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LibreOffice IRC channels moving to Libera.Chat

Many projects in the LibreOffice community use IRC (Internet Relay Chat) to communicate. This is a real-time text-based communication protocol that’s popular amongst many free and open source software projects.

We are moving our IRC channels to a new host, Libera.Chat, which is run by a Swedish non-profit organisation. Here’s an alphabetical list of the current channels – for more information, see our wiki:

  • #libreoffice
  • #libreoffice-de
  • #libreoffice-design
  • #libreoffice-dev
  • #libreoffice-doc
  • #libreoffice-fi
  • #libreoffice-fr
  • #libreoffice-gsoc
  • #libreoffice-hackfest
  • #libreoffice-NLP
  • #libreoffice-qa
  • #libreoffice-telegram
  • #tdf-infra

Thanks to everyone who participates in our IRC channel discussions, and keeps LibreOffice moving forward!

Annual Report 2020: TDF and LibreOffice infrastructure

In 2020, the infrastructure team added new services, implemented a new Extensions and Templates site, and worked on a replacement for Ask LibreOffice

(This is part of The Document Foundation’s Annual Report for 2020 – the full version is here.)

LibreOffice’s infrastructure team is responsible for maintaining the hardware, virtual machines and services that enable the wider community to develop, market, test, localize and improve the software. The public infrastructure is powered by around 50 kernel-based virtual machines (KVMs) spread across four hypervisors, plugged to an internal 10Gbps switch, hosted at Manitu in St. Wendel (Germany), and managed with libvirt and its KVM/QEMU driver. The virtual disk images are typically stored in GlusterFS volumes – distributed across the hypervisors – except for some transient disks (such as cache) where the IOPS requirement is higher and the redundancy less important.

In 2020, the infra team added various new services, such as the new SilverStripe-based Extensions and Templates site. Some background to the technical and design decisions behind the site are here on the blog.

Meanwhile, Discourse was investigated as a likely AskBot replacement, while several VMs for deployment tests outside the scope of infra were handed over (such as decidim). The infra team worked on Moodle (an e-learning platform), build bots, integration of the Weblate translation platform into the TDF development dashboard, and a crashtest box (sponsored by Adfinis).

Along with the new services, there were many notable upgrades too. Some machines are still running Debian GNU/Linux 9 (codename Stretch), but most are now upgraded to Debian 10 (codename Buster). Other updates include: Nextcloud 16 to 20, Gerrit 2.16 to 3.2, LibreOffice Online 6.3 to 7.0, and Mediawiki 1.31 to 1.35. Finally, OpenGrok, Etherpad Lite, Weblate and the Grimoire dashboard received updates too.

Notable refactoring/improvements took place in the online help backend, along with the backends for bibisecting and mailing lists. The team started collecting metrics for download counters and the update checker, and worked on improving IRC bots, the monitoring setup, and a distributed backup solution.

Documentation was improved to make onboarding of new infra team members easier, while the SSO (Single Sign-On authentication) system was expanded with more services: Gerrit, the new extension site, Discourse, Jitsi and Moodle.

Like what we do? Support the LibreOffice project and The Document Foundation – get involved and help our volunteers, or consider making a donation. Thank you!

Get printed copies of LibreOffice handbooks!

LibreOffice’s Documentation Team writes, updates and translates many handbooks. These are full of tips, tricks and tutorials covering the whole office suite. You can find PDF and ODT versions on this page – but sometimes it’s nice to have a hard-copy, printed version, right?

Well, you can get those too! Our community has made these available via the online bookshop Lulu (which was started by Red Hat co-founder Bob Young). These are printed on-demand, in various facilities around the world, and have global shipping.

So, if you want to learn more about LibreOffice but fancy a break from your computer screen, check them out!

Projects selected for LibreOffice in the Google Summer of Code 2021

In March, we announced that LibreOffice will be participating in the Google Summer of Code (GSoC), a programme that connects students with free and open source software projects. GSoC helps students to implement new features, and provides them with financial support along the way.

Well, the projects have been selected, so here they are!

  • Bayram Çiçek – 100 Paper Cuts: This aims to improve LibreOffice’s user interface, implementing enhancement requests and solving the most annoying UX (user experience) issues.
  • Anshu Khare – Sidebar: It’s planned to revamp the current styles deck sidebar and to merge paragraph and character styles into one Text Style deck. Furthermore, the student wants to rework the filter workflow. Here’s a mockup (click for larger):

  • Tushar Kumar – Implement an interface for external data source import in Calc: Currently, Calc’s back-end data provider supports CSV, HTML, XML and and Base’s data provider. This feature is not yet ready for production, however, so this project’s goal is to improve it. Here’s a mockup:

  • Balázs Sántha – Implement table styles in OOXML (.docx) support: At the moment, table styles found in .docx documents are converted into direct formatting at at Writer’s core level. This project aims to take a step towards a solution for handling proper table styles.

  • Panos Korovesis – Make the SVM format independent of the VCL metafile + tests for the format: This requires the completion of the tests regarding SVM, and then the separation of the read and write functionality of MetaActions to new distinct classes.
  • Akshit Kushwaha – Tests for the VCL graphics back-end: Add more test cases to the pre-existing tests, running those tests in every back-end, and implement a usable UI for the users to test the graphic’s feasibility themselves. This should make graphics rendering smoother.
  • Shubham Jain – Write missing unit tests: Extend the tests in Libreoffice. There are currently more than 1300 bugs fixes which do not have tests written for them, so this project aims to bring down that number.

