On January 31, we released LibreOffice 6.0 (shortly followed up by 6.0.1). So what has happened in the last two weeks? Let’s look at some statistics…

969,108 downloads

Yes, there have been almost 1 million downloads of LibreOffice 6.0 since release day. Of course, this is just part of the overall downloads of LibreOffice – we also offer the “still” 5.4 family, which has reached version 5.4.5 and is more suited to enterprise deployments.…

FOSDEM is a major event in the free and open source software world – thousands of FOSS supporters get together to discuss new features, work on bugs, make new contacts, and just have a great time.

This year, many members of the LibreOffice community were there too, and gave talks and presentations in the Open Document Editors devroom.…

Starting with the recent release of the 6.0 family, LibreOffice has now a brand new online help system. Unlike the previous version – based on the transfer of help content to the Mediawiki framework hosted by The Document Foundation – the new help is a direct transformation of the help XML files into simple HTML files, with additions of some JavaScript magic and CSS wizardry.

But how do I get this new help online? Actually it is quite easy. Either you navigate in your browser to https://help.libreoffice.org/6.0/ from your desktop or smartphone or you just don’t install the local help packages in your computer. When the local help is not installed, LibreOffice calls the online help, passing parameters that includes the dialog box identification or UNO command, operating system language and version. Your default browser will open the correct page at the right line position.

What is new in this help online? By working on the XML transformation targeted at modern browsers, LibreOffice developers were able to insert many nice features in the pages. Here are a few, just for a start:

The top header contains two drop-down lists, one to select the module and the second to select the language of the pages. These two lists are there to let you navigate in all help domains. If you want to read the help content in another language, just select the language in the list. There are as many as 50 languages available (not every Help page is fully translated in some languages). (more…)