Regina Henschel shows you how to do some nifty 3D tricks in LibreOffice…
First, you need a world map in “Miller projection”. You find a suitable one on Wikipedia – download the full-size version. Here’s a thumbnail of it (CC-BY-SA, Daniel R. Strebe, August 2011):
Next, start LibreOffice Draw, and create a sphere from the “3D-Objects” toolbar.
Click the sphere to select it, right-click to bring up the context menu, and choose “Area”.
In the dialog box that appears, click on “Bitmap” and then on “Add/Import”. Select the downloaded map, and enter a name for it, that you will use in your collection of bitmaps. The image should be applied to the sphere. If not, select the map from the collection.
Then, in the “Options” part of the dialog box, select the item “Stretched” from the drop-down list “Style”. Click OK. Your globe is finished!
Now you can rotate the globe to the part of the earth you want to see – click on it once to show red corner controls, then once again to show orange; the latter can be used for rotation.
If you want to change the position of the “sun”, open the “3D Effects” dialog from the context menu. Select the tab “Illumination”. In the lower part drag the ball to the desired direction. And finally, apply it with the “Assign” icon top right.
Thanks to Regina for the tips! More guides for LibreOffice Draw, written by our documentation community, are available on this page. Check out the Draw Guide 6.4 for lots more info!
The LibreOffice Conference is the annual gathering of the community, our end-users, developers, and everyone interested in free office software. Last year, it took place online – and was co-organised with the openSUSE project
(This is part of The Document Foundation’s Annual Report for 2020 – the full version will be posted here on the blog soon.)
Normally the conference takes place at a different venue each year, to reflect the international and diverse LibreOffice community. For instance, in 2019 we were in Almeria; in 2018 in Tirana; and in 2017 in Rome. Due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, though, we decided to move the conference online in 2020. This wasn’t an easy decision, as face-to-face meetups are important for free and open source software projects, but we focused on making it work.
We did so with the help of openSUSE, a GNU/Linux distribution project, which also has yearly conferences. There’s a lot of overlap between the openSUSE and LibreOffice projects – both produce free software for end users, and many people are active in both communities – so we decided to join forces and bring as many people together as possible.
The conference took place from 15 – 17 October, with sessions usually running from 10:00 to 21:00 (UTC). We created multiple Jitsi “rooms” for the various talks and presentations, along with extra rooms for social interaction and general chit-chat.
Conference Tracks
Following the opening session, presentations and talks were given across various “tracks” or categories: Development, Advocacy, Marketing, Design, Accessibility, Localisation, Documentation and more. There were highly technical talks focused on specific areas, along with more open discussions about community building and recent updates from The Document Foundation.
On the final day, the conference wrapped up with a closing session, headed by TDF’s Chairman, Lothar Becker. He thanked the presenters and all attendees for their support, especially given that it was the first time we’ve run such a large event online.
Hackfest and Workshops
Outside of the conference tracks, there were several workshops covering certification, new tools to onboard contributors, strategic marketing, and the Google Summer of Code. On the final day of the conference, Ilmari Lauhakangas organised a Virtual Hackfest – an opportunity for developers to work together on features and bugs.
Full Programme
Full details about the event are available on openSUSE’s events page. For a quick overview of all the talks, including links to PDF versions of the presentations, see here. Videos of many of the talks are available as a playlist on our YouTube channel (or click here to watch them on PeerTube):
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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.
