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LibreOffice 7.3.5 Community available for download

Berlin, July 21, 2022 – LibreOffice 7.3.5 Community, the fifth minor release of the LibreOffice 7.3 family, targeted at personal productivity users, is available for download from https://www.libreoffice.org/download. Users of previous versions of LibreOffice should update immediately, as this is now the release suggested for deployment in production environments.

The LibreOffice 7.3 family 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.

Microsoft files are still based on the proprietary format deprecated by ISO in 2008, which is artificially complex, and not on the ISO approved standard. This lack of respect for the ISO standard format may create issues to LibreOffice, and is a huge obstacle for transparent interoperability.

LibreOffice for enterprise deployments

For enterprise-class deployments, TDF strongly recommends the LibreOffice Enterprise family of applications from ecosystem partners, with long-term support options, professional assistance, custom features and Service Level Agreements: https://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-in-business

LibreOffice Community and the LibreOffice Enterprise family of products are based on the LibreOffice Technology platform, the result of years of development efforts with the objective of providing a state of the art office suite not only for the desktop but also for mobile and the cloud.

Products based on LibreOffice Technology are available for major desktop operating systems (Windows, macOS, Linux and Chrome OS), mobile platforms (Android and iOS) and the cloud. They may have a different name, according to each company brand strategy, but they share the same LibreOffice unique advantages, robustness and flexibility.

Availability of LibreOffice 7.3.5 Community

LibreOffice 7.3.5 Community is the best office suite for personal productivity, and is immediately available from https://www.libreoffice.org/download for Windows, macOS (for Apple and Intel processors) and Linux.

LibreOffice 7.3.5 change log pages are available on TDF’s wiki: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/7.3.5/RC1 (changed in RC1) and https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/7.3.5/RC2 (changed in RC2). Over 80 bugs and regressions have been solved.

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

LibreOffice individual users are assisted by a global community of volunteers: https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/community-support. On the website and the wiki there are guides, manuals, tutorials and HowTos. Donations help the project to make all of these resources available.

LibreOffice users are invited to join the community at https://ask.libreoffice.org, where they can get and provide user-to-user support. People willing to contribute their time and professional skills to the project can visit the dedicated website at https://whatcanidoforlibreoffice.org.

LibreOffice users, free software advocates and community members can provide financial support to The Document Foundation with a donation via PayPal, credit card or other tools at https://www.libreoffice.org/donate.

LibreOffice 7.3.5 is built with document conversion libraries from the Document Liberation Project: https://www.documentliberation.org.

Custom Shape Tutorial

Have you ever tried to draw special and complex shapes beyond the basic offerings of LibreOffice? A custom shape of the Fibonacci spiral defined by its equation and properties with handles to reshape size? Thanks to Regina Henschel, now you have a tutorial for drawing custom shapes of your own and use them in LibreOffice.

Currently, LibreOffice provides a lot of predefined custom shapes. They are grouped to the sets ‘Basic Shapes’, ‘Block Arrows’, ‘Symbol Shapes’, ‘Stars and Banners’, ‘Callouts’, and ‘Flowchart’. And all shapes from the ‘Fontwork Gallery’ are custom shapes too. But you can do more, much more.

Custom Shapes Tutorial

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Two ODF Toolkit releases in a row!

ODF is the Open Document Format, the native format used by LibreOffice (and supported by many other apps too). Then there’s the ODF Toolkit, a set of Java modules that allow programmatic creation, scanning and manipulation of ODF files. Svante Schubert writes with some updates:

We are happy to announce that there have been recently two ODF Toolkit releases in a row. These were our first releases at The Document Foundation (TDF), after the migration of the project to TDF in 2019:

  • With the 0.9.0 release, we have our last JDK 8 release (due to a switch of the Java Doc Taglet API we are using). After this release, we dropped the so-called “Simple API” (which was once forked from our ODFDOM doc Java Package by IBM, but not merged back, leaving lots of duplicated code that was unable to embrace our new change API). And the XSLT Runner Ant plugin will be removed in a future release, as we are no longer using Ant but Maven (to avoid maintenance of untested functionality).
  • With the 0.10.0 release, we support the next JDK 11 LTS version and our new change API that was implemented by myself for Open-XChange’s web office OX Documents – thanks to them, especially Malte Timmermann and Rafael Laguna for keeping the Apache License 2. Unfortunately, OX forked before I started there and it took me several months – and some sponsorship from a PrototypeFund project – to merge manually every file and enable all tests again (which some OX colleagues had disabled as they took too long…). (Please check out the PrototypeFund: Any German taxpayer may apply with an open-source project/idea!).

