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Sophie Gautier: an update about LibreOffice localization

Once in a while, I try to look back to see what the l10n project has achieved in the last months. And it is a lot! When you consider that almost every change in the LibreOffice interface means some work for the localizers, open LibreOffice and have a look, you will see new toolbars, new functionalities with new dialogues, some different labels, so many tiny things which request translator’s work.

And it’s only part of the work, a lot has been achieved also in the help. Old articles removed, texts on features that have never been documented have been added, new features are described. Finally, a fair amount of help pages have been changed or created and it’s much work for the translators. For example, between LibreOffice 5.4 and the next version, this is about 4,000 words that have been added to both UI and Help. This counts only new words, not those who are fuzzy or need correction.

Another part is LibreOffice online. Parts of the strings are already translated, but new words come that are not the easiest to translate because there is no context. For 2018, we are looking into deploying instances for localizers and the community at large to actually test the translation. The good news it that it’s much more light than the local application (2,768 words compared to 98,235 words in the UI).

There’s also a lot of work in Pootle going on with features rolled out and improved for our specific needs and purposes. We’ve learned that we run probably one of the largest installations of it and therefore quite some time is spent on improving it for our requirements. There are many corner cases that need reflecting, and lots of work is done in the background to streamline the process. To explain a bit the changes in the translation system without technical details, we previously used the resource src/res system and migrated to the gettext standard, for a better support of localisation in the product, so it’s an important step for the quality of LibreOffice localisation and a better recognition of our translators. Help is of course always welcome

Being a welcoming and open community requires ongoing work, for example, most of the contributors are not English native speakers while all the work is done in English. It’s true also for the strings added to the product but it’s not a problem because with all the eyes of the l10n community each typo made in the sources is reported, even a double space is reported and corrected. This is an unseen work done by the localisation team on the en_US version and I would like to thank them a lot for that.

And we have welcomed our newest languages: Plautdietsch and Sardinian.

In addition to the IRC channel #libreoffice-nlp on Freenode, we have now three new discussion groups on Telegram: LibreOfficeLocalisation for general discussions and information on localisation, LibreOfficeCJK for Chinese, Japanese and Korean languages and LibreOfficeRTL for languages using complex scripts. Exchanges going on there are mostly about bugs encountered on these writing modes more than on localisation. Most important news and information still go to the mailing lists.

Part of the translation work concerns also not only the product but the marketing activity, be it on the product or on the community. Thus we also work on videos subtitles, press releases, website updates. We also translate the surveys the UX/Design team is running to get feedback on the user preferences/habits.
The community is made of great people helping in all the facets of the project. LibreOffice project is big and it’s difficult to get the whole picture in mind when you’re not here for years and when you concentrate your efforts on a particular area. So part of my role is to help that each project is working well with others. Helping local marketing contributors to adapt the campaigns to their local target, helping UX to integrate localisation at the beginning are some examples.

There is a special thank I wanted to add for Yousuf Philips and the tireless help he brings in solving CJK and RTL bugs and simplifying the UI with a never-ending enthusiasm, big thanks to you Jay!

Update about Marketing Activities in 2nd Half of 2017

LibreOffice has turned seven on September 28, 2017. When we launched our first press release on September 28, 2010, our entire mailing list was quite small: 200 recipients gathered from different sources with journalists and media contacts from all over the world.

During these seven years, my main task has been media relations. One of the most important objectives has been the improvement of the mailing lists, both in terms of quantity and quality.

Today, after seven years, the size of the database has changed dramatically, as we have almost 19,000 email address in our mailing lists, which are targeted based on country, platform (desktop, iOS, Android, mobile, cloud) and focus (security and reviews). In 2017, we have started to target industry analysts, but this list is far from being complete.

Based on geography, we have 6 global lists (journalists, analysts, teams), 70 lists for Europe, 30 lists for the Americas, 5 lists for Pacific, 21 lists for Africa, 18 lists for Asia Middle East, 17 lists for Asia, and 24 lists for Asia Far East. In addition, around 5,000 records are updated and 2,500 are added each year.

Lists are global by country, plus each country – when possible – has a specific list of people who opened a previous press release. Thanks to this targeted database, we have a hit rate around 30%, twice as much as the global PR industry.

For major announcements, individual emails are sent to friendly journalists with a specific angle. I am connected to over 2,000 journalists via LinkedIn, and I have regular contacts with many of them.

Of course, taking care of mailing lists would not be enough without a monthly average of 50 personal contacts with editors, via email and/or phone, and over 100 answers to specific requests (pictures, statistics, review related questions and other info about TDF and LibreOffice).

