Following our interviews with Caolán McNamara at Red Hat and Thorsten Behrens at allotropia, today we’re talking to Michael Meeks from Collabora Productivity: Tell us a bit about yourself! I’m Michael Meeks, a Christian, husband and enthusiastic open source developer. I run Collabora’s Office division with the assistance of an amazing team – leading our Collabora Online and Office products, and supporting customers and partners. I’ve served as a Director of the The Document Foundation from its founding until recently, and have contributed to both the OpenDocument Format and OOXML standardization. I’d started some decades ago working on the Linux desktop in the GNOME project around the Gnumeric spreadsheet, first as a volunteer, then for Ximian – which was involved in the open-sourcing of OpenOffice.org. Since then, I’ve been involved with improving the codebase, although the name of my employer has changed from Ximian, Novell, Attachmate, Micro Focus, SUSE – and finally being spun out alongside a brave and talented subset of the SUSE LibreOffice team to Collabora Productivity some nine years ago. What does Collabora Productivity provide in the LibreOffice ecosystem? One big piece we do is improving the awesome LibreOffice Technology core engine / APIs, and performance for
Berlin, March 3, 2022 – LibreOffice 7.3.1 Community, the first minor release of the LibreOffice 7.3 family, targeted at technology enthusiasts and power users, is available for download from https://www.libreoffice.org/download/. This version provides a solution to several LibreOffice 7.3 bugs, including the Auto Calculate regression on Calc, the crashes running Calc when lacking AVX instructions and the crashes related to the Skia graphic engine on macOS. The LibreOffice 7.3 family offers the highest level of compatibility in the office suite market segment, starting with native support for the OpenDocument Format (ODF) – beating proprietary formats in the areas of security and robustness – to superior support for DOCX, XLSX and PPTX files. Microsoft files are still based on the proprietary format deprecated by ISO in 2008, which is artificially complex, and not on the ISO approved standard. This lack of respect for the ISO standard format may create issues to LibreOffice, and is a huge obstacle for transparent interoperability. LibreOffice for enterprise deployments For enterprise-class deployments, TDF strongly recommends the LibreOffice Enterprise family of applications from ecosystem partners, with long-term support options, professional assistance, custom features and Service Level Agreements: https://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-in-business/. LibreOffice Community and the LibreOffice Enterprise family of products
LibreOffice is developed by a worldwide community, made up of volunteers, certified developers and companies in the wider ecosystem. Today we’re talking to Caolán McNamara, a long-time LibreOffice developer who works for Red Hat… Tell us a bit about yourself! I’m a Principal Engineer at Red Hat, Inc. on the Desktop Team since 2004! And I live on the west coast of Ireland. What does Red Hat do in the LibreOffice ecosystem? We try and do a lot of different things, from integration with the GNOME desktop, Calc and UNO work, and porting to architectures such as aarch64 and ppc64le, but I can highlight some of the efforts we make in detecting flaws close to when they get introduced into LibreOffice. We maintain the regular crashtesting infrastructure, where we import and export 120,000+ documents and typically fix, or identify the triggering commit, any new import/export failures as they are discovered. Similarly, we maintain the LibreOffice Coverity instance and work to keep the warnings to an effectively zero level in over six million lines of code, as part of that early detection of code flaw process. In the same theme, we manage the LibreOffice OSS-Fuzz work and work to maintain the
In addition to the majority of code commits being focused on interoperability with Microsoft’s proprietary file formats, there is a wealth of new features targeted at users migrating from Office, to simplify the transition Berlin, February 2, 2022 – LibreOffice 7.3 Community, the new major release of the volunteer-supported free office suite for desktop productivity, is available from https://www.libreoffice.org/download. Based on the LibreOffice Technology platform for personal productivity on desktop, mobile and cloud, it provides a large number of improvements targeted at users migrating from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice, or exchanging documents between the two office suites. There are three different kinds of interoperability improvements: Development of new features, such as the new handling of change tracking in tables and when text is moved, which have a positive impact on interoperability with Microsoft Office documents. Performance improvements when opening large DOCX and XLSX/XLSM files, improved rendering speed of some complex documents, and new rendering speed improvements when using the Skia back-end introduced with LibreOffice 7.1. Improvements to import/export filters: DOC (greatly improved list/numbering import); DOCX (greatly improved list/numbering import; hyperlinks attached to shapes are now imported/exported; fix permission for editing; track change of paragraph style); XLSX (decreased row height for
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 announcing our plans for FOSDEM, which will take place online on February 5 – 6. The LibreOffice community will be present with many talks – join us! Early in January, we released LibreOffice 7.2.5 with 90 bugfixes and compatibility improvements. Our awesome documentation community created a macOS version of the LibreOffice Writer Guide 7.2. This includes changes specific to the macOS version of the suite. Over in the localisation project, we announced initial Klingon and Interslavic support in LibreOffice. If you have some knowledge of either of these languages, give us a hand! There was another guidebook update from our docs team in January: The LibreOffice Draw Guide 7.2. This covers the vector image editing component. In the middle of the month, we talked to Baltasar García Perez-Schofield about his work on the Basic interpreter, and becoming a Member of The Document Foundation. Meanwhile, we noticed that many OpenOffice users are receiving warning dialogs when opening files made in LibreOffice. This is because LibreOffice supports newer versions of OpenDocument Format, its
Happy new year, everyone! Here’s our summary of updates, events and activities in the LibreOffice project in the last four weeks of 2021 – click the links to learn more… We started December by announcing the LibreOffice Technology DevRoom Call for Papers for FOSDEM. This year, FOSDEM will take place online once again, and the LibreOffice community will be present with talks and discussions. Join us! At the recent Indian SFCamp 2021, Mike Saunders from the LibreOffice community gave a talk about our work, and where we’re going. He also explained how everyone can join the project and help to make LibreOffice even better. In December, TDF announced two updates for LibreOffice, for the 7.2 and 7.1 branches. These fix an important security issue and all users are recommended to upgrade. Meanwhile, the Coalition for Competitive Digital Markets, a group of more than 50 technology companies from 16 different European countries, sent an open letter to members of the European Parliament to raise awareness about interoperability and to impose stricter rules on big companies – the so-called ‘big tech’ companies – that act as gatekeepers and prevent transparency and openness in digital markets. In November, we ran a Month of
