LibreOffice Asia Meetup in A+A Space, Taipei, Taiwan

Community members from five different countries had a good time, and talked about holding a LibreOffice Asia Conference in the future

Event report by: Wally Lian, PR & Marketing Consultant, Software Liberty Association Taiwan

This summer is hot in Taiwan, and so are the FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) communities! From the end of July to the middle of August, there were several big FOSS events in Taiwan.…

LibreOffice 6.1: A week in stats

On August 8, we announced LibreOffice 6.1, a new version of the suite with many great features and updates created by our worldwide community. Let’s look at some stats from the last week!

373,758 downloads

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

Community Member Monday: Sam Tuke

Over the last few years we’ve posted many LibreOffice contributor interviews on this blog. Today, we catch up with Sam Tuke who is a member of the marketing community and helps out with QA too…

Where do you live, and are you active on IRC/social media?

I live in Berlin, Germany. Originally I’m from Suffolk, England.…

Taming LibreOffice 6.1’s New Help System

or… the Help must help.

LibreOffice 6.1 has been released and carries a refactored and improved new Help system, based on modern browser technologies. Let’s explore what this new help brought to LibreOffice.

The main driver of the new Help is our vision that the Help must help. When we look at the old help system from the perspective of a typical user, we realize quickly that the text and layout of the help pages don’t provide the best experience. So how can we improve the experience and help our users better? The diagnostic was straightforward: the LibreOffice Help system was tied to a very limited technology, so we had to unleash LibreOffice Help.

The approach was to look at the capabilities of modern browser technologies of 2018, and compare them to the aging help system that relied on 2000’s web standards. Until LibreOffice 6.1, the local help consisted of static description text, very few images, no multimedia and almost no easy support for evolution and improvements.

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The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 6.1, a major release which shows the power of a large and diverse community of contributors

Berlin, August 8, 2018 – The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 6.1, the second major release of the LibreOffice 6 family presented in January 2018, with a significant number of new and improved features:

  • Colibre, a new icon theme for Windows based on Microsoft’s icon design guidelines, which makes the office suite visually appealing for users coming from the Microsoft environment;
  • A reworked image handling feature, which is significantly faster and smoother thanks to a new graphic manager and an improved image lifecycle, with some advantages also when loading documents in Microsoft proprietary formats;
  • The reorganization of Draw menus with the addition of a new Page menu, for better UX consistency across the different modules;
  • A major improvement for Base, only available in experimental mode: the old HSQLDB database engine has been deprecated, though still available, and the new Firebird database engine is now the default option (users are encouraged to migrate files using the migration assistant from HSQLDB to Firebird, or by exporting them to an external HSQLDB server);
  • Significant improvements in all modules of LibreOffice Online, with changes to the user interface to make it more appealing and consistent with the desktop version,
  • An improved EPUB export filter, in terms of link, table, image, font embedding and footnote support, with more options for customizing metadata;
  • Online Help pages have been enriched with text and example files to guide the users through features, and are now easier to localize.

LibreOffice 6.0 Writer Guide

LibreOffice Documentation Team has just released the LibreOffice 6.0 Writer Guide, with a general Introduction to LibreOffice Writer followed by the following chapters: Working with Text (basics), Working with Text (advanced), Formatting Text, Formatting Pages (basics), Formatting Pages (advanced), Print Export Email, Introduction to Styles, Working with Styles, Templates, Images & Graphics, Lists, Tables of Data, Mail Merge, TOCs Indexes Biblios, Master Documents, Fields, Forms, Spreadsheets Charts Objects, Setting Up Writer and Customizing Writer, for a total of 448 pages.…