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Hossein Nourikhah joins the TDF team as Developer Community Architect

Next week, Hossein Nourikhah will join the team at The Document Foundation, the non-profit behind LibreOffice, as Developer Community Architect. Hossein is a developer, university lecturer and FOSS advocate. He writes programs, teaches programming to students, and is an advocate for the use of free software applications, because they have a huge positive impact on the quality of our life by providing the essential freedoms that we all deserve.

Hossein has a B.Sc. in Computer Engineering (Software) from Isfahan University of Technology, and a M.Sc. and a Ph.D. in Information Technology from Amirkabir University of Technology, also called the Tehran Polytechnic. Since 2016 he has been an instructor at the Amirkabir University of Technology, teaching various courses including C/C++ programming, operating systems, software design, and many others.

Hossein started programming in BASIC and Pascal when he was 12, and after two and a half decades he is still involved in programming for fun and profit. He has worked with several programming languages, including C/C++, Java, Pascal, PHP and many more.

Industry experience

In addition to the university activities, including teaching and research, Hossein has several years of experience in the industry, working at various software/hardware companies as a C/C++/Java programmer – and lately as a software team manager and lead developer.

Hossein’s work experience ranges from web development with PHP to industrial application development with C++/Qt. He considers Qt a great platform for C++ software development, and he likes it very much as a clean and lovely tool.

Hossein has worked with many programmers as mentor, helping them to improve and reach their potential in software development by better understanding programming languages, libraries and tools. He feels great when he can empower other people, also because this helps him to expand his knowledge and understand things much better than before.

As Developer Community Architect, Hossein will be responsible for attracting new contributors to the LibreOffice project by identifying and onboarding new potential developers, building relationships between them and the community, and introducing them to TDF’s communication channels – where they will meet fellow co-hackers. He will encourage everyone’s contribution, and show community members ways to grow by bringing the more skilled contributors in contact with existing experts in the various fields for even deeper learning.

We’re happy to have him on board, and look forward to working with him!

100 Paper Cuts as a new student mentoring activity

Just before the pandemic, the Board of Directors of The Document Foundation approved a budget to launch an educational program targeted to universities, where students at selected tech schools would receive an economic incentive to promote LibreOffice amongst their peers, with the objective of increasing the number of young contributors both in source code development and in other areas. Unfortunately, the pandemics has forced all universities to stop all collateral activities, and this has resulted in the program being frozen for over one year.

Although the situation is not yet back to normal, we have the opportunity to mentor a student in Turkey. Muhammet Kara, a member of the MC and a Collabora full time developer, will mentor Ahmet Hakan Çelik, an undergraduate computer science student at Çanakkale Onsekiz Mart University, who will be working on 100 Paper Cuts – a list of bugs and enhancement requests relating to LibreOffice’s user experience – during June and July, trying to solve as many issues as he can. The target is to collect 10 points.

This is a first step in the direction set before the pandemic. We are planning to make similar announcements soon.

After the summer, if the academic activities will be back to normal – although the recover will be slow, and will have to cope with entirely new regulations – The Document Foundation will be able to get back in touch with the universities to start the planned Ambassador Program.

LibreOffice 7.1.4 Community available for download

Berlin, June 10, 2021 – LibreOffice 7.1.4 Community, the fourth minor release of the LibreOffice 7.1 family, targeted at technology enthusiasts and power users, is available for download from https://www.libreoffice.org/download/. LibreOffice 7.1.4 includes around 80 bug fixes, with 20% focused on Microsoft Office file compatibility (DOCX, XLSX and PPTX, and legacy DOCs).

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, but they share the same LibreOffice unique advantages, robustness and flexibility.

Migrations to LibreOffice

The Document Foundation has developed a Migration Protocol to support enterprises moving from proprietary office suites to LibreOffice, which is based on the deployment of a LTS version from the LibreOffice Enterprise family, plus migration consultancy and training sourced from certified professionals who offer CIOs and IT managers value-added solutions in line with proprietary offerings. Reference: https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/professional-support/.

