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The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 5.4.1 “fresh” and LibreOffice 5.3.6 “still”

Berlin, August 31, 2017 – The Document Foundation (TDF) announces LibreOffice 5.4.1, the first minor release of the new LibreOffice 5.4 family, which was announced in early August, and LibreOffice 5.3.6, the sixth release of the mature LibreOffice 5.3 family, which was announced in January 2017.

LibreOffice 5.4.1 represents the bleeding edge in term of features, and as such is targeted at technology enthusiasts and early adopters, while LibreOffice 5.3.6 is targeted at conservative users and enterprise deployments.

TDF suggests deploying LibreOffice 5.3.6 with the backing of certified professionals (updated list available at: https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/professional-support/).

LibreOffice 5.4.1 includes approximately 100 bug and regression fixes, along with document compatibility improvements. Technical details about the release can be found in the change logs here: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/5.4.1/RC1 (fixed in RC1) and https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/5.4.1/RC2 (fixed in RC2).

LibreOffice 5.3.6 includes approximately 50 bug and regression fixes. Technical details about the release can be found in the change log here: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/5.3.6/RC1 (fixed in RC1).

Download LibreOffice

LibreOffice 5.4.1 and LibreOffice 5.3.6 are immediately available for download from the following link: https://www.libreoffice.org/download/.

LibreOffice users, free software advocates and community members can support The Document Foundation with a donation at https://www.libreoffice.org/donate/. Donations help TDF to maintain its infrastructure, share knowledge, and organise events such as the LibreOffice Conference, with the next one taking place in October in Rome (http://conference.libreoffice.org).

Several companies sitting in TDF’s Advisory Board (https://www.documentfoundation.org/governance/advisory-board/) provide either value-added Long Term Supported versions of LibreOffice or consultancy services for migrations and training, based on best practices distilled by The Document Foundation.

Updates from the Document Liberation Project

The Document Liberation Project (aka DLP) is working to free users and content creators from vendor lock-in. To achieve this, it develops and maintains libraries for reading documents in many different formats – including those generated by proprietary software. To learn more about the DLP, check our our short video.

In recent months, DLP developers have been working on updates and new features, so read on for all the details.

QuarkXPress import filter

Lithuanian coder Aleksas Pantechovskis (who we interviewed last year) has been working with David Tardon on a filter to read documents generated by the QuarkXPress desktop publishing application. He was doing this as a Google Summer of Code project, and added code for importing text boxes, shapes and other objects.

The image below shows an original QuarkXPress document on the left, and how it is converted into the open and standardised OpenDocument Format for use in LibreOffice and other software:

Aleksas and David have implemented the filter in a new library, libqxp – it supports QuarkXPress 3.1 – 4.1 documents at the moment.

PowerPoint and StarOffice

Meanwhile, Laurent Alonso has been improving a number of libraries for better compatibility with legacy documents. For instance, in libmwaw he has implemented an import filter for presentations created in Microsoft PowerPoint 2 (Windows), PowerPoint 4 (Mac and Windows) and PowerPoint for Windows 95. If you have old presentations in this format and need to retrieve the main contents, this filter will help you out.

In addition, he has updated libstaroffice, which is a library used to read files generated by StarOffice (which later became OpenOffice.org and then LibreOffice – see our timeline for the full history). Thanks to Laurent’s work, .sdc spreadsheet files preserve more of their formatting when imported, while .sda files created with StarOffice Impress are now converted as presentations.

Give us a hand!

As you’ve seen, DLP is helping users and content creators to free their data from old, legacy and proprietary formats. DLP libraries are used by many well-known applications such as LibreOffice, Inkscape and Scribus, so your contributions can help millions of people around the world.

And you don’t have to be a developer! While code contributions are always welcome, you can help us by reverse-engineering and documenting file formats, or sending us sample documents to analyse and test against the DLP libraries. Any help can really make a big difference, so see this page to learn more. We look forward to meeting you!

Surpassed the 40,000 closed bugs milestone

As Tommy kindly mentioned on the QA mailing list, this week the LibreOffice project has surpassed the 40,000 resolved bugs milestone – a huge achievement demonstrating the enormous amount of effort the community puts into software quality. If we take a look at the numbers from August 2016 (the month we started to collect data from Bugzilla) up to now, 7,143 bugs have been closed during this year, with an average of 133 bugs closed each week.

Let’s see some charts for the mentioned timeframe.

Number of bugs closed each week
Accumulative number of bugs closed
Statuses of the bugs closed

Get Involved!
So, you’ve seen what the QA team is doing across the LibreOffice project – why not get involved and help out? Even if you only have half an hour of spare time each week, by confirming bugs (and fixes) you can make LibreOffice better for millions of people around the world. And in addition, you build up valuable experience working with a large project and open source community – which could be very useful for a future career! Discover more about the QA team in our video interview with QA engineer Xisco Fauli.

(Notes about this blog post: raw data can be checked here. For more stats, visit the stats page in the QA wiki.)

Meeting the Taiwanese community

I have just visited Taiwan to attend COSCUP, meet representatives of the Taiwanese government and the local community, and run a certification session. Generally speaking, it was a very positive trip, because I was able to get a grasp of the activities at every level. Taiwan is definitely one of the strongholds of The Document Foundation.

COSCUP is the annual conference held by the Taiwanese Open source community since 2006. This year, the event has returned to its original location at the National Taiwan University on August 5/6, with a number of community managed tracks. ODF and LibreOffice were featured during the first day, when I was able to present about the advantages of ODF over OOXML to a large audience of Taiwanese people – mostly young students – who asked several questions. Taiwan is one of the countries moving to ODF, so the topic is rather hot.

The meeting with representatives of the Taiwanese government, led by Digital Minister Audrey Tang, was organized on Monday, August 7, in the early afternoon. During the meeting, we discussed the situation of the migrations to ODF in Europe, together with the opportunities and the challenges faced by every government. I learned about the digital strategy of the Taiwanese government, and about the investments they are doing to introduce open source software to the next generations of citizens. Digital Minister Audrey Tang asked about the evolution of LibreOffice in the cloud.

The meeting with the Taiwanese LibreOffice community spanned over a couple of events: a dinner on Saturday night, during which I had the opportunity to taste some real Chinese and Taiwanese dishes (which are rather different from their European equivalents), and a meetup on Monday night, during which I could talk about ODF vs OOXML, to provide some competitive marketing background on the topic. Moving from OOXML to ODF is not easy, not even in countries where the decision is backed by the government like Taiwan. It is therefore important that all community members know the differences between the two document formats and the advantages of ODF in term of interoperability and costs over OOXML.

I would like to take the opportunity of thanking LibreOffice Taiwanese community for the organization of my presence in the island, and congratulate the Taiwanese government for their comprehensive digital strategy to support not only open source software and open standards but also the education of a new generation of digital citizens.

LibreOffice contributor interview: Nguyen Vu Hung

The Document Foundation’s wiki has lots of resources and materials for marketing LibreOffice in English – such as presentations, flyers, stickers and branding guidelines. But we also want to spread the word about free software and open standards in every country, so we really appreciate our international community which promotes LibreOffice in other languages. One such community member is Nguyễn Vũ Hưng who helps with marketing LibreOffice.

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

I live in Hanoi, Vietnam, and you can find me on social media at:

Do you work for a LibreOffice-related company or just contribute in your spare time?

I work as an CTO for a game and offshore development company based in Hanoi. The company has nothing related to LibreOffice, but our staff uses LibreOffice at work. I’m a volunteer in the LibreOffice community in my spare time, and have been a long-time contributor to open source projects.

How did you get involved with LibreOffice?

​It goes back about ten years ago, when I contributed to Vietnamese localization and ​community support with OpenOffice.org. When LibreOffice started, I join the new project with nearly the same role, translating the user interface, until recently. The English skills of average users around the world are getting better, which is why I’ve changed my focus to open source and LibreOffice marketing.

What areas of the project do you normally work on? Anything else you want to tackle?

For a year or two until now, I’ve found that the role most fitting for me is forum and Facebook fan-page content seeding. It works 🙂 For that kind of marketing and content seeding activity, getting people involved is the most difficult part. I’ve been looking at what Slashdot does, and I’m learning about approaches to improve KPIs (key performance indicators) such as the statistics for “seen”, “comments” and “engagement” in Facebook posts.

What was your initial experience of contributing to LibreOffice like?

This is not my first experience with LibreOffice, but I still remember: I was mentoring a student who was finishing an Easy Hack. It was not really “easy” to read so much code and start hacking away on a small improvement – but luckily, he did it 🙂 (Here’s the Bugzilla ticket showing how it went.)

What does LibreOffice need most right now?

It needs to go mobile (more work on Android) and get into the cloud (more work on LibreOffice Online).

What do you do when you’re not working on LibreOffice?

Playing with my kids takes up most of my time. I balance time spent with my family with other IT/open source activities, including LibreOffice, Agile Vietnam ​and ITEC (IT Experts Clubs in Vietnam). We hold monthly events about Agile/Scrum and an event series named “S* Architecture”. I wish I could do the same with LibreOffice in Vietnam!

Thanks Nguyễn for all your contributions. And for others reading this who’d like to help out with LibreOffice marketing – or indeed translations, design, documentation, QA and other projects – join us and get involved!

LibreOffice at KDE’s Akademy meetup in Almeria

Collaboration is essential within free and open source software projects – but it’s also important between projects as well. For instance, many LibreOffice users and contributors run it on the GNU/Linux operating system, with KDE as the desktop environment. With this in mind, members of the LibreOffice community attended Akademy, the yearly summit of KDE developers, users and supporters. It was held this year in Almeria, Spain.

Gabriele Ponzo from LibreItalia, Teodor Mircea Ionita (TDF’s new Development Mentor) and Xisco Fauli (QA engineer) set up a stand for two days of the event. They answered questions from LibreOffice users, and handed out stickers and promotional flyers:

They were assisted by Franklin Weng and Jeff Huang from the Taiwanese LibreOffice community. Franklin gave two presentations:

He also hosted a Birds of a Feather (BoF) session entitled “Migrating FOSS and KDE – Does KDE have chances?”, while Jeff gave a talk about the challenges faced by translation teams. Gabriele and Xisco ran BoF sessions on the value of becoming a TDF member, and they also discussed the newly-released LibreOffice 5.4.

Teodor summarised the event with: “Being somewhat new to the LibreOffice project, this has been a very lucrative opportunity to learn a lot regarding the community and how it works, meet members in person and get a bit more acquainted on a personal human level. Oh, we also had lots of fun too!”

So that was Akademy – but don’t forget that the LibreOffice Conference in Rome is coming up too, in early October. Register now!

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