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 the month by highlighting upcoming events: the LibreOffice Conference 2023 (which has now finished – more on that in a moment); the Latin American Conference, and LibreOffice Conf.Asia. Next up, we had a bunch of LibreOffice Expert magazines to give away to schools and local communities. They’ve all been claimed now, but if you still want a copy, you can get one from the publisher. On September 11, we announced 1.5 million downloads of the new LibreOffice 7.6 family! And we had some more stats to share too… Then our Documentation community announced the LibreOffice Writer Guide 7.6 – an essential accompaniment to the software. Great work, everyone 😊 This year, LibreOffice was once again a mentoring organization in the Google Summer of Code (GSoC), a global program focused on bringing more student developers into free and open source software development. Five projects were finished successfully. Students and mentors enjoyed the time, and we presented some of the achievements, which should make their way into LibreOffice 24.2 in early February 2024! The biggest event
Berlin, September 14, 2023 – LibreOffice 7.6.1 Community, the first minor release of the 7.6 family of the volunteer-supported free office suite for desktop productivity, for Windows (Intel/AMD and ARM processors), macOS (Apple and Intel processors) and Linux is immediately available from www.libreoffice.org/download. LibreOffice is the only open source office suite for personal productivity which can be compared feature-by-feature with the market leader. LibreOffice offers the highest level of compatibility in the office suite market segment, with native support for the Open Document Format (ODF) – beating proprietary formats for security and robustness – to superior support for MS Office files, along with filters for a large number of legacy document formats, to return ownership and control to users. Based on the advanced features of the LibreOffice Technology platform for personal productivity on desktop, mobile and cloud, the LibreOffice 7.6 family provides a large number of improvements and new features targeted at users sharing documents with MS Office or migrating from MS Office. These users should check new releases of LibreOffice on a regular basis, as the progress is so fast, that each new version improves dramatically over the previous one. LibreOffice 7.6 Community Highlights GENERAL Support for zoom gestures
Berlin, August 21, 2023 – LibreOffice 7.6 Community, the new major release of the volunteer-supported free office suite for desktop productivity, and the last based on the historical release numbering scheme (first digit for release cycle, second digit for major release), is immediately available from www.libreoffice.org/download for Windows (Intel/AMD and ARM processors), macOS (Apple and Intel processors), and Linux. Starting from 2024, TDF will adopt calendar based-release numbering, so the next major release will be LibreOffice 24.2 in February 2024. LibreOffice is the only open source office suite for personal productivity which can be compared feature-by-feature with the market leader. After twelve years and five release cycles – code cleaning, code refactoring, polishing the user interface, extending to new hardware and software platforms, and optimizing interoperability with OOXML to support users – it is increasingly difficult to develop entirely new features, so most of them are refinements or improvements of existing ones. Highlights of LibreOffice 7.6 Community GENERAL Support for zoom gestures when using touchpads in the main view. Support for document themes, and import and export of theme definitions for ODF and OOXML documents. Many improvements to font handling, especially for right-to-left scripts, CJK and other Asian alphabets. WRITER
In 2022, the marketing team continued the deployment of the Strategic Marketing Plan, without overlooking ongoing activities to promote LibreOffice and support the efforts of native language communities (This is part of The Document Foundation’s Annual Report for 2022 – we’ll post the full version here soon.) LibreOffice Strategic Marketing Plan We have invested in the deployment of the Strategic Marketing Plan, with additional activities such as the release of generic presentations about The Document Foundation (History, and Digital Sovereignty), LibreOffice (Technology, also with comments, and Sustainability) and Open Document Format (Generic, ODF and Interoperability, and OOXML Issues), to be used by community members. Videos who help to personalize a slide deck according to the audience are also available. We have also released a White Paper about LibreOffice Technology, to explain the evolution of LibreOffice from a single desktop product to a product based technology for individual or enterprise productivity, which is the foundation for a series of products optimized for different platforms, such as desktop, mobile and the cloud. To underline the importance of the LibreOffice Technology concept, a specific logo has been created, to make visually easier to associate all products based on this technology platform. A second
Berlin, May 11, 2023 – The Document Foundation releases LibreOffice 7.4.7 Community, the seventh and last minor release of the LibreOffice 7.4 line, which is approaching the end of life [1]. The new release is immediately available from https://www.libreoffice.org/download/ for Windows (Intel and Arm processors), macOS (Apple and Intel processors), and Linux. LibreOffice offers the highest level of compatibility in the office suite market segment, with native support for the OpenDocument Format (ODF) – beating proprietary formats for security and robustness – to superior support for MS Office files, to filters for a large number of legacy document formats, to return ownership and control to users. LibreOffice Technology Platform Products based on the LibreOffice Technology platform – the transactional engine shared by all LibreOffice based products, which provides a rock solid solution with a high level of coherence and interoperability – are available for major desktop operating systems (Windows, macOS, Linux and Chrome OS), for mobile platforms (Android and iOS), and for the cloud. For enterprise-class deployments, TDF strongly recommends the LibreOffice Enterprise family of applications from ecosystem partners – for desktop, mobile and cloud – with a large number of dedicated value-added features and other benefits such as SLA
In 2022 we had with elections for the foundation’s Membership Committee, along with regular Advisory Board calls, and support for other projects and activities (This is part of The Document Foundation’s Annual Report for 2022 – we’ll post the full version here soon.) Election of new Membership Committee The mission of the Membership Committee (MC) is to administer membership applications and renewals following the criteria defined in The Document Foundation’s Foundation’s Statutes. It initiates and supervises the election of the Board of Directors, and The Board of Trustees elects from among its members the Membership Committee for a period of two years. In August, we had live town-hall meetings with the Membership Committee candidates, in multiple timezones, to ensure that as many people as possible (both candidates and TDF members) could take part and ask their questions. We made video recordings of these meetings, and posted them on our video channels and blog, for those who couldn’t take part live: 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