I would like to thank also all those numerous folks assisting us to make this work – especially recently in pushing this forward!

Especially, I would like to congratulate Michael Stahl for officially becoming the co-maintainer of this project. Michael has been my long term colleague (from StarOffice Hamburg times) and helps me constantly drop procrastination and/or fix issues I am no longer capable to realize as I looked too long at them. In addition, Michael and I also serve as editors of the OASIS ODF TC. There at the ODF TC, we envision having a faster turn-around of ODF spec deliveries and making their information set more readable for downstream software as we are. Thanks to allotropia software GmbH, Michael’s employer, for providing him with the time for working on these tasks!

So what’s next? Obviously, it’s more than time to release an ODF Toolkit 1.0.0.

Personally, I would like to get the code generation right, but keep as much compatibility to prior releases as possible. Michael and my aim is to work from the end of January on this release (any helping hand is most welcome) 😊

There is also ODF 1.3, to be embraced by a release in the near future.

In February, I will likely have an online talk at FOSDEM, at the LibreOffice dev room about our project and what I intend to do next year.

In a nutshell, I was able to receive some NGI Search funding for this project to enable search in ODF documents.

Aside from the obvious search API – focusing on one higher-level based on user semantic and likely having also one lower-level based on XML, I would like to refactor my “spaghetti feature code” in the SAX parser that made the implementation of the changes hard to maintain. Sorry for that, not my first and likely not my last mistake – but I am learning! 🙂

We’re going to work out a more elaborate picture for the FOSDEM presentation.

Until then, have fun with the ODF Toolkit!

Open Letter to Members of EU Parliament

Today, the Coalition for Competitive Digital Markets (https://competitivedigitalmarkets.eu/), a group of more than 50 technology companies from 16 different European countries, sent an open letter to members of the European Parliament to raise awareness about interoperability and to impose stricter rules on big companies – the so-called ‘big tech’ companies – that act as gatekeepers and prevent transparency and openness in digital markets.

Open Letter 6 December

LibreOffice Technology DevRoom Call for Papers

FOSDEM 2022 will be a virtual event, taking place online on Saturday, February 5, and Sunday, February 6. The LibreOffice DevRoom is scheduled for Sunday, February 6, from 9AM to 7PM (times to be confirmed). If we will get more interesting talk proposals than the maximum number we can fit in one day, we will have the opportunity to extend the DevRoom to Saturday, February 5, in the afternoon.

NEW RULES FOR 2022

  • The reference time will be Brussels local time (CET).
  • Talks will be pre-recorded in advance, and streamed during the event
  • Q/A session will be live
  • A facility will be provided for people watching to chat between themselves
  • A facility will be provided for people watching to submit questions

IMPORTANT DATES TO REMEMBER

  • December 26: Submission deadline
  • December 28: Announcement of selected talks
  • December 31: Publication of DevRoom final schedule
  • January 16: Availability of pre-recordings for review
  • January 23: Deadline for upload of presentations

CALL FOR PAPERS

We are inviting proposals for talks about LibreOffice Technology, including ODF standard document format, on topics such as code, localization, QA, UX, documentation, tools, extensions, migrations and general advocacy. Please keep in mind that product pitches are not allowed at FOSDEM.

The length of talks is limited to a maximum of 25 minutes, as we would like to have some minutes for questions after each presentation, and to fit as many presenters as possible in the schedule. Exceptions must be explicitly requested and justified. You may be assigned LESS time than you have requested.

IMPORTANT INFORMATIONS

  • Presentations have to be pre-recorded and tested for streaming before the event.
  • Once your talk is pre-recorded, and approved by a reviewer in term of quality for streaming, it will have to be uploaded by January 23, to be prepared and ready for broadcast (the deadline cannot be moved further).
  • During the stream of talks, speakers must be available online for the Q/A session.

TALK SUBMISSIONS

All talk submissions have to be made in the Pentabarf event planning tool: https://penta.fosdem.org/submission/FOSDEM22.

While filing the proposal, please provide the title of your talk, a short abstract (one or two paragraphs), some information about yourself (name, bio and photo, but please do remember that your profile might be already stored in Pentabarf). To submit your talk, click on “Create Event” and select the “LibreOffice Technology” DevRoom as the “Track”. Otherwise, your talk will not be even considered for any devroom at all.

If you already have a Pentabarf account from a previous year, even if your talk was not accepted, please reuse it. Create an account if, and only if, you don’t have one from a previous year. If you have any issues with Pentabarf, please get in touch with the DevRoom manager.

DEVROOM MANAGER

Italo Vignoli: italo@libreoffice.org

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