TDF Community Blog

In 2020, LibreOffice celebrated its tenth birthday. Two new major versions of the suite introduced a variety of new features, while minor releases helped to improve stability as well

(This is part of The Document Foundation’s Annual Report for 2020 – the full version will be posted here on the blog soon.)

The Document Foundation announced two major releases of LibreOffice in 2020: version 6.4 on January 29, and version 7.0 on August 5. In addition, 13 minor releases were made available over the year:

Throughout the year, we held three Bug Hunting Sessions in preparation for new major releases. These typically took place on a single day between set times, so that experienced developers and QA engineers could help new volunteers to file and triage bugs via the IRC channels and mailing lists. The Bug Hunting Sessions for LibreOffice 7.0 were held on May 11 and July 6 – while the one for LibreOffice 7.1 took place on October 26.

LibreOffice 6.4

On January 29, LibreOffice 6.4 was officially released after six months of work. Developers at Collabora, CIB, Red Hat, SIL and other companies – along with volunteers – worked on many new features. For instance, a QR Code generator was added to the suite, making it easy to add QR codes (which can be read by mobile devices) to documents.

Hyperlink context menus were unified throughout the software to provide the following menu entries: Open Hyperlink, Edit Hyperlink, Copy Hyperlink Location and Remove Hyperlink.

Meanwhile, a new Automatic Redaction feature was added to hide classified or sensitive data in a document, based on text or regular expression matches, while the help system was reworked to provide faster and more precise search results – and many help pages were given localized screenshots for a better user experience.

TDF produced a video to explain and demonstrate many of the new features in LibreOffice 6.4. This was linked to in the announcement, and embedded into various web news websites that covered the release:

LibreOffice 7.0

Later in the year, on August 5, TDF released LibreOffice 7.0. OpenDocument, LibreOffice’s native open and standardised format for office documents, was updated to version 1.3 as an OASIS Technical Committee Specification. Important new features included digital signatures and OpenPGP-based encryption of XML documents, with improvements in areas such as change tracking, and additional details in the description of elements in first pages, text, numbers and charts. The development of ODF 1.3’s features was funded by donations to The Document Foundation, and the implementation was done by CIB and other developers in the ecosystem.

Additionally, support for Skia graphics engine was added thanks to sponsorship by AMD, and was set as the default on Windows, for faster performance. Skia is an open source 2D graphics library which provides common APIs that work across a variety of hardware and software platforms, and can be used for drawing text, shapes and images. Vulkan is a new-generation graphics and compute API with high-efficiency and cross-platform access to modern GPUs. Luboš Luňák (Collabora) did a large part of the work to support Skia.

Many other features were added as well, and there were a large number of compatibility improvements.

As with the previous release, TDF staff worked with the LibreOffice community to make a video (PeerTube version here) to demonstrate the new features:

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!

In 2020 we had with elections for the foundation’s Membership Committee, along with regular Advisory Board calls, and support for other projects and activities

(This is part of The Document Foundation’s Annual Report for 2020 – the full version will be posted here on the blog soon.)

Election of new Membership Committee (MC)

Members – more formally known as the “Board of Trustees” – are a crucial part of The Document Foundation. They are people from across the globe who contribute time, effort and skills, whether on a voluntary or paid basis. Members can vote for the Board of Directors (aka BoD) and the Membership Committee (MC), and also nominate themselves for a position in the BoD and the MC. The mission of the MC is to administer membership applications and renewals following the criteria defined in the Foundation’s Statutes.

In July, we announced the process of elections for the next MC, which is in place from 19 September 2020 until 18 September 2022. Initially, we started by opening up nominations; TDF members could nominate themselves for a position in the MC, or nominate others.

On 1 September, Franklin Weng announced the final list of 13 candidates, along with the voting phase, which ran from 4 – 10 September. All members were sent tokens so that they could vote anonymously during this time. On 16 September, Franklin announced the final results, where voting preferences were considered according to the Meek STV method with Droop-Dynamic-Fractional setting, default threshold.

• Elected Members: Marina Latini, Muhammet Kara, Gabriele Ponzo, Gustavo Buzzatti Pacheco, and Ahmad Haris. Elected Substitute (Deputy) Members: Shinji Enoki, Uwe Altmann, Dennis Roczek, Jona Azizaj.

TDF’s Board would like to say thank you to all past and new members of the Membership Committee for their service to the community, and to all candidates for running. Congratulations to the newly elected Committee Members and their deputies.

Advisory Board members and meetings

The Document Foundation relies on its Advisory Board Members in order to receive advice and support. The Advisory Board’s primary function is to represent The Document Foundation’s supporters and to provide the Board of Directors with advice, guidance and proposals. Current members are Adfinis SyGroup, allotropia software GmbH (joined in 2021), Red Hat, Collabora, GNOME, Google, Kopano b.v., City of Munich (Landeshaupstadt München), the Free Software Foundation (FSF), CIB Software, LLC RusBITech-Astra, IHC Invest Inc., Software in the Public Interest (SPI), KDE e.V., UK Government Digital Services, and the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE).

