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Parabolas as custom shapes in LibreOffice

Regina Henschel writes…

Teachers of mathematics often need a parabola in their instructions or exercises. Creating a parabola by using a chart is cumbersome. Therefore I have generated some parabolas as custom shape for anyone to use. You can get them in this LibreOffice Writer document.

A simple parabola

A parabola with focus

And a parabola with tangent, where you can drag the point of contact

The parabola-shapes are contained in a document. You can copy and paste a shape from there to your document or you can drag the shapes into your Gallery. The document contains in addition some explanations how the shapes were generated. You can download the document from the wiki.

I hope you find the shapes useful!

LibreOffice 7.2: A week in stats

One week ago, we announced LibreOffice 7.2, our brand new major release. It’s packed with new features, and has many improvements to compatibility and performance too. So, what has happened in the week since then? Let’s check out some stats…

473,308 downloads

These are just stats for our official downloads page, of course – many Linux users will have acquired the new release via their distribution’s package repositories.

44,814 Tweet impressions

The announcement Tweet was viewed almost 45,000 times, and had 418 likes and 187 retweets. We’re also on Mastodon, a FOSS-friendly federated microblogging service: our Mastodon toot had 48 likes and 45 shares. Meanwhile, the Facebook post reached 7,604 people, with 297 reactions and 32 shares.

15,156 video views

Our LibreOffice 7.2 New Features video has been popular, with 57 comments and 522 likes. (We also uploaded the video to PeerTube, an open source, decentralized and federated video platform.)

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1077 upvotes on Reddit

As always, we posted the announcement on the /r/linux subreddit, where it had 1077 upvotes and 161 comments. We also have our own dedicated /r/libreoffice subreddit – check it out!

A huge thanks to our worldwide community of volunteers, and certified developers, for all their work on this release!

LibreOffice community members: Have your say in our survey!

At The Document Foundation, we try to grow and strengthen our community in many ways. We’d like to improve our support for existing community members who’re working on LibreOffice, but also increase the number of contributors (and TDF members).

To achieve this, we’ve created a survey for active members inside the LibreOffice community, to identify areas where focused activity is needed, and address the needs of local projects around the world.

There are 17 questions in the survey, and it runs from today until September 8. So, if you’re active in the LibreOffice or Document Liberation projects, let us know what you think! We appreciate all feedback:

» Click here to take part in the survey

The Guia do Writer 7.1 is finally here.

Translation courtesy of Timothy Brennan Jr.

Brazilian computer users in general, the community of Brazilian free software users and supporters, and of LibreOffice in particular, have received quite the gift today: the Brazilian LibreOffice documentation team proudly announces the publication of the Guia do Writer 7.1, the most complete Writer word processor guide for the best free software office suite, the LibreOffice Community.

The Guia do Writer 7.1 is an extensive 570-page volume covering the most advanced text-editing techniques, from simple typing of a page to assembling multi-volume documents, including electronic forms, illustrations, tables, indexes and summaries, automation and export to numerous file formats.

The guide is the LibreOffice Brazilian documentation team’s contribution to the public. The team has used automatic translation followed by a thorough manual review correcting terms, drafting and stylistics of the Portuguese language, as well as proofreading. While rereading the content, the team is able to check the accuracy of the techniques described in the documentation and review the terminology used in the software, signaling to the LibreOffice translation team the inconsistencies found in the interface suggesting improvements in terms, changes in the vocabulary of the commands and correction of the software Help Pages. This feedback has served to make the LibreOffice interface even more robust, consistent and has helped consolidate its command terminology.

The Guia do Writer 7.1 is available in three formats: The traditional PDF with adjusted pagination for those who want to print the guide and bind it, the source file in Open Document Format (ODF) for free editing, and the installed online version on The Document Foundation’s servers for reading on tablets, your desktop browser and — of course — on mobile phones.

“The importance of the  Guia do Writer is enormous. I suggest reading it for all who need to produce professional documents, as well as using the guide for creating courses, video classes, and even material for public tenders” says Olivier Hallot, coordinator of LibreOffice’s global documentation. “We are working on the LibreOffice Community ‘s manual library to provide the most advanced user guides for all LibreOffice modules, and, other volumes are on the way.” added Olivier.

