Parabolas as custom shapes in LibreOffice

Regina Henschel writes…

Teachers of mathematics often need a parabola in their instructions or exercises. Creating a parabola by using a chart is cumbersome. Therefore I have generated some parabolas as custom shape for anyone to use. You can get them in this LibreOffice Writer document.

A simple parabola

A parabola with focus

And a parabola with tangent, where you can drag the point of contact

The parabola-shapes are contained in a document. You can copy and paste a shape from there to your document or you can drag the shapes into your Gallery. The document contains in addition some explanations how the shapes were generated. You can download the document from the wiki.

I hope you find the shapes useful!

The Writer Guide 7.2 just arrived

The new Guide comes one week after the release of the latest LibreOffice Community software

Jean H. Weber and Kees Kriek from the LibreOffice Documentation Team are happy to announce the immediate availability of the Writer Guide 7.2, one week after the release of LibreOffice Community 7.2

LibreOffice 7.2 Community includes many changes not visible in the user interface. These changes include improved interoperability with Microsoft’s proprietary file formats and performance improvements in handling large files, opening certain .docx and .xlsx files, managing font caching, and opening presentations and drawings that contain large images.

The Writer Guide 7.2 has been updated from Writer Guide 7.1. It covers changes that are visible in the user interface, including:

  • Added a note about icon sets and Gallery sets in this Preface.
  • Added details about the Insert > Formatting Mark submenu (Chapter 2).
  • Updated list terminology and changed screenshots in Chapters 4, 8, 9, 11, and anywhere else lists are mentioned.
  • Added new gutter margins and choices for page background fills (Chapters 5, 6, and 9).
  • Updated details about some options on tabs of the PDF Options dialog (Chapter 7).
  • Added new, advanced features of the Style Inspector (Chapter 9)
  • Updated details about Templates dialog (Chapter 10).
  • Added “no registered database” error message in Mail Merge Wizard (Chapter 14).
  • Added information on classifying document contents (Chapter 17).
  • Added Basic Fonts options and custom dictionaries (Chapter 20).
  • New Chapter 21 on user interface variants.
  • Minor rewording, updates to terminology, and replacement figures in many chapters.

LibreOffice Community 7.2 release notes are here: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleaseNotes/7.2.

A big thank you to Jean and Kees for their wonderful work.

Jean Weber
Kees Kriek

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The LibreOffice Documentation Team is devoted to produce the best documentation for LibreOffice and is open to everyone interested in contributing to our collective effort.

LibreOffice 7.2: A week in stats

One week ago, we announced LibreOffice 7.2, our brand new major release. It’s packed with new features, and has many improvements to compatibility and performance too. So, what has happened in the week since then? Let’s check out some stats…

473,308 downloads

These are just stats for our official downloads page, of course – many Linux users will have acquired the new release via their distribution’s package repositories.

44,814 Tweet impressions

The announcement Tweet was viewed almost 45,000 times, and had 418 likes and 187 retweets. We’re also on Mastodon, a FOSS-friendly federated microblogging service: our Mastodon toot had 48 likes and 45 shares. Meanwhile, the Facebook post reached 7,604 people, with 297 reactions and 32 shares.

15,156 video views

Our LibreOffice 7.2 New Features video has been popular, with 57 comments and 522 likes. (We also uploaded the video to PeerTube, an open source, decentralized and federated video platform.)

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1077 upvotes on Reddit

As always, we posted the announcement on the /r/linux subreddit, where it had 1077 upvotes and 161 comments. We also have our own dedicated /r/libreoffice subreddit – check it out!

A huge thanks to our worldwide community of volunteers, and certified developers, for all their work on this release!

LibreOffice community members: Have your say in our survey!

At The Document Foundation, we try to grow and strengthen our community in many ways. We’d like to improve our support for existing community members who’re working on LibreOffice, but also increase the number of contributors (and TDF members).

To achieve this, we’ve created a survey for active members inside the LibreOffice community, to identify areas where focused activity is needed, and address the needs of local projects around the world.

