Our community in Asia let us know about an event they’re organising…
LibreOffice Conf Asia x UbuCon Asia 2023 (hereinafter referred to as LOUCA23) is an event that brings together Linux and Open Source Software (OSS) activists, contributors, users, communities, and businesses in the Asian region, mainly related to and focused on the LibreOffice and Ubuntu projects.
This year’s LOUCA23 will be held in the city of Surakarta, Central Java, Indonesia, and is targeting as many as 500 participants from students, university students, academics, professionals, government agencies, NGOs, cooperatives, and companies.
Objective
LOUCA23 is organised as an active contribution of the LibreOffice Indonesia and Ubuntu communities, by bringing together experts and practitioners, business entities, institutions, activists, contributors, and users of LibreOffice and Ubuntu to discuss and share knowledge directly. This activity is expected to provide benefits in terms of knowledge, relationships, finance, and so on for participants who are directly involved during the activity process.
Participants
LOUCA23 targets at least 500 participants including students, academics, professionals, government agencies, NGOs, cooperatives and companies.
Agenda
Here are some of the types of activities that will be part of the LOUCA23 event:
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 with the Month of LibreOffice! This is a campaign that we run twice a year, encouraging users to join our community and help to improve the software. Everyone can learn new things – and get some merchandise as thanks! Results will be announced here on the blog very soon…
LibreOffice’s YouTube channel went over the 3 million views mark. Great stuff! We’d like to say a special thanks to community members who’ve contributed great work, such as the Indonesian community for the “New Features” videos (major LibreOffice releases), and Harald B. in the German community for his tutorials. (Note that many of the videos are also available on PeerTube.)
Our QA (Quality Assurance) community helps to identify and fix bugs in LibreOffice. Every week, Ilmari Lauhakangas from The Document Foundation (the non-profit entity behind LibreOffice) live-streams bug triaging sessions, so that others can see how he works on bug reports, and ask him questions. So, what do attendees think of the sessions so far? We asked some regulars – here’s what they said…
Throughout May, we posted sections from The Document Foundation’s Annual Report 2022. TDF is the non-profit entity that coordinates the LibreOffice community and provides infrastructure – all thanks to generous donations from users! Here are the sections on social media, user interface design, attracting new contributors to the project and documentation.
The LibreOffice Conference 2023 is coming up in Bucharest, Romania – September 21 – 23! And sponsorship packages are now available. Get in contact with one of the largest open source communities in the world, showcase your brand, and support FOSS!
One of the goals of The Document Foundation and the community it represents is to improve LibreOffice to make it even more competitive with other office suites. And one of the tools to achieve this goal are tenders for the development of specific features, such as the implementation of OpenDocument Format version 1.3, the standard format used by LibreOffice and other applications. So we are looking for tender ideas and proposals to improve LibreOffice – let us know what you think.
On May 12 and 13, the esLibre Conference took place in Zaragoza, Spain and the Spanish-speaking LibreOffice community took the opportunity to meet in person and talk about the project.
Ever heard the term “scratching your own itch”? Wiktionary describes it as “doing something out of motivation to solve a personal problem”. In the world of free and open source software development, this happens a lot! Anyone can contribute to FOSS projects like LibreOffice, and help to improve them. And that’s exactly what Rafael Lima did, with a long-standing limitation in LibreOffice. Here’s what he had to say.
And finally, we welcomed Khaled Hosny to the team at TDF. He’ll focusing on improving LibreOffice’s language support, making the software more accessible to hundreds of millions of people around the world.
The LibreOffice Documentation team is happy to announce the new Math Guide 7.5, for the equation editor of the LibreOffice productivity suite.
Anyone who wants to learn how to insert formulas and equations using Math will find this 73-page guide valuable. Formulas can be inserted as objects into Writer, Impress, Draw, and Calc documents. Regardless of the document type, formula objects are edited using LibreOffice Math.
Thanks to Vitor Ferreira, the new guide has included the changes carried from LibreOffice 7.2 and is now fully updated.
He added:
I am a college professor of Mechanical Engineering at Universidade Federal da Bahia (UFBA) in Salvador, Brazil. I use LibreOffice Math since 2019 for my documents and lectures notes, and I together with the Brazilian LibreOffice Community I updated the Math Guide to the latest release.” Said Vitor Ferreira. “The opportunity to volunteer to LibreOffice Documentation was unique and I found it very encouraging in all aspects of document production.
In 2022, 11,769 commits were made to the LibreOffice source code, from 218 authors, in 10 repositories. We also took part in the Google Summer of Code, to support student developers
(This is part of The Document Foundation’s Annual Report for 2022 – we’ll post the full version here soon.)
Infrastructure for developers
TDF provides infrastructure for the developer community to continue their work on LibreOffice. These include Git and Gerrit, to make changes to the source code, along with Bugzilla (to track bug reports and enhancement requests), a wiki (to document changes), and Weblate (for translations).
Most technical discussions took place on the developer mailing list and IRC channel, with the latter providing more real-time communication. Members of the Engineering Steering Committee met weekly, to discuss the most pressing issues with the codebase.
Google Summer of Code (GSoC)
GSoC is an annual programme in which student developers of free and open source software projects receive stipends from Google for their work. LibreOffice takes part in GSoC every year, and in 2022, two students developed features and updates in the software. Let’s go through them…
Hannah Meeks – VBA Macros – Tests and missing APIs: LibreOffice supports VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) Macros, but the implemented API isn’t complete and the API functions aren’t largely tested. The consequence of this is that the VBA macros in OOXML documents don’t run as intended in LibreOffice, which causes compatibility problems. The goal of this project is to add tests for the functions already implemented and then look for what functions are missing for a method or module and add them. Hannah described her results:
I wrote lots of macros tests which was the main aim of the project and found lots of bugs/areas to fix, so my summer was a success! I also really enjoyed looking into the core and fixing some of these problems. Lots of my tests are still broken in LibreOffice so need fixing – for example, I found that there seem to be problems with new lines being created in Microsoft Word that are not created in LibreOffice Writer.