The Brazilian  LibreOffice Community documentation team is made up of volunteers from all over Brazil (and one person in Ireland) and has been dedicated to producing the reference material in Brazilian Portuguese. The team includes (name and state or country) Vera Cavalcante (São Paulo), Luciana Mota (Distrito Federal), Márcia Buffon Machado (Ireland), Jackson Cavalcanti Jr. (Pernambuco), Raul Pacheco da Silva (São Paulo), Timothy Brennan Jr (Rio Grande do Sul), Túlio Macedo (Distrito Federal), Diego Peres Marques (Rio de Janeiro), Rafael Lima (Santa Catarina) and Olivier Hallot (Rio de Janeiro).

The Brazilian Guia do Writer 7.1 can be downloaded at https://documentation.libreoffice.org/pt-br/portugues   along with other volumes for Impress, Calc, Math and the Beginner’s Guide.

The original Writer Guide 7.1 can be downloaded at https://documentation.libreoffice.org/en/english-documentation/

LibreOffice 7.2 Community is strong on interoperability

Over 60% of code commits for the brand new version of the best free and open source office suite are focused on interoperability with Microsoft’s proprietary file formats

Berlin, August 19, 2021 – LibreOffice 7.2 Community, the new major release of the volunteer-supported free office suite for desktop productivity, is available from https://www.libreoffice.org/download. Based on the LibreOffice Technology platform for personal productivity on desktop, mobile and cloud, it provides a large number of interoperability improvements with Microsoft’s proprietary file formats. In addition, LibreOffice 7.2 Community offers numerous performance improvements in handling large files, opening certain DOCX and XLSX files, managing font caching, and opening presentations and drawings that contain large images. There are also drawing speed improvements when using the Skia back-end that was introduced with LibreOffice 7.1.

LibreOffice 7.2 is now available natively for Apple Silicon, a series of processors designed by Apple and based on the ARM architecture. Because of the early phase of development on this specific platform, binaries are provided but should not be used for any critical purpose at this stage. Software will be available from the following page: https://download.documentfoundation.org/libreoffice/stable/7.2.0/mac/aarch64/.

LibreOffice and Interoperability

LibreOffice 7.2 Community adds a significant number of improvements to interoperability with legacy DOC files, and DOCX, XLSX and PPTX documents. Microsoft files are still based on the proprietary format deprecated by the ISO in April 2008, and not on the ISO approved standard, so they embed a large amount of hidden artificial complexity. This causes handling issues with LibreOffice, which defaults to a true open standard format (the OpenDocument Format).

The LibreOffice community is happy to have many talented developers who are tackling these issues.

Thanks to the focused development activity from volunteer and sponsored developers, LibreOffice 7.2 takes a significant step forward in terms of transparent interoperability, while maintaining many advantages in terms of resiliency, robustness and compliance with standards – to the benefit of enterprise and individual users.

LibreOffice offers the highest level of compatibility in the office suite market segment, starting with native support for the OpenDocument Format (ODF) – beating proprietary formats in the areas of security and robustness – to superior support for DOCX, XLSX and PPTX files. In addition, LibreOffice provides filters for a large number of legacy document formats, to return ownership and control to users.

LibreOffice 7.2 Community New Features [1]

LibreOffice 7.2 Community’s new features have been developed by 171 contributors: 70% of code commits are from 51 developers employed by three companies sitting in TDF’s Advisory Board – Collabora, Red Hat and allotropia – or other organizations (including The Document Foundation), and 30% are from 120 individual volunteers.

In addition, 232 volunteers have provided localizations in 151 languages. LibreOffice 7.2 Community is released in 119 different language versions, more than any other free or proprietary software, and as such can be used in the native language (L1) by over 5.4 billion people worldwide. In addition, over 2.3 billion people speak one of those 119 languages as their second language (L2).

GENERAL

• Popup list to search for menu commands
• Scrollable style picker in the NotebookBar
• Fontwork panel in the Sidebar
• New list view for the templates dialog
• Built-in “Xray”-like UNO object inspector

WRITER

• Background fills can cover whole pages, beyond margins
• Page styles can now have a gutter margin
• Mail merge shows a warning about nonexistent data sources
• RDF metadata in Style Inspector
• Custom color metadata field shadings

CALC

• Calc now can filter by color in AutoFilter
• HTML tables listed in the External Data dialogue now show captions
• “Fat cross” cursor available in the options
• Type can be selected in “Moving Average” trend lines

IMPRESS & DRAW

• New templates: Candy, Freshes, Grey Elegant, Growing Liberty, Yellow Idea
• Multiple columns now available in text boxes
• Direct access to the scaling factor via the status bar

A video summarizing the top new features in LibreOffice 7.2 Community is available on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cWmURg_rM2o and PeerTube: https://peertube.opencloud.lu/videos/watch/d9413c81-a568-4a0e-b570-6200fc1d062c.

