The Brazilian Community Gave a Presentation at the FLISOL-DF event (Festival Latino Americano de Instalação de Software Livre) about the LibreOffice Project.
Translation by Timothy Brennan Jr.
With the participation of Luciana Motta, Henderson Matsuura, Túlio Macedo and Timothy Brennan Jr., all members of The Document Foundation, the Brazilian LibreOffice community had the opportunity to give a presentation on the dynamics of LibreOffice in Brazil and their interaction with the international project.
Timothy and Luciana gave a lecture in conjunction entitled “I Don’t Know How to Code: How to contribute?” demonstrating how the LibreOffice project benefits from the volunteer and participative work of those who have foreign language skills, professional proofreading in Brazilian Portuguese, marketing and the promotion of software products, as well as coding in various modern computer languages where the gains acquired by individuals is always the unique experience of working alongside a team of professionals, both domestic and international. FLISOL was, additionally, an opportunity for a personal get-together of the Brazil team. This event focused on interaction and the exchange of ideas.
Team Brazil
FLISOL-DF, in the Federal District of Brazil’s capital, Brasília, took place on April 15, 2023 at the campus of Taguatinga (one of the Federal Districts satellite cities around Brasília) in the Universidade Católica de Brasília with the presence of Professor Wesley Sepulveda, and was organized by a team of volunteers lead by Henderson Matsuura.
Every major release of LibreOffice includes new features, thanks to our community of volunteer and ecosystem developers. But what can you do, if you want a new feature in LibreOffice but don’t have the technical know-how to implement it?
If you’re in a large company, you can engage with the LibreOffice ecosystem to get professional support. Or if you’re a regular end user, you can support individual developers for their work. For instance, Andreas Heinisch recently improved LibreOffice’s AutoText dialog with pre-filled text and a shortcut name, based on selected text, like this:
If users want me to fix a certain issue, they can fund me to fix a bug or implement an enhancement, like I did for a fire department in Italy (create Table of Contents from the current chapter level only), or some small changes for TDF (fixing a redraw bug in Calc, and the renaming of macro libraries).
Andreas has worked on 173 other fixes and improvements, as you can see on the bug tracker. Many thanks for all his work! And to other developers in our community: you too can consider setting up a Patreon page too (or similar system), to get financial support for your work, and provide a way for end users to fund the improvements they want.
In 2022, LibreOffice celebrated its twelfth birthday. Two new major versions of the suite introduced a variety of new features, while minor releases helped to improve stability as well
(This is part of The Document Foundation’s Annual Report for 2022 – we’ll post the full version here soon.)
LibreOffice 7.3
On February 2, LibreOffice 7.3 was officially released after six months of work. Developers at Collabora, allotropia, CIB, Red Hat, NISZ, The Document Foundation and other companies and organisations – along with volunteers – worked on many new features.
For instance, large improvements were made to change tracking, with especially when tables are altered and paragraphs are moved (László Németh, NISZ). Colour Filter support was added to the “Standard Filter” dialog in Calc (Samuel Mehrbrodt, allotropia), while PowerPoint-compatible screen sizes were added to Impress (Jun Nogata). On top of the new features, there were many other general improvements to performance, compatibility and stability.
With the help of the Indonesian community, TDF produced a video to explain and demonstrate many of the new features in LibreOffice 7.3. This was linked to in the announcement, and embedded into various web news websites that covered the release. The video is also available on PeerTube.
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LibreOffice 7.4
Later in the year, on August 18, TDF released LibreOffice 7.4. Based on the LibreOffice Technology platform for personal productivity on desktop, mobile and cloud, it provided a large number of interoperability improvements with Microsoft’s proprietary file formats.
In terms of features, this release added support for “sparklines” in Calc (Tomaž Vajngerl, Collabora). These are very small line charts, without axes or coordinates, to provide a quick overview of trends – as opposed to a full chart with details. Then, support for WebP images (Luboš Luňák, Collabora) and EMZ/WMZ files (Paris Oplopoios) was added, along with integration of the remote grammar checker LanguageTool (Mert Tümer; Collabora).
Many other features were added as well, and there were a large number of compatibility improvements. As with the previous release, TDF staff worked with the Indonesian LibreOffice community to make a video (PeerTube version) to demonstrate the new features:
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The Document Foundation, thanks to the widespread popularity of LibreOffice, is recognized as one of the largest FOSS organizations worldwide, and especially in Europe (where the project was born over 20 years ago). Because of this, during the last couple of years TDF has been involved in several discussions about policies which can affect or are affecting the adoption of FOSS, or the freedom of users’ choice for hardware, operating systems and software. A freedom of choice which should be protected by laws, especially when involving public administrations (with a strong focus on schools and universities, where future citizens grow up).
In December 2022, TDF’s Board of Directors has decided to increase public policy related activities in the EU by sponsoring travels to events organized by Open Forum Europe (OFE) – an umbrella organization supporting FOSS at the EU in Brussels – and by the European Commission – including DIGIT, the department in charge of IT related policies – on this specific topic, and I have been assigned this task within the team.
In term of meetings, apart from regular meetings with representatives of other FOSS projects organized by OFE, just before FOSDEM I have attended OFE’s meeting in Brussels, and during FOSDEM a specific round table organized by FOSS organizations. In March, I have discussed the potentially negative impact of the CRA with representatives of DIGIT. In April, I will be at the meeting organized by the Swedish Government – temporary president of the European Commission – in Stockholm, where the Cyber Resilence Act will be a key topic. Hopefully, the joint efforts put in place during these months by FOSS foundations, communities and organizations will contribute to a better Cyber Resilience Act.
Microsoft plans to raise the prices of its office software in Germany – and other services – significantly (article in German here). And not just once, but every six months there are to be “price adjustments”.
This is of course a problem for many businesses, organisations, schools and local governments that have limited resources. But it is also a good time to explore alternatives like LibreOffice.
LibreOffice is a free (as in zero cost) office suite, but it also offers fundamental freedoms to study, modify and share the software. Businesses benefit from the software’s data protection and security, and they can also take advantage of professional support. Other advantages:
LibreOffice can be installed in parallel with Microsoft Office for testing purposes
Throughout the month, we had three updates to LibreOffice – version 7.5.1 on March 2, and version 7.5.2 on March 30. We’re also maintaining the older LibreOffice 7.4 branch, and released 7.4.6 on March 9.
LibreOffice installer improvements (on Windows) are coming, thanks to Rachael Odetayo, Ximena Alcaman and Outreachy mentors. We talked to Rachael about what she’s working on, and how the installation process will be simplified.
Data protection and privacy is very important to us – and our users – in the LibreOffice project, so we’re happy to see that the European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS) is piloting the use of LibreOffice Technology.
While we’re planning the LibreOffice Conference 2023, as mentioned, we’re also looking further ahead to 2024. If you’d like to host the conference in your location, get in touch – we’d love to hear from you.
Members of the German-speaking LibreOffice community met at the Chemnitzer Linux-Tage event. They had a booth with merchandise, and answered questions from visitors.
