Weblate (translation tool) improvements funded by TDF

Weblate logo

Weblate is a free and open source software (FOSS) translation tool, with version control features. It’s used by many projects around the world, including LibreOffice, Fedora and openSUSE, to assist their communities with translating user interfaces, documentation, and other aspects of software.

Because we in the LibreOffice project use Weblate, we wanted to contribute back and help to fund fixes and improvements. This is all possible thanks to generous donations from you!

The full list of changes is at the bottom of this blogpost, but as a summary: TDF funded improvements to the administration interface, making it easier to work with permissions, and filter by language when generating reports. A night theme was added (shown below), along with other cosmetic improvements, and it’s now possible for translators to explain why they reject a suggestion.

Weblate night/dark mode

All of these are available in Weblate 4.18 (the latest release) and future versions. And more are coming in Weblate 5.0, such as nested projects or project grouping and per-language translation workflow settings.

Thanks again to our donors for making this possible, and Sophie Gautier and Jan ‘Kendy’ Holešovský for ther help! And we can say to other FOSS projects looking for translating tools, we recommend Weblate 👍


Full list of improvements and fixes

  • #7205 – unchanged translation flag notwithstanding glossary term marked as untranslatable, fixed in 4.17
  • #5854 – Autofix Bangla/Bengali sentence ender to ।, fixed in 4.17
  • #5842 – Shortcut for suggest, fixed in 4.15
  • #4368 – Improved presentation of differences in machine translations, fixed in 4.18
  • #4160 – Allow to filter on language in reports, fixed in 4.17
  • #3242 – Ability to download all translation memory from a given project in a per-language basis, fixed in 4.17
  • #2241 – Search who translates the same language, fixed in 4.18
  • #2127 – Create Group Administration Permissions, fixed in 4.15
  • #1994 – Check if two different strings share same translation, fixed in 4.18
  • #1661 – Suggestion rejection reason: possibility of explaining why you reject a suggestion, fixed in 4.18
  • #2969 – Add night theme, fixed in 4.18
  • #5519 – Glossary import and export with explanations, fixed in 4.18

Double Gift for the Community: Impress Guide 7.5 and Draw Guide 7.5

The community documentation team is happy to announce the immediate availability of the Impress Guide 7.5 and Draw Guide 7.5. The guides are updated to the latest LibreOffice release as a community effort to keep our literature sharp and up to date.

Impress and Draw Guides

The double gift is brought to you by Peter Schofield with valuable contributions by Socks Eight, members of the documentation team.

The Impress Guide covers the main features of Impress, the presentations (slide show) component of LibreOffice. You can create slides that contain text, bulleted and numbered lists, tables, charts, clip art, and other objects. Impress comes with prepackaged text styles, slide backgrounds, and Help. It can open and save to Microsoft PowerPoint formats and can export to PDF, HTML, and numerous graphic formats. This book was written by volunteers from the LibreOffice community.

The Draw Guide introduces the main features of LibreOffice Draw. Draw is a vector graphics drawing tool, although it can also perform some operations on raster graphics (pixels) such as photographs. Using Draw, a wide variety of graphical images can be quickly created.

The guides can be downloaded or purchased in printed version from the Documentation website as well as the bookshelf project.

Happy reading!

The Document Foundation’s Annual Report 2022

TDF Annual Report 2022

The Annual Report of The Document Foundation describes the foundation’s activities and projects, especially in regards to LibreOffice and the Document Liberation Project.

We’ve been posting sections of the 2022 report here on the blog, and now the full version is available in PDF format on TDF’s Nextcloud server in two different versions: low resolution (8.2MB) and high resolution (57.4MB). The Annual Report is based on the German version presented to the authorities.

The document has been entirely created with free open source software: written contents have obviously been developed with LibreOffice Writer (desktop) and collaboratively modified with LibreOffice Writer (online), charts have been created with LibreOffice Calc and prepared for publishing with LibreOffice Draw, drawings and tables have been developed or modified (from legacy PDF originals) with LibreOffice Draw, images have been prepared for publishing with GIMP, and the layout has been created with Scribus based on the existing templates.

We at The Document Foundation are very grateful to all contributors to our projects and communities in 2022 – none of this would be possible without you!

LibreOffice project and community recap: July 2023

Recap logo

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

Michael Weghorn

  • Talking of the TDF team: in June, team members met in Munich to discuss ideas and proposals for the community and software. They worked on lots of topics – and now we’ve uploaded the report of the meeting. Check it out and let us know what you think!

The Document Foundation team

LibreOffice Draw Guide 7.4 - Czech version

  • We had one release in July, LibreOffice 7.5.5. This is the fifth maintenance release of the LibreOffice 7.5 branch, and all users are recommended to get the update.

LibreOffice 7.5 banner

Screenshot of Extensions and Templates website

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

Czech translation of LibreOffice Draw Guide 7.4 – and more news

Draw Guide cover

Zdeněk Crhonek (aka “raal”) from the Czech LibreOffice community writes:

The Czech team has finished its translation of the LibreOffice Draw Guide 7.4. As usual it was team work, namely: translations by Petr Kuběj, Zdeněk Crhonek and Radomír Strnad; localized pictures by Roman Toman; and technical support from Miloš Šrámek. Thanks to all the team for their work! The Czech translation of the Draw guide 7.4 is available for download from this page.

Now the team continues with translation of the Impress Guide 7.5. We always looking for new translators and correctors. Join us!

Migration protocol translated into Czech

Thanks to Jana Švejdová for translating the LibreOffice Migration Protocol into Czech, and HeroClan for finding a volunteer. The protocol represents a reference for migrations, based on best practices from some of the most successful projects. The file is available on the Czech website.

Try our updated Extensions and Templates site!

Screenshot of LibreOffice extensions and template website

LibreOffice includes a wide range of features, covering most use-cases. But it also supports extensions for more functionality, and our worldwide community has submitted hundreds of great extensions (and templates).

Recently, our new Web Developer Juan José González (aka “JJ”) improved the design of the site, to make it more usable and visually appealing, including:

  • Counters for number of downloads
  • A more prominent search bar
  • Tag filters in a menu on the left
  • Larger sort order buttons
  • Easier to read dates of last update (e.g. “2 months ago”)

Explore the new site here! If you notice anything that could still be improved, please report it on our tracker.

And a huge thanks to all extension and template maintainers – you’ve done the biggest work on the website.

Create and submit an extension

Interested in making an extension and sharing it with the world? It’s a great way to learn about LibreOffice development. Here are some guides to get started: