versions.

TDF suggests deploying LibreOffice in large organizations, 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/).

Road to LibreOffice 5.3

LibreOffice 5.3 will be announced in less than a week, on February 1st, 2017. Users can start learning about the new features on LibreOffice 5.3 Release Notes page (https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleaseNotes/5.3).

Download LibreOffice

LibreOffice 5.2.5 is immediately available for download from the following link: http://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-fresh/. LibreOffice users, free software advocates and community members can support The Document Foundation with a donation at http://donate.libreoffice.org.

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.

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