LibreOffice monthly recap: August 2019

Here’s our summary of updates, events and activities in the LibreOffice project in the last four weeks – click the links to learn more! On August 8, we announced LibreOffice 6.3, a new major release with better performance, a large number of new and improved features, and enhanced interoperability with proprietary document formats. 10 days later, we followed this up with a look at some statistics – there had been 430,000 downloads of the new version, and 54,000 views of the press release. Check out some of the new features in this short video: Please confirm that you want to play a YouTube video. By accepting, you will be accessing content from YouTube, a service provided by an external third party. YouTube privacy policy If you accept this notice, your choice will be saved and the page will refresh. Accept YouTube Content Meanwhile, we posted reports from the the LibreOffice Asia Conference, which took place earlier in the year. Part 1 looks at how the free and open source software (FOSS) ecosystem is growing in Asia, while part 2 examines how software affects the autonomy of countries. Oh and speaking of conferences, don’t forget that the LibreOffice Conference 2019 is taking

LibreOffice monthly recap: July 2019

Here’s our summary of updates, events and activities in the LibreOffice project in the last four weeks – click the links to learn more! ODF (the Open Document Format) is the native file format of LibreOffice, and is a fully open and standardised format, ideal for long-term document storage. At the start of the month, we announced COSM – the Community of ODF Specification Maintainers, to hold funds and to retain editors to work at the ODF Technical Committee. The goal is to accelerate development of the standard, and build up experienced editors. Find out more here. We put the next part of our Annual Report 2018 online! Our native language communities around the world help to improve LibreOffice and share knowledge – and their passion and dedication is wonderful. LibreOffice wouldn’t be what it is today without their great work! On July 4th, we announced LibreOffice 6.2.5. This includes 118 bugfixes, thanks to our worldwide community and ecosystem of certified developers. Meanwhile, work continues on LibreOffice 6.3 (due to be released in early August), and our QA community organised a Bug Hunting Session. Give us a hand in future sessions to ensure that LibreOffice stays rock-solid! We talked to

LibreOffice monthly recap: June 2019

Here’s our summary of updates, events and activities in the LibreOffice project last month – click the links to learn more! We started by announcing the winners in the Month of LibreOffice, May 2019! 355 sticker packs were awarded – the most ever – along with 12 exclusive glass mugs. Don’t forget to check the wiki page to see if your name (or username) is included, and claim your stickers! Want to start hacking on the LibreOffice source code? We translated a guide by a Hungarian community member, that explains registering with Git and Gerrit, and local settings. Just follow the steps, and you’re ready to go! Later in the month, we followed this up with a guide to downloading the source code and building it on Linux. In our next C++ workshop, we looked at MSTs and Graph Implementations. Stay tuned to this blog for more workshops! In LibreOffice 6.3, which is due to be released in August, The Document Foundation won’t be building 32-bit binary packages for GNU/Linux. But! That doesn’t mean that 32-bit compatibility is being removed. We prepared a statement to clarify the position, so if you use LibreOffice on a 32-bit Linux system, make sure

LibreOffice monthly recap: May 2019

May was an especially busy month in the project, with new releases of LibreOffice, events, workshops, interviews and more. Check it out… We started with a new Month of LibreOffice. These are twice-yearly campaigns where we encourage people to join our community and help to improve the software. Everyone who contributes can claim a cool sticker pack at the end – and this year, we have some exclusive glass mugs for a randomly selected bunch of winners too! Learn all about it here. We’re all looking forward to the upcoming LibreOffice Conference in September, in Spain – but we’re also looking further ahead, to 2020! If you’d like to organise our conference that year, bringing together LibreOffice developers, supporters and users, see our call for locations. Applications are open until the end of June. You’ve probably heard of the Google Summer of Code, right? Well now there’s the Google Season of Docs – and LibreOffice is taking part! The goal is to give technical writers an opportunity to gain experience in contributing to open source projects, and to give open source projects an opportunity to engage the technical writing community. In May, we had two new releases of LibreOffice, thanks

LibreOffice monthly recap: October 2018

Here’s our regular recap of events and updates in the last month! The Albanian LibreOffice Community made an awesome recap video of our recent conference in Tirana. Check it out: Please confirm that you want to play a YouTube video. By accepting, you will be accessing content from YouTube, a service provided by an external third party. YouTube privacy policy If you accept this notice, your choice will be saved and the page will refresh. Accept YouTube Content Also, we’ve been uploading presentation videos from the conference. Apologies for the echo in the audio, but it’s the best we could do given technical limitations of the venue – try using headphones and it should be a bit clearer. There are many more videos to come! As a large open source project serving millions of end users, LibreOffice has extensive infrastructure. We talked to Guilhem Moulin, who is in charge of The Document Foundation’s infrastructure and services, about new developments and how others can get involved. Meanwhile, the QA community organised the first Bug Hunting Session for LibreOffice 6.2, which is currently in development and due to be released in early February next year. There will be more sessions in the coming

Marketing Activities, January to September 2018

The new year at The Document Foundation starts with FOSDEM, where many LibreOffice contributors gather for the largest Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) meeting in Europe. In 2018 we had a booth in the main hall of building K, where most of the largest projects are based, and a devroom focused on OpenDocument Format (ODF) editing software. The marketing team at TDF was in charge of the booth and the devroom, and also of logistics for the internal meetings and the hackfest organized at ICAB just after FOSDEM. I also helped to cook some real Italian pasta for the social dinner on Saturday, where the community gathered together with some friends. Just before FOSDEM, we announced LibreOffice 6.0. We coordinated the announcement, drafting the documents for the press kit and organizing several pre briefings with journalists. As usual, thanks to the efforts of localization volunteers we were able to distribute the press release in some local languages. We then followed up with announcements of minor releases, with a reduced emphasis in comparison with the major announcement. After FOSDEM, we started working on TDF’s Annual Report, drafting most of the content and illustrations, and collecting images from community events for