LibreOffice for Enterprises

For enterprise-class deployments, TDF strongly recommends the LibreOffice Enterprise family of applications from ecosystem partners – for desktop, mobile and cloud – with a large number of dedicated value-added features. These include long-term support options, professional assistance, personalized developments and other benefits such as SLA (Service Level Agreements): https://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-in-business/.

Despite this recommendation, an increasing number of enterprises are using the version supported by volunteers, instead of the version optimized for their needs and supported by the different ecosystem companies.

Over time, this represents a problem for the sustainability of the LibreOffice project, because it slows down the evolution of the project. In fact, every line of code developed by ecosystem companies for their enterprise customers is shared with the community on the master code repository, and improves the LibreOffice Technology platform.

Products based on LibreOffice Technology are available for major desktop operating systems (Windows, macOS, Linux and Chrome OS), for mobile platforms (Android and iOS), and for the cloud. Slowing down the development of the platform is hurting users at every level, and may ultimately lead to a stagnation of the LibreOffice project.

Migrations to LibreOffice

The Document Foundation has developed a Migration Protocol to support enterprises moving from proprietary office suites to LibreOffice, which is based on the deployment of an LTS version from the LibreOffice Enterprise family, plus migration consultancy and training sourced from certified professionals who offer CIOs and IT managers value-added solutions in line with proprietary offerings. Reference: https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/professional-support/.

In fact, LibreOffice – thanks to its mature codebase, rich feature set, strong support for open standards, excellent compatibility and long-term support options from certified partners – represents the ideal solution for businesses that want to regain control of their data and free themselves from vendor lock-in.

Availability of LibreOffice 7.2 Community

LibreOffice 7.2 Community is immediately available from the following link: https://www.libreoffice.org/download/. Minimum requirements for proprietary operating systems are Microsoft Windows 7 SP1 and Apple macOS 10.12.

Change Logs: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/7.2.0/RC1 (RC1), https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/7.2.0/RC2 (RC2), https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/7.2.0/RC3 (RC3).

LibreOffice Technology-based products for Android and iOS are listed here: https://www.libreoffice.org/download/android-and-ios/, while for App Stores and ChromeOS are listed here: https://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-from-microsoft-and-mac-app-stores/.

For users whose main objective is personal productivity, and therefore prefer a release that has undergone more testing and bug fixing over the new features, The Document Foundation maintains the LibreOffice 7.1 family, which includes some months of back-ported fixes. The current version is LibreOffice 7.1.5.

The Document Foundation does not provide technical support for users, although they can get it from volunteers on user mailing lists and the Ask LibreOffice website: https://ask.libreoffice.org.

LibreOffice users, free software advocates and community members can support The Document Foundation with a donation at https://www.libreoffice.org/donate.

LibreOffice 7.2 is built with document conversion libraries from the Document Liberation Project: https://www.documentliberation.org.

[1] Release Notes: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleaseNotes/7.2.

Press Kit

Download link: https://nextcloud.documentfoundation.org/s/AgY6G3WAAtsCZrn.

Open Badges for awesome Czech documentation contributors!

LibreOffice’s documentation team is driven by volunteers around the world. Today, we want to say a special thanks to members of the Czech LibreOffice community, who’ve worked hard to translate and proof-read the software’s documentation.

So we’re sending out Open Badges – special, customised badges with embedded metadata, describing their achievements. The badges can be verified using an external service, and are a great way to show off contributions and use as proof of participation.

So, here are the badge recipients – we’re sending them out personally:

  • Translators: Petr Kuběj, Radomír Strnad and Zdenek Crhonek
  • Proof-readers: Petr Valach and Marcela Tomešová
  • Czech screenshots: Roman Toman
  • Git and OmegaT maintenance, machine translations, chapters cleaning and tools support: Miloš Šrámek

Huge thanks to all recipients – check your inbox for your badges!

Meanwhile, here’s a quick history of recent Czech guide translations:

Press Releases

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File formats are not usually the subject of philosophical debate because most users just want to open, save and share…