Another project I have been working at is the production of basic slide decks on different subjects, which can be used by community members to create their own slide decks for presentations. At the moment I am working at updating the following slide decks: Project History & Background, LibreOffice & Competitive Presentation, Document Standards & Open Document Format, Advantages of ODF vs OOXML, Migration Protocol & Training Protocol, plus Useful Slides for Presentations. I also have less organized slides about Digital Citizenship, or the relationship between Technology and Individual Freedom of Choice.

Community members are warmly invited to send me an email to check if I have something which can help them to add some beef to their presentations. In fact, in some cases I test slide decks – adding new angles and concepts – in front of small audiences, before releasing them “officially” on the wiki.

Looking forward, I plan to bring analyst relations up to speed (as media), and improve community-focused activities, supporting the organization of local events and participate when it makes sense budget wise. I would also like to facilitate NLP (native language projects) involvement in the project, helping the integration of local communities within TDF and fostering their growth when they are small or even completely missing.

Coming up on 28th September: Reddit “Ask us Anything” (and a birthday)

Thursday, 28th September 2017 will be a special day – not only is it the seventh birthday of The Document Foundation, but we will also be running an “Ask me (us) Anything” session on Reddit – specifically, the /r/linux subreddit.

Team and board members from The Document Foundation will be on hand to answer questions and point people in the right directions. The AmA will run from 12:00 UTC, and we’ll be around for several hours to answer questions. (And indeed we’ll check the post the following day for any extra questions).

We look forward to taking part and talking to everyone!

Marketing activities so far in 2017: Mike Saunders

Thanks to donations to The Document Foundation, along with valued contributions from our community, we maintain a small team working on various aspects of LibreOffice including documentation, user interface design, quality assurance, release engineering and marketing. Together with Italo Vignoli, I help with the latter, and today I’ll summarise some of the achievements so far in 2017.

Videos

The year started off with preparations for LibreOffice 5.3, a major release that arrived on February 1st. We’ve found that videos are a great way to demonstrate new features to end users – and news websites often embed them as well. So I created a series of New Features videos for LibreOffice 5.3 covering the suite as a whole, along with Writer, Calc and Impress. So far they’ve had over 150,000 views in total:

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I also coordinated script translations from our diligent localisation community, so that the videos had subtitles in 17 different languages. Thanks to everyone who helped!

Around the same time, FOSDEM took place in Brussels, and I used the opportunity to record video interviews with various people involved in The Document Foundation. If you want to learn more about how TDF works, and what you can do to help the project, check out this playlist:

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After returning from FOSDEM, I also edited and uploaded LibreOffice-related presentations from the event.

Month of LibreOffice, and events

In May, we had another Month of LibreOffice, celebrating contributions from right across the project. But this time we awarded printed stickers to everyone who took part:

Over 300 contributors won stickers, and we gathered together some photos showing them in action on laptops, PCs, and even a bike!

Regarding events, I attended the MuvGoc ’17 BarCamp in Munich together with Thorsten Behrens. We discussed removing barriers in the digital world, and the relationship between open data and open source. See here for the write-up.

From 23 – 25 of June, I helped to organise a German LibreOffice community meeting in Berlin. We talked about various topics, including ways to bring in new contributors and link different parts of the project and community together – see here for the details (German version).

Website, blog and infrastructure

The LibreOffice download page was due for a facelift, so I worked with Christian Lohmaier (Cloph) on a new design: this makes the download button more prominent, provides better and clearer information, and is generally more pleasant to look at. Similarly, we worked on a restructured donate page, making it significantly simpler and more user-friendly than the previous version.

Meanwhile, I created a new Frequently Asked Questions page on the site, to handle some of the queries TDF receives every day. Community members can point users to these answers where necessary, and discuss them further on Ask LibreOffice.

Various LibreOffice-related events around the globe have taken place since the start of the year, and I collected information about them and wrote a short report. In addition, I summarised various updates from the Document Liberation Project.

If you haven’t seen TDF’s 2016 Annual Report yet, check out out – the TDF team worked together to write it and translate it into German.

Infrastructure-wise, Guilhem Moulin and I set up a new Nextcloud instance for community members to host and share data. We also moved the events calendar to Nextcloud as well.

LibreOffice timeline and LibreOffice 5.4

LibreOffice has a rich history behind it, starting with StarOffice in the 1990s and being open sourced as OpenOffice.org in 2000. To showcase many of the important steps along the way, we worked on a LibreOffice timeline on the website. Along with new versions of the suite, you can see news of major LibreOffice migrations and events that took place.

In August, TDF welcomed a new Development Mentor, Teodor Mircea Ionita (aka Shinnok). I worked with him to examine the state of our build system documentation, to see how we can make it friendlier for new developers – here’s my report.

Finally, for LibreOffice 5.4 I created another New Features video – and again, our localisation communities did a great job providing subtitle translations:

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So that’s the progress so far this year – but there’s more to come, with the LibreOffice Conference in October, another Month of LibreOffice in November, and preparations for LibreOffice 6.0 – which is due to be released early next year!