Throughout the year, TDF had regular calls with representatives of the Advisory Board. Staff and Board members at TDF provided updates on the foundation, software and community, and described plans for the future. Advisory Board members were invited to provide valuable feedback on TDF’s activities, and various ideas and proposals were discussed. TDF would like to express its thanks to all of the members for their help.

Highlights of activities

Throughout the year, TDF supported various campaigns and events, via this blog and social media channels. For instance, on 14 February we joined the Free Software Foundation Europe’s campaign “I love Free Software”. This was the perfect opportunity to say thank you to the contributors of the various Free Software we love: developers, translators, designers, testers, or documentation writers, of huge software projects – or smaller ones.
Similarly, we backed International Women’s Day on March 8, raising awareness against bias and prejudices. Free Software projects tend to be heavily male-dominated, but our community is trying to be more open and inclusive.

In March, we celebrated Document Freedom Day 2020, to educate organizations and users about the importance of adopting open document standards. This helps users to get back full ownership of their documents and content that they have developed, but have then – often unwittingly – left in the hands of a proprietary software vendor. LibreOffice’s native format, OpenDocument, is fully standardised and available to everyone to implement, making it the best long-term storage format for office data.

In June, TDF celebrated its 500,000th donation (since we started counting on 1 May 2013). We are grateful to all the people who have donated, because they help all of us to keep the LibreOffice community growing and developing. Over the years, many donors added notes and feedback to their donations, so we collected them together in a blog post.

2020 had two milestone anniversaries for our projects, the first being 20 years of free office suites. On 19 July 2000, Sun Microsystems announced the release of the source code of its StarOffice Suite to the open source community, at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention in Monterey, California. This started the history of the community that helped to grow the OpenOffice project for nearly ten years, until the announcement of the acquisition of Sun by Oracle.

Then, on 27 September, we celebrated 10 years of LibreOffice, putting together a video with highlights of community activities and events over the past decade:

(PeerTube version here)

Finally, on 30 September, we supported International Translation Day. This is celebrated every year on the feast of Saint Jerome, the Bible translator who is considered the patron saint of translators. The celebrations have been promoted by International Federation of Translators (FIT) ever since it was set up in 1953. In 1991, FIT launched the idea of an officially recognized International Translation Day to show solidarity to the worldwide translation community, in an effort to promote the translation profession in different countries.

We celebrate our community of translators, which provide LibreOffice in 119 different languages (with more hopefully becoming available in the future), more than any other software. This helps us to fulfil one of the most important objectives of The Document Foundation: “to support the preservation of mother tongues by encouraging all people to translate, document, support, and promote our office productivity tools in their native language”. Today, there are over four billion people in the world who can use LibreOffice in their native languages.

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!

2020 was a year to remember, because of LibreOffice’s 10th anniversary and the COVID-19 pandemic, which impacted our lives, hindered travel and canceled community meetings

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

On March 11, 2020, when the World Health Organization declared a pandemic, few could foresee the long road ahead or the different ways in which people would suffer: the deaths and agony of millions, the damaged economies, the disrupted lives and near-universal loneliness and isolation.

At the end of 2020, over 100 million people were confirmed to have been infected and, according to Johns Hopkins, more than two million people had died. Some were still dreaming of a return to normal, thanks to vaccines that seemed to materialize as if by magic.

Let’s look back at where we were when we first understood how drastically our lives would change.

We were planning LibreOffice events in Asia and Latin America, as in 2019, and a LibreOffice Conference in Germany, in the lovely medieval city of Nuremberg. We were also planning to attend conferences in Africa, Asia, Europe, North and South America, to celebrate LibreOffice’s 10th anniversary.

We were planning local meetings of native language communities, to engage new volunteers, and talks at local events, to advocate the use of LibreOffice and the Open Document Format. We were planning meetups with other community members, for a chat over food and drinks, as we have been used to doing on a regular basis over the last 10 – or even 20 – years (in the OpenOffice.org project).

Unfortunately, since March 2020 we have been forced to spend most of our time at home, to protect each other from COVID-19. Although our community has not been hit severely, we have suffered from the pandemic like anyone else, to the point that we will not remember 2020 as the year of the 10th LibreOffice anniversary, but as the year of the big lockdown.

Luckily, we have not lost our enthusiasm. We were able to organize a global virtual conference in October, a local virtual conference in Italy in December, the “talks in the time of isolation” of the Spanish speaking community, plus other local virtual events around the world. In addition, we managed to secure speaking slots at many free open source virtual events around the world, to update FOSS communities about the progress of the LibreOffice project during the previous decade.

We plan to take part in many events in 2021 – mostly online, but with some hope that
in-person events may be possible later in the year. In any case, we wish everyone in the LibreOffice community good health and strength through these difficult times.

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!