The second project was by Paris Oplopoios – Extend Z compressed graphic format support. Some graphic formats are compressed with ZIP (deflate) to make them smaller, while the formats themselves don’t support compression. In LibreOffice we already support SVGZ format, but not other formats. The goal of this idea was to look at how SVGZ is implemented and extend that to other formats (EMF, WMF). The extended goal was to implement support for compressing in addition to extracting.
Paris got off to a flying start with the originally defined goal, which was to add import functionality for Z compressed EMF and WMF graphics and thus to improve compatibility with Microsoft documents. In the end, he also implemented exporting of WMZ, EMZ and SVGZ graphics, replaced homegrown PNG export code with one that uses libpng and added automated tests for PNG export in addition to tests for the Z compressed formats.
For more details about the students’ great achievements, see the video below and the results post – and thanks to Tomaž Vajngerl and Miklos Vajna (Collabora) and Thorsten Behrens (allotropia) for mentoring the students.
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Quality Assurance (QA)
In 2022, the QA team triaged thousands of bugs, bisected hundreds of regressions, and answered questions from countless bug reporters. As one of the most visible groups directly responding to end users, the QA team must be nimble and able to adapt to changes. In addition, it must deal with specific requests for help from other teams.
The QA team meets regularly on IRC on the #libreoffice-qa channel, which is the best medium for discussing bugs and regressions. The IRC channel provides an excellent opportunity to remain in close contact with team members, and to tutor new members in the art and skill of LibreOffice QA. This is bridged to the Telegram group.
During 2022, 5,966 bugs were reported by 2,650 users, which means 115 new bugs were reported every week on average. The QA team prepared monthly reports about their activity and posted on the QA blog.
Top 10 bug reporters
Telesto (288)
Eyal Rozenberg (207)
Mike Kaganski (165)
Xisco Faulí (126)
Gabor Kelemen (111)
Rafael Lima (108)
sdc.blanco (104)
Regina Henschel (93)
NISZ LibreOffice Team (93)
Hossein (59)
Triaging
During 2022, 6,100 bugs were triaged by 391 people. Here are the top 10 bug triagers:
Buovjaga (675)
Dieter (462)
Heiko Tietze (445)
Xisco Faulí (354)
Timur (327)
raal (303)
Julien Nabet (276)
m.a.riosv (268)
Rafael Lima (218)
Mike Kaganski (207)
Bibisecting
Also, during 2022, the QA team performed 622 bibisects of regressions by 32 people. These are the top 10 bisecters:
The Document Foundation (TDF) is the non-profit entity behind LibreOffice, providing infrastructure and support for the community that makes the suite. Recently, TDF decided to expand its small team with a new Developer, focusing on improving LibreOffice’s language support. This will help to make the software more accessible to hundreds of millions of people around the world.
The new Developer is Khaled Hosny, so let’s hear from him…
Tell us a bit about yourself!
I’m a software developer based in Cairo, Egypt. My area of expertise is centered around written language; fonts, text layout in general and so-called “complex” text layout in particular (I don’t like how some text layout is signaled out as being complex – all text layout is complex, but some complexity is obvious right away while others are more subtle), PDF, and so on.
I have been involved with FOSS since 2006. I started with doing Arabic localization, then Arabic fonts, and a few years later I started programming to fix Arabic bugs (I think my first patch was to fix a right-to-left UI issue for Sugar, the desktop environment for the OLPC XO laptop, if anyone still remembers it). I contributed and continue to contribute to many FOSS projects – Firefox, GNOME, HarfBuzz, XeTeX, LuaTeX, to name some.
I got involved with LibreOffice in early 2011, and I have been lurking around since then.
I’m also a type designer and font engineer. I have designed and built a few Arabic and math fonts (I can’t read much of the math notation – I was taught math in Arabic notation and I hardly remember any of that either, but I’m fascinated by the 2D nature of math typesetting).
Funnily enough, I had no formal training in any of this, I actually graduated from medical school and worked as a doctor for few years before quitting to focus on a software career (I was already deep into localization and fonts while still at medical school).
Improved glyph positioning of artificial italic text, especially combining marks – implemented by Khaled in LibreOffice 7.5
What’s your new role at TDF?
I’m joining the team as a LibreOffice developer focusing on areas of right-to-left and the aforementioned so-called “complex” text layout. These are some of the underserved areas of LibreOffice development while disproportionately affecting a very large group of (existing and potential) users.
I hope my role at TDF will help to widen the LibreOffice community, attract more people to it, and make it accessible to more users.
What will you be working on?
I will be fixing bugs and implementing features related to right-to-left text layout and user interface issues which affect languages like Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, and Urdu, as well as text layout issues involving writing systems that require more involved text layout, like Arabic script, and the Indic group of scripts.
I will be also working on fonts, PDF export (text extraction from PDF is major pain point for many scripts), and related areas.
I’m also looking forward to mentoring new developers interested in working on any of these areas.
Do you have any tips for new developers, who’re eager to get involved with the LibreOffice codebase?
LibreOffice is a large code base and can be overwhelming, so try to read any existing documentation as much as possible, don’t be afraid to ask for help, and in general be patient.
We’re really happy to have Khaled on board! Follow this blog and our Mastodon and Twitter accounts for updates on his work – plus more news from the LibreOffice community.