Availability of LibreOffice 7.1.4 Community

LibreOffice 7.1.4 Community represents the bleeding edge in term of features for open source office suites. For users whose main objective is personal productivity and therefore prefer a release that has undergone more testing and bug fixing over the new features, The Document Foundation provides LibreOffice 7.0.6.

LibreOffice 7.1.4 change log pages are available on TDF’s wiki: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/7.1.4/RC1 (changed in RC1) and https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/7.1.4/RC2 (changed in RC2).

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 us 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 7.1.4 is built with document conversion libraries from the Document Liberation Project: https://www.documentliberation.org.

Tender to implement master document fixes (#202106-02)

The Document Foundation (TDF) is the charitable entity behind the world’s leading free/libre open source (FLOSS) office suite LibreOffice.

We are looking for an individual or company to implement master document fixes.

The documentation team regularly publishes guides and books. The underlying workflow requires to fix bugs and issues with the master document feature of Writer.

The scope of this tender is to fix at least the following issues:

  1. ToC is never shown in Master Document if it is in ODT in a section with a hide condition
    https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=103612
  2. Exported PDF of master document with hidden sections containing headings shows headings anyway
    https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=142129
  3. Creating master document from *.odt breaks cross-references
    https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=128106
  4. TRACK CHANGES: linked files changes are not shown in the master document
    https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=121166

The work has to be developed on LibreOffice master, so that it will be released in the next major version.

The bugs must be fixed and verified.

All technology standards of relevance, as well as their targeted versions for this tender should be declared or defined in the offer’s description of implementation.

A key item of the deliverables for this tender and therefore also a decision criteria – besides qualification, references, price, and completeness of fullfilment – is extensive is documentation about the approach chosen to implement or fix the above items. We expect bidders to provide documentation on both the code and the non-code parts of this tender, e.g. methodology, structure and technical aspects. The Document Foundation will publish this under a free and open source license and make it available to the general public. Publications will be in the Help system and in the Guides books.

If the bug fix incurs in a change in the user interface or user procedure, it should also contain the necessary instructions to activate the procedure.

Required skills

  • Extensive knowledge of C++
  • Experience working on the LibreOffice source code

Other skills

  • English (conversationally fluent in order to coordinate and plan with members of TDF)

We use free, libre and open source (FLOSS) software for development wherever possible, and the resulting work on the program code must be licensed under the Mozilla Public License v2.0.

TDF welcomes applications from all suitably qualified persons regardless of their race, sex, disability, religion/belief, sexual orientation or age.

Bidders will get a preference for including a partner or independent developer who has not been involved in a successful tender before. For such developers, who have not yet been part of a successful tender bid, we aim on a best-effort basis, but without any guarantees whatsoever, to provide some mentoring in understanding the code base and the process in contributing to the code. We expect that time and efforts on the bidder’s side for this should not be part of the paid work for this tender. Please mention such need of LibreOffice development mentoring in your offer.

As always, TDF will give some preference to individuals who have previously shown a commitment to TDF, including but not limited to certified developers and/or members of TDF. Not being a member, or never having contributed before, does not exclude any applicants from consideration.

The task offered is a project-based one-off, with no immediate plans to a mid- or long-term contractual relationship. It is offered on a freelance, project basis. Individuals and companies applying can be located anywhere in the world.

When budgeting, we anticipated that this project (all items combined) to take in the region of 5 days of work. Should bidders’ assessment result in a significantly different number, please reach out to us before sending your bid, so we can clarify upfront.

TDF is looking forward to receiving your applications for the aforementioned tasks, your offer in form of a fixed-time, fixed-budget approach, and the duration period for the implementation in calendar weeks after the final awarding of the tender, via e-mail to a committee at tender20210602@documentfoundation.org no later than July 5, 2021.

Applicants who have not received feedback by August 2, 2021 should consider that their application, after careful review, was not accepted.

All bidders are invited to ask their questions on this tender until June 23, 2021. Questions and answers will be made public in a collected and anonymized form.