Good luck to all the students – we appreciate their work on these important features and improvements! And thanks to our mentors for assisting them: Heiko Tietze, Xisco Fauli, lmari Lauhakangas, Olivier Hallot and Christian Lohmeier (The Document Foundation); Tomaž Vajngerl, Muhammet Kara, Luboš Luňák, Miklos Vajna and Mike Kaganski (Collabora); Thorsten Behrens (allotropia); László Németh and Markus Mohrhard.

From August 16 – 23, students will submit their code, project summaries, and final evaluations of their mentors. Find out more about the timeline here, and check out more details about the projects on this page.

Community Member Monday: Hüseyin GÜÇ

Today we’re speaking to Hüseyin GÜÇ from our Turkish community, who’s helping with translations and spreading the word. Last year, he updated us on a LibreOffice migration in a municipality in Turkey.

Tell us a bit about yourself!

I’m a passionate administrator and open source enthusiast, starting my career 26 years ago. I live in Istanbul, and enjoy keeping myself up to date with the latest in the open source world, and trying out the latest tools, features, and services around Linux. In my spare time, I participate in the Turkish translation of open source applications.

You recently decided to become a Member of The Document Foundation, the non-profit behind LibreOffice. Tell us about that…

I want the OpenDocument Format and LibreOffice application to be used in my institutions and city. For this reason, I wanted to support The Documentation Foundation individually.

Also, I am here because I think the LibreOffice community has a differentiation from other open source communities. You can install and use open source applications, but there is a need for the OpenDocument Format to become widespread in order to use the produced output.

Here, I want to be a part of this dissemination and I believe that there will be an opportunity for this. Open source usage in Turkey is not at the desired level yet. In addition, it is very sad that many individuals and institutions are unaware of the OpenDocument Format and LibreOffice. I want to strive to eliminate this problem.

Many thanks to Hüseyin for his contributions! Learn more about the Turkish LibreOffice community here. And if you want to spread the word about LibreOffice in your area, join our marketing community – we can help you!

LibreOffice Design Community Work in 2020

Design has been one of the major focus points of LibreOffice in the last few years, and has produced new icon sets and a number of incremental updates to the user interface – menus, toolbars and the SideBar – and the creation of the brand new NotebookBar…

(This is part of The Document Foundation’s Annual Report for 2020 – the full version will be posted here on the blog soon.)

Improvements in LibreOffice 7.0

Icon Themes

A new Sukapura icon theme, based on Apple’s color palette as defined in macOS Human Interface Guidelines for Visual Design, was developed to become the default on macOS. The Sukapura icon theme is based on the Colibre icon theme and developed to fit macOS desktop environment in mind. (Added by Rizal Muttaqin)

The Colibre icon theme was adopted as default for the Windows operating system was refreshed based on the new Monoline style iconography implemented by Microsoft Office 365. The goal of the Monoline style is to have a consistent, clear, and accessible iconography to communicate action and features with simple visuals, ensure the icons are accessible to all users, and have a style that is consistent with those used elsewhere in Windows. (Rizal Muttaqin)

Sifr was polished and updated, with fewer icons falling back to Breeze or Colibre, while the unmaintained Tango icon theme was removed from core, but is still available as an extension. (Rizal Muttaqin, Heiko Tietze)

Dialogs

The Windows Installer was updated with new icons and images, based on LibreOffice 7.0’s visual theme. (Bayu Rizaldhan Rayes, Rizal Muttaqin, Muhammad Rivan)

Impress Presenter Screen

The Impress Presenter Screen shows on the personal computer or laptop screen when the presentation is projected on a second screen or a projector. The screen shows both the current and the next slide, plus optionally the speaker notes, plus a timer and some presentation controls such as arrows to go back and forth.

The visual appearance of the screen was refreshed, according to the user interface design. The extra white border pixel in the box was removed as well as the blurred shadow, while the background has been darkened to make the icons in the bottom bar more visible.

Three buttons were added: the first two to pause and resume the timer, which are useful to get the complete control on the timing of the session which was missing in the past, and a third to exit the Presenter Screen, in addition to the Esc button used in past versions. (Rizal Muttaqin)

Improvements in LibreOffice 7.1

Icons

The Elementary icon theme has been updated to be more consistent with Elementary branding colors, which are named after natural elements such as fruits. (Rizal Muttaqin)

Dialogs

LibreOffice offers several User Interface options, from the traditional one based on Toolbars and Menus, with Sidebar, to the different NotebookBar alternatives, which are more familiar to users migrating from proprietary solutions. To help users choose the best User Interface for their preferences or habits, a new dialog window was added to select the UI during the first start. (Heiko Tietze, TDF)

NotebookBar

A new widget providing styles preview was added to the tabbed NotebookBar. (Szymon Kłos, Collabora)

Like what we do? Support the LibreOffice project and The Document Foundation – get involved and help our volunteers, or consider making a donation. Thank you!

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