Introducing Teodor Mircea Ionita, aka Shinnok, TDF Development Mentor

Starting from July, the TDF team has increased by one unit with the arrival of Teodor Mircea Ionita, aka Shinnok, in the role of Development Mentor.

Teodor has a degree in Computer Science from the University of Iasi in Romania, his native country and city, where he is still living.

We asked Teodor a couple of questions in order to introduce him to the LibreOffice community.

How would you describe yourself?

I’m a passionate open source advocate and developer, Unix head and occasionally sysadmin. I’m also deeply interested and involved in systems, network and information security as an independent security researcher and aficionado.

On a personal note, I like to travel a lot, enjoy swimming and sun bathing, exchanging good reads and good movies (who doesn’t like them?), as well as interacting with peeps of various trades and life experiences and learning from real people, instead of avatars.

Can you outline your work experience?

My experience in the field spans across 10 years, casting a wide range of interest in programming and scripting languages, operating systems, network and web technologies, with a rather strong focus on systems, network and application development on Unix flavours and cross-platform technologies.

I’ve been venturing with many more technologies throughout my career path, such as web development, system administration and some electrical engineering. Suffice it to say that I cast a wide and evolving net of interests in this fascinating and rapidly ever changing field. Not sure where it will ever stop? 🙂

I like to think of myself as a passionate open source advocate and developer, and an eager contributor to several FLOSS communities/projects like the Nmap Security Suite, Openwall and the Qt project. I also contribute via technical blogging, participation at events and conferences and involvement in knowledge and code exchange based communities like Stack Overflow and GitHub.

As a seeder to the open source ecosystem I authored several open-source tools: a front-end to the John the Ripper password security testing suite, and a cross-platform desktop app for the Tarsnap secure online backup service, as well as less impressive projects like an FTP server and a small GUI version of the Netcat tool.

Gabriele Ponzo (left), Theodor and Xisco Fauli (right) at KDE Akademy in Almeria (Spain)

Which are your desktop configuration and preferred development tools?

Having been a longtime Debian user on desktop, server and mobile (Maemo, Moblin, Meego, Nokia N810/900… the first real “smart” phones IMHO, good old days), lately I’ve been using macOS as my preferred desktop platform of choice out of convenience and probably because I’m getting older.

I like having a decent desktop and range of GUI applications to choose from, on top of the powerful Unix backend and tooling that I need for my day-to-day work – and I think the Mac provides that to a sufficiently acceptable degree and atop of a good hardware lineup.

Rest assured, on my day to day routine I still interact a lot with the various Linux and BSD distros out there, I wouldn’t go anywhere without my virtual machine only USB3 SSD Samsung Pro drive.

I still sport a powerful Intel based desktop workstation, with a triple boot, built just a year ago paired with a 40” 4k display from Philips, but I find that I use it sparingly nowadays.

For editing I use Vim, for complex projects Qt Creator IDE, LLVM/Clang tooling for C++, Git everyday everywhere and that’s about it.

Why did you decide to apply for the position of TDF Development Mentor?

This one has a simple answer: I was actively looking to fill a gap in my clients roster and what I usually do in that case is look at the daily tools that I’ve been using for years, with a preference towards the open ones, that I would like and love to contribute to and push further.

Needless to say LibreOffice was one of those indispensable tools for me and lo and behold, the TDF was actually looking for the Development Mentor position! We got in touch, we clicked and so I started as soon as possible. Thank you TDF! I’m genuinely excited to be part of it and hopefully I’ll be able make myself a valuable asset in a short time.

Teodor is available on IRC using the alias shinnok.

TDF Team’s Interviews: Christian “Cloph” Lohmaier

Christian “Cloph” Lohmaier has been LibreOffice’s release manager for quite a long time. We asked him some questions, to not only get better knowledge about his daily activities, but find out his opinions about The Document Foundation and LibreOffice.

Q1. What is the typical day of a release manager?

Release manager is not a single-day job. The release process spans across multiple days for a single tag, or multiple weeks if you take a new version.

Release preparations typically start with preparing the translations. For LibreOffice, most language teams translate using Pootle, so translations have to be exported and then processed a little before they can be checked into the source repository. Most of the processing is just to reduce noise in the commit though, not changing anything in the actual translations, though we also have a tool that removes invalid strings (like for example duplicate translated names for spreadsheet functions, or commands with spaces in the formula editor).

The next step is looking into Gerrit, to see what patches are still pending, even after reminding people of the tag the days before. For smaller ones or for areas where I feel competent enough, I do the review myself; for more low-level stuff I hope to mobilize more experienced developers.