LibreOffice Documentation Team Activities in 2020

In 2020, the documentation community released many updated guidebooks, translated them into several languages, and participated in the Google Season of Docs

(This is part of The Document Foundation’s Annual Report for 2020 – the full version is here.)

New and translated guides

In January 2020, just before release of LibreOffice 6.4, the Documentation Team was proud to announce the Math Guide 6.4, an update of the previous version (4.0), updated to cover all of the innovations included in the latest release of the software. The guide was updated by Roman Kuznetsov and revised by Dave Barton from the documentation community. This was followed by the Calc Guide 6.2, a long-awaited update of the old Calc Guide 4.4.

In May, the guide to Base for LibreOffice 6.2 was released, covering, LibreOffice’s database component. It was updated by Pulkit Krishna, Dan Lewis, Jean Hollis Weber, Alain Romedenne, Jean-Pierre Ledure and Randolph Gamo. Another update in May was the Getting Started Guide 6.4 – the introductory guide for the latest LibreOffice 6.4, aimed to the general public interested to quickly get familiar with the software. It’s available as a PDF for offline reading, and ODT (OpenDocument Text) for editors and translators.

In summer, the Documentation Team announced the availability of the LibreOffice Draw Guide 6.4, the complete handbook for the drawing tool of LibreOffice. The guide was updated from the existing release (4.3) and include all the improvements developed since early 2014, when the last version of the guide was published.

Then there was the LibreOffice Calc Guide 6.4, the complete handbook for the spreadsheet tool. It was also updated from the existing release (6.2) and included all of the improvements developed in Calc since then.

In October, the Math Guide 7.0 was published – being the first guide based on LibreOffice 7.0. The effort was mostly carried by Rafael Lima and reviewed by Jean H. Weber. The new guide covers were designed by Rizal Muttaqin and Drew Jensen. The final publication was carried by Olivier Hallot. This was followed by the Calc Guide 7.0, a team effort of Steve Fanning, Gordon Bates, Kees Kriek, Annie Nguyen, Samantha Hamilton, Olivier Hallot and Jean Hollis Weber, coordinated by Felipe Viggiano.

Many guides were also translated in to various languages, thanks to our worldwide communities. For more information on their work, and the specific guides that they translated, see the “Native Language “Projects” section of this Annual Report.

Google Season of Docs

For the second year in a row, The Document Foundation was accepted as an organization in the Google Season of Docs, a programme whose goals are to give technical writers an opportunity to participate in contributing to open source projects, and to give open source projects an opportunity to engage the technical writing community.

In 2020, TDF’s documentation community offered a wide range of projects for technical writers, and extended the reach by providing projects for e-learning, mathematical documentation and code-oriented documentation.

TDF received several applications, containing important information including the technical writer’s resumés, proposals for project schedule and suggested deliverables. After a careful evaluation by the project mentors, TDF accepted the application of Ronnie Gandhi, a computer science undergraduate student enrolled at IIT Roorkee, India.

Steve Fanning, who had already worked as coordinator of the Calc Guide, served as mentor with Olivier Hallot as second mentor. Ilmari Lauhakangas and Olivier managed the administrative aspects of the project on behalf of The Document Foundation.

Ronnie worked on improving the descriptions for Calc’s functions, adding statements describing each function’s compliance with the Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) Version 1.2 specification. Each function was also supplemented by extra use cases, illustrations and external references (where applicable).

Access the Extensive Calc Functions Description on The Document Foundation’s wiki. Thanks to Ronnie for all his work, and the mentors for assisting him on his journey.

Like what we do? Support the LibreOffice project and The Document Foundation – get involved and help our volunteers, or consider making a donation. Thank you!

Press Releases

Announcement of LibreOffice 25.8.4

Berlin, 18 December 2025 – LibreOffice 25.8.4, the fourth minor update to the free office suite developed by volunteers for…

Open Document Format

The Role of ODF in the Era of Digital Identity and Authentication

Digital identity has become an integral part of everyday life. We use it to access work tools and sign documents…