There are 17 questions in the survey, and it runs from today until September 8. So, if you’re active in the LibreOffice or Document Liberation projects, let us know what you think! We appreciate all feedback:

» Click here to take part in the survey

Hypra joins the Advisory Board of The Document Foundation

Hypra is a French social-impact company with a specific competence in hardware and free software accessibility. Its mission is to make IT accessible to everyone – especially seniors, people with disabilities and first-time users – through a universal design approach. By relying mainly on free software, Hypra is giving back users full control over their personal data, and making them part of a global project for a “digital common good”.

Hypra was founded in 2015 by Corentin Voiseux and Jean-Philippe Mengual, and is based in Paris. The company provides hardware solutions for seniors and people with disabilities, supported with training and technical assistance, and enterprise solutions to facilitate the integration of people with disabilities into the business world.

Lothar Becker, Chairman of The Document Foundation, says: “We at TDF are proud to welcome Hypra as a member of our Advisory Board. Accessibility is a key factor in the inclusiveness of the digital transformation, and Hypra’s expertise in this area – and in FOSS – are ideal complements to the LibreOffice project and ecosystem expertise in developing a free office suite.”

“Hypra is delighted,” says its co-founder Jean-Philippe Mengual, “to be part of The Document Foundation’s Advisory Board, and honored to work alongside the organization to improve the Free Software digital environment’s accessibility.”

You can find additional information about Hypra at https://www.hypra.fr/ (the website is only in French for now).

The Guia do Writer 7.1 is finally here.

Translation courtesy of Timothy Brennan Jr.

Brazilian computer users in general, the community of Brazilian free software users and supporters, and of LibreOffice in particular, have received quite the gift today: the Brazilian LibreOffice documentation team proudly announces the publication of the Guia do Writer 7.1, the most complete Writer word processor guide for the best free software office suite, the LibreOffice Community.

The Guia do Writer 7.1 is an extensive 570-page volume covering the most advanced text-editing techniques, from simple typing of a page to assembling multi-volume documents, including electronic forms, illustrations, tables, indexes and summaries, automation and export to numerous file formats.

The guide is the LibreOffice Brazilian documentation team’s contribution to the public. The team has used automatic translation followed by a thorough manual review correcting terms, drafting and stylistics of the Portuguese language, as well as proofreading. While rereading the content, the team is able to check the accuracy of the techniques described in the documentation and review the terminology used in the software, signaling to the LibreOffice translation team the inconsistencies found in the interface suggesting improvements in terms, changes in the vocabulary of the commands and correction of the software Help Pages. This feedback has served to make the LibreOffice interface even more robust, consistent and has helped consolidate its command terminology.

The Guia do Writer 7.1 is available in three formats: The traditional PDF with adjusted pagination for those who want to print the guide and bind it, the source file in Open Document Format (ODF) for free editing, and the installed online version on The Document Foundation’s servers for reading on tablets, your desktop browser and — of course — on mobile phones.

“The importance of the  Guia do Writer is enormous. I suggest reading it for all who need to produce professional documents, as well as using the guide for creating courses, video classes, and even material for public tenders” says Olivier Hallot, coordinator of LibreOffice’s global documentation. “We are working on the LibreOffice Community ‘s manual library to provide the most advanced user guides for all LibreOffice modules, and, other volumes are on the way.” added Olivier.

The Brazilian  LibreOffice Community documentation team is made up of volunteers from all over Brazil (and one person in Ireland) and has been dedicated to producing the reference material in Brazilian Portuguese. The team includes (name and state or country) Vera Cavalcante (São Paulo), Luciana Mota (Distrito Federal), Márcia Buffon Machado (Ireland), Jackson Cavalcanti Jr. (Pernambuco), Raul Pacheco da Silva (São Paulo), Timothy Brennan Jr (Rio Grande do Sul), Túlio Macedo (Distrito Federal), Diego Peres Marques (Rio de Janeiro), Rafael Lima (Santa Catarina) and Olivier Hallot (Rio de Janeiro).

The Brazilian Guia do Writer 7.1 can be downloaded at https://documentation.libreoffice.org/pt-br/portugues   along with other volumes for Impress, Calc, Math and the Beginner’s Guide.

The original Writer Guide 7.1 can be downloaded at https://documentation.libreoffice.org/en/english-documentation/