Final steps then are updating the credits documents and bumping the version string. After the tag is pushed, then it goes to building. While typically this is a non-issue nowadays, thanks to the investments in CI (continuous integration) and tinderboxes, there still might be some corner cases that might need an additional fix and a corresponding buildfix tag.

After the builds are done and uploaded to our staging server, the builds are announced to the QA team and other volunteers while they are being distributed to the main mirror network. This gives a chance to spot last-minute blockers or bloopers (like for example missing a configure switch). Then the builds are announced to the general public for testing.

Q2. 2016 so far for LibreOffice and for TDF: what is your personal perspective?

It is hard to keep track and especially for me I have bad memory when it comes to people’s names or to when a certain event took place. Some things feel like they were years in the past but just happened a few months ago.

But 2016 for me especially was also about temporary changes in duties and more specifically infrastructure administration. You might be aware that former infrastructure admin Alexander Werner moved to a new job, so there were quite a bit of thing to juggle until we got Guilhem on board to take over the infrastructure again. So my personal perspective wasn’t so much based on release manager duties (where also some training to reduce the bus factor was done), but rather a year of transitions, both at work and also in private life (I moved within the city).

It was nice to see the rough edges smooth out, to gain confidence in the decisions that were done in the past.

Q3. What do you see as the most important challenges for TDF in 2017 and beyond?

I think communication channels for the younger audience is one of the biggest hurdles to overcome. Mailing lists or IRC aren’t really used by the smartphone generation. It appears to me that in general people have less patience, expect a response within minutes – but that’s not what people like me are used to. There are ongoing efforts to expand the outreach, by using Telegram or also by the series of YouTube videos. But even then: a lot of young people don’t even use a dedicated computer anymore (except for gaming) – their phone/tablet or a set top box are their “computers”.

And on top of that, they don’t recognize the value of open document standards. They kind of take it for granted to be able to exchange stuff, but don’t care what magic makes that happen.

Q4. Where do you see TDF and LibreOffice in 2020? And in 2025?

Whoa, that is a tough question. Hopefully, by then we will have a fully functioning tablet/touch-input-friendly version of LibreOffice, and many more public administrations will offer files in free formats (ideally using LibreOffice to create and edit them :-))

Also, I hope that the communications situation will be sorted out, both in terms of which medium to use, but also in the sense of the language barrier. Unfortunately, many native-lang communities stay mostly amongst themselves – they stay invisible to the English lists despite making a big difference to the project.

Q5. You have been with the project since day one: which is your opinion about what we have achieved, and what we could have achieved?

I think it was a success story. I was especially overwhelmed by the support at the very beginning when it came to founding the Foundation. I really didn’t expect the €50,000 to be collected that quickly. And I’m also happy that even private end users value what TDF does, and support TDF with donations.

Q6. Are you contributing to other open source projects? If yes, which is your role, and which are your expectations?

While not really active, I’m using Mageia as my distro of choice, and am lurking in their IRC channel and am subscribed to the mailing list. So I do some user-support and occasionally did some packaging (although not as maintainer, rather I assemble a spec file that other people could use). That was still when I had an ISDN internet connection instead of DSL, so I don’t have any use for those packages any more – and the rest did find its way into Magia already.

Q7. Last, but not least, which is your personal hardware/software configuration? Do you have any preferred tool?

I mentioned Mageia in the last answer, that is definitely my desktop distribution of choice. I (still) run Gnome desktop, although with some tweaks and extensions to make it usable.

Hardware-wise: I really like the Dell XPS13 (FullHD variant) laptop due to its form factor for travel and mobile use, but my regular desktop is a low-power system using a mini-ITX board with an AMD A4-5000 APU with a 27″ monitor at 2560×1440. Gotta love big high res screens, even when not considered HiDPI. For building and tinderbox use I have a Mac Mini and a PC with i7-3770.

I’m a Vim user for most editing, but when it comes to Android (Java) development, I’m a fan of Android Studio. Often enough I need to connect to a Mac or Windows box via tunneled VNC or RDP, and for that nothing beats Remmina. Especially when it comes to mapping a PC keyboard to the Mac it’s a blessing. The built-in support for SSH tunnels is a welcome convenience.

For an IRC client I’m using Smuxi – that allows me to have it running on my main desktop and connect to it from the laptop, sharing a session. And finally Chromium-browser – it was simply ahead of the competition when Galeon slowly faded away and Epiphany was stripped of all the features I liked. Firefox at the time was too resource-hungry for the much slower systems I had back then. And then I stuck with it out of convenience mostly (but to be fair: I don’t have many complaints with it anymore, except no proper keyboard control for HTML 5 video).

So there you have it: GNOME desktop, GNOME-terminal with Bash/Vim/SSH/other command line tools, Smuxi and Chromium web browser are running constantly, followed by Remmina and Android Studio.

PS: I also like Perl for scripting.

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