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LibreOffice Podcast, Episode #6 – Language support

The Draw Guide 6.4 is Ready for Download

Draw Guide 6.4

Following the recent release of our updated guides, the LibreOffice Documentation Team is happy to announce the immediate 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.

LibreOffice Draw is the vector drawing tool of LibreOffice, capable of creating and edit complex drawings, from basic geometric shapes to sophisticated technical drawings, including tri-dimensional composition, all supporting the ODF file format standard.

“Returning to the LibreOffice Documentation team was a great opportunity for me to continue to contribute for the LibreOffice Community. I used all my 35 years of professional experience as a technical writer in high end industries to bring the Draw Guide up to date with the latest publicly available release of LibreOffice (Version 6.4). I hope the community enjoy LibreOffice as this is an excellent office software package that is freely available” said Peter Schofield, who coordinated the update and release of the Draw guide.

“Our vision for LibreOffice goes beyond the software development and we care to create the elements of an authentic LibreOffice culture. It is a great joy for all of us to see the LibreOffice community and the documentation team actively working on the update of the Guides. These books are important assets of the LibreOffice ecosystem and a critical element to improve and enlarge the opportunities for all persons of the community” Said Emiliano Vavassori and Daniel Rodriguez, members of The Document Foundation Board of Directors.

The Draw Guide 6.4 is the result of the collaborative work of Peter Schofield, Claire Wood and Regina Henschel. A big thanks to them for all their work!

Peter Schofield Claire Wood Regina Henschel

 

Meet the whole LibreOffice Documentation Team.

LibreOffice has extensive documentation in many languages, thanks to our worldwide community.

Download it

• PDF version – recommended for viewing
• ODT version – for opening/editing in LibreOffice

Everyone is welcome to join our documentation team! It’s a great way to build up experience in a large and well-known open source project, especially if you’re interested in a career in technical writing one day.

Community Member Monday: Andreas Heinisch

Today we’re talking to Andreas Heinisch, who recently became a member of The Document Foundation, the non-profit entity behind LibreOffice…

Tell us a bit about yourself!

I am from South Tyrol, and live near the city of Meran/Merano on the mountain side. I studied computer science, and teach informatics, physics and mathematics at the local high schools. In my spare time, I like to go hiking, climbing, and of course programming 🙂

What are you working on in the LibreOffice project right now?

At the moment I am part of the Macro team, and try to solve some of the bug reports. I don’t remember exactly, but I think that I contributed to about over a dozen of them. Personally, I think macros are not without controversy due to the security concerns, but they are widely used in order to automate some easy tasks.

Why did you decide to become a member of TDF?

In my teaching activity, there’s only a small part where I can really program or solve some challenging problems. So I decided to join an open source project in order to contribute to the community, get in touch with current software lifecycle technologies and to improve or contribute to existing widely used software. To be honest: LibreOffice was the first product which came to my mind.

In addition, I think that local public administrations should not invest only in proprietary software solutions, which abuse their market position.

Anything else you plan to do in the future?

In the future I want to promote LibreOffice for our local high school, and to encourage more students to contribute to open source software. For this reason, I think that the help pages of LibreOffice should be revisited and simplified in order to attract more people to improve and contribute to such a great product.

Thanks to Andreas for all his work! Everyone in the LibreOffice project is welcome to apply as a member of TDF – check out this short video for more info…

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Month of LibreOffice, May 2020: The winners!

At the beginning of May, we started a new Month of LibreOffice, celebrating community contributions all across the project. So how many people got sticker packs? Check it out…

This makes it the best Month of LibreOffice we’ve ever had! Hundreds of people, all across the globe, have helped out in our projects and communities. We’re hugely thankful for your work – and, of course, everyone who’s listed on the page can get a sticker pack!

How to claim

If you see your name (or username) on this page, get in touch! Email mike.saunders@documentfoundation.org with your name (or username) from the wiki page so that we can check, along with your postal address, and we’ll send you these:

(Note: your address will only be used to post the stickers, and will be deleted immediately afterwards.) If you contributed to the project in May but you’re not on the wiki page, please let us know what you did, so that we can add you.

But wait – there’s more…

And we have an extra bonus: 20 contributors have also been selected at random to get an extra piece of merchandise – a hoodie, T-shirt or snazzy LibreOffice glass mug. Here are the winners – we’ll get in touch personally with the details:

  • Gellért Gyuris
  • Anastasiya T
  • Walter o’Dim
  • BigRAl
  • hoergen@horche.demkontinuum.de (Mastodon)
  • Schiavinatto
  • Earnest Al
  • jwtiyar ali nariman
  • Dimitris Spingos
  • Tuomas Hietala
  • @mpanhans@librem.one (Mastodon)
  • Hugo Carvalho
  • Ayhan YALÇINSOY
  • @sebastiaanveld (Twitter)
  • Sarper Akdemir
  • pb
  • Steve Fanning
  • Rob Westein
  • Andrew Krizhanovsky
  • Peter Schofield

Congratulations to all the winners, and a big thanks once again to everyone who took part! Your contributions keep the LibreOffice project strong. We plan to have another Month of LibreOffice in November, but everyone is welcome to see what they can do for LibreOffice at any time!

LibreOffice monthly recap: May 2020 – News, events and more…

Here’s our summary of updates, events and activities in the LibreOffice project in the last four weeks – click the links to learn more…

  • We started May by announcing the Month of LibreOffice – showing our appreciation for contributions from our worldwide community. Everyone who contributed to LibreOffice throughout May can claim a cool sticker pack, and also has a chance to win extra merchandise. We’ll announce the winners here on the blog in the coming days – stay tuned!

  • Meanwhile, our documentation community announced the LibreOffice Base Guide 6.2. This covers the database component of LibreOffice – a big thanks to Pulkit Krishna, Dan Lewis, Jean Hollis Weber, Alain Romedenne, Jean-Pierre Ledure and Randolph Gamo for their work on it.

  • Next up: the Google Summer of Code, a global programme focused on bringing more student developers into open source software development. LibreOffice took part last year, which led to some great new features including a QR code generator and NotebookBar improvements. LibreOffice is taking part again in 2020, with six projects – click the link to check them out…

  • In further documentation news, the Getting Started Guide was updated to version 6.4. This book covers all components of the suite, and is the collaborative work of Andrew Jensen, Claire Wood, Dan Lewis, Kees Kriek, Steve Fanning, Pulkit Krishna, Roman Kuznetsov and was reviewed and assembled by Jean Hollis Weber. We really appreciate their help!

  • In May, we interviewed two community members: Marco Marinello and Rania Amina. They both recently decided to become members of The Document Foundation, and are helping the LibreOffice project with documentation, QA and social media. And really enjoying it!

  • We mentioned the Google Summer of Code earlier, but there’s also the Google Season of Docs, which connects technical writers with FOSS projects. TDF has been accepted as a participating organisation, with projects for e-learning, mathematical documentation and code-oriented documentation.

  • Members of the Hispanic LibreOffice community met online to discuss documentation, macros, QA and other topics.

  • Finally, later in the month we released LibreOffice 6.4.4. This is a regular maintenance release with almost 100 bug fixes and compatibility improvements.

Keep in touch – follow us on Twitter, Facebook and Mastodon. Like what we do? Support our community with a donation – or join us and help to make LibreOffice even better for everyone!

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 philosophy behind ODF: openness, freedom and control

File formats are not usually the subject of philosophical debate because most users just want to open, save and share…