Check out our summary of what happened in the LibreOffice community last month…
We started off by releasing LibreOffice 7.1.2, an update with over 60 bug fixes and improvements to document compatibility.
Meanwhile, the Council of the German city of Dortmund announced that it’s moving to free and open source software, where possible. This is great news: in the future, the city administration will have to justify why open source software cannot be used for every proprietary software application.
There were several documentation updates in April, thanks to our busy community: the Brazilian Community launched the LibreOffice 7.0 Getting Started Guide in Portuguese, while the Writer Guide 7.1 also arrived. Great work, everyone!
Next up: the Czech community’s translation of the Writer Guide 6.4. Thanks to Petr Kuběj, Zdeněk Crhonek, Petr Valach, Vendula Crhonková, Radomír Strnad, Ludmila Chládková and Zuzana Pitříková for their contributions!
Our New Generation project, aimed at bringing new (and especially younger) contributors into the community, announced its first work: flyers to hand out in schools and universities. They’re available in many languages, and encourage younger people to not just use LibreOffice, but also get involved with it too.
Later in the month, we chatted with Necdet Yücel, who has been mentoring students and helping them to get involved with LibreOffice.
LibreOffice’s Macro Team wrote a progress report, listing documentation updates and code contributions from many community members. A big thanks to everyone who’s helping to improve LibreOffice’s macro support.
Our French community has been working on translations for LibreOffice user guides, so we thanked them with special Open Badges, containing custom metadata, recognising their achievements!
If you’ve been using LibreOffice for a while, you may be wondering: who makes it? Well, the answer is: people like you! LibreOffice is a worldwide, community open source project – and many people who help to improve it, actually started out as regular users of the software.
So in May, we want to encourage you to get involved, join our community, and have fun. You can build up valuable skills for a future career – and you don’t need to be a programmer. There are many ways to help make LibreOffice awesome, as we’ll see in a moment.
And best of all: everyone who contributes to LibreOffice in May 2021 can claim a cool sticker pack, and has the chance to win extra LibreOffice merchandise such as mugs, hoodies, T-shirts, rucksacks and more (we’ll choose 10 participants at random at the end):
How to take part
So, let’s get started! There are many ways you can help out – and as mentioned, you don’t need to be a developer. For instance, you can be a…
Handy Helper, answering questions from users on Ask LibreOffice. We’re keeping an eye on that site so if you give someone useful advice, you can claim your shiny stickers.
First Responder, helping to confirm new bug reports: go to our Bugzilla page and look for new bugs. If you can recreate one, add a comment like “CONFIRMED on Windows 10 and LibreOffice 7.1.2”.
Drum Beater, spreading the word: tell everyone about LibreOffice on Twitter or Mastodon! Just say why you love it or what you’re using it for, add the #libreoffice hashtag, and at the end of the month you can claim your stickers.
Globetrotter, translating the user interface: LibreOffice is available in a wide range of languages, but its interface translations need to be kept up-to-date. Or maybe you want to translate the suite to a whole new language? Get involved here.
Code Cruncher, contributing source code: The codebase is big, but there are lots of places to get involved with small jobs. See our Developers page on the website and this page on the wiki to get started.
Docs Doctor, writing documentation: Whether you want to update the online help or add chapters to the handbooks, here’s where to start.
We’ll be updating this page every day with usernames across our various services, as people contribute. So dive in, get involved and help make LibreOffice better for millions of people around the world – and enjoy your sticker pack at the end as thanks from us! And who knows, maybe you’ll be lucky enough to win bonus merch as well…
Let’s go! We’ll be posting regular updates on this blog and our Mastodon and Twitter accounts over the next four weeks – stay tuned!
Thanks to localisation volunteers around the world, LibreOffice’s documentation is available in many languages. Today, we want to say thanks to the French community of translators, who localised the guide for LibreOffice Math 7.0 – great work, everyone!
Each translator gets an Open Badge from The Document Foundation, the non-profit behind LibreOffice. These are special, custom images with embedded metadata, confirming the contributions.
So, if you got a badge, feel free to share it on your blog, social media, Git page and other places! And indeed use it as proof of your abilities, when joining another project or looking for work! You can verify your badge here.
The recipients:
Sango BARKER-GILES
Maëlle GONZALEZ
Ornella NGUENANG LOWE
Célian LIMOUSIN
Baptiste LECUYER
Enjoy, and thanks again! Stay tuned to this blog for more Open Badges in coming months…
If you are interested in contributing to the macro team (development, testing or documentation), we’d love to hear from you – please send an email to ilmari.lauhakangas@libreoffice.org and we’ll get in touch.
ScriptForge Libraries
The biggest single event was the introduction of ScriptForge Libraries in LibreOffice 7.1. ScriptForge and its documentation is a collaboration betwen Jean-Pierre Ledure, Alain Romedenne and Rafael Lima. You can read more about it in the January 2021 blog post and the work-in-progress Help content.
Wiki docs
Nathan Ullberg continued working on Impress macro articles.
In 2020, LibreOffice celebrated its tenth 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 2020 – the full version will be posted here on the blog soon.)
The Document Foundation announced two major releases of LibreOffice in 2020: version 6.4 on January 29, and version 7.0 on August 5. In addition, 13 minor releases were made available over the year:
RELEASE
DATE
LibreOffice 6.3.5
February20
LibreOffice 6.4.1
February27
LibreOffice 6.4.2
March19
LibreOffice 6.4.3
April16
LibreOffice 6.3.6
April 30
LibreOffice 6.4.4
May21
LibreOffice 6.4.5
July 2
LibreOffice 6.4.6
August13
LibreOffice 7.0.1
September3
LibreOffice 7.0.2
October8
LibreOffice 6.4.7
October22
LibreOffice 7.0.3
October 29
LibreOffice 7.0.4
December 17
Throughout the year, we held three Bug Hunting Sessions in preparation for new major releases. These typically took place on a single day between set times, so that experienced developers and QA engineers could help new volunteers to file and triage bugs via the IRC channels and mailing lists. The Bug Hunting Sessions for LibreOffice 7.0 were held on May 11 and July 6 – while the one for LibreOffice 7.1 took place on October 26.
LibreOffice 6.4
On January 29, LibreOffice 6.4 was officially released after six months of work. Developers at Collabora, CIB, Red Hat, SIL and other companies – along with volunteers – worked on many new features. For instance, a QR Code generator was added to the suite, making it easy to add QR codes (which can be read by mobile devices) to documents.
Hyperlink context menus were unified throughout the software to provide the following menu entries: Open Hyperlink, Edit Hyperlink, Copy Hyperlink Location and Remove Hyperlink.
Meanwhile, a new Automatic Redaction feature was added to hide classified or sensitive data in a document, based on text or regular expression matches, while the help system was reworked to provide faster and more precise search results – and many help pages were given localized screenshots for a better user experience.
TDF produced a video to explain and demonstrate many of the new features in LibreOffice 6.4. This was linked to in the announcement, and embedded into various web news websites that covered the release:
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LibreOffice 7.0
Later in the year, on August 5, TDF released LibreOffice 7.0. OpenDocument, LibreOffice’s native open and standardised format for office documents, was updated to version 1.3 as an OASIS Technical Committee Specification. Important new features included digital signatures and OpenPGP-based encryption of XML documents, with improvements in areas such as change tracking, and additional details in the description of elements in first pages, text, numbers and charts. The development of ODF 1.3’s features was funded by donations to The Document Foundation, and the implementation was done by CIB and other developers in the ecosystem.
Additionally, support for Skia graphics engine was added thanks to sponsorship by AMD, and was set as the default on Windows, for faster performance. Skia is an open source 2D graphics library which provides common APIs that work across a variety of hardware and software platforms, and can be used for drawing text, shapes and images. Vulkan is a new-generation graphics and compute API with high-efficiency and cross-platform access to modern GPUs. Luboš Luňák (Collabora) did a large part of the work to support Skia.
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 LibreOffice community to make a video (PeerTube version here) to demonstrate the new features:
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Today we’re talking to Necdet Yücel from the Turkish LibreOffice community, who has been mentoring students and helping them to get involved with LibreOffice…
Tell us a bit about yourself!
I have been working as a lecturer at a university for more than 20 years. I teach programming and computer networks courses in the computer engineering department. My main area of interest is free software. My personal contribution to the free software world is mostly by making Turkish translations of free software – and I try to explain the free software world to my students, and guide them through it.
What are you doing in the LibreOffice project right now?
I’m one of the old translators of LibreOffice. I have translated hundreds of thousands of words, but I have no motivation to work on translations for a while.
Since 2015, the year Gülşah Köse become a LibreOffice developer, more than 15 of my students made contributions to LibreOffice. One of them is Mert Tümer’s, who is an active LibreOffice developer. Gülşah’s work was a major influence for LibreOffice developments in Turkey. I am very proud of my students, who started with her and continued until Gökçe Küler.
Do you have any tips/thoughts to share from bringing people into the community?
I think we have no choice but to direct students to free software in universities. Because it’s the only chance to to study how the programs work. Reading well-written code, changing it, compiling and redistributing it are the main requirements for being good developers. If we can explain them to students, they will become free software developers.
Is there anything else you plan to do in the project
The only thing I think I know well is mentoring students to free software. My short term plan is to continue translating and consulting students for free software.
Many thanks to Necdet for all his contributions! And to everyone reading this who uses LibreOffice and is interested in getting more involved: find out what you can do here. We’d love to have you on board, in our community!
