The new Guide comes one week after the release of the latest LibreOffice Community software Jean H. Weber and Kees Kriek from the LibreOffice Documentation Team are happy to announce the immediate availability of the Writer Guide 7.2, one week after the release of LibreOffice Community 7.2 LibreOffice 7.2 Community includes many changes not visible in the user interface. These changes include improved interoperability with Microsoft’s proprietary file formats and performance improvements in handling large files, opening certain .docx and .xlsx files, managing font caching, and opening presentations and drawings that contain large images. The Writer Guide 7.2 has been updated from Writer Guide 7.1. It covers changes that are visible in the user interface, including: Added a note about icon sets and Gallery sets in this Preface. Added details about the Insert > Formatting Mark submenu (Chapter 2). Updated list terminology and changed screenshots in Chapters 4, 8, 9, 11, and anywhere else lists are mentioned. Added new gutter margins and choices for page background fills (Chapters 5, 6, and 9). Updated details about some options on tabs of the PDF Options dialog (Chapter 7). Added new, advanced features of the Style Inspector (Chapter 9) Updated details about Templates
Over 60% of code commits for the brand new version of the best free and open source office suite are focused on interoperability with Microsoft’s proprietary file formats Berlin, August 19, 2021 – LibreOffice 7.2 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 interoperability improvements with Microsoft’s proprietary file formats. In addition, LibreOffice 7.2 Community offers numerous performance improvements in handling large files, opening certain DOCX and XLSX files, managing font caching, and opening presentations and drawings that contain large images. There are also drawing speed improvements when using the Skia back-end that was introduced with LibreOffice 7.1. LibreOffice 7.2 is now available natively for Apple Silicon, a series of processors designed by Apple and based on the ARM architecture. Because of the early phase of development on this specific platform, binaries are provided but should not be used for any critical purpose at this stage. Software will be available from the following page: https://download.documentfoundation.org/libreoffice/stable/7.2.0/mac/aarch64/. LibreOffice and Interoperability LibreOffice 7.2 Community adds a significant number of improvements to interoperability with
Harald Berger is a volunteer in our German-speaking LibreOffice community, and over the years has created many tutorial videos for the software. We’re really thankful for his work, and we decided to find out exactly how he goes about creating the videos… (Translated from the German original)
Shinji Enoki reports from an event in Japan (original text here)… LibreOffice Kaigi 2021 Online was held on Saturday, June 12, 2021. This is normally an annual gathering in Japan, originally scheduled for March 2020 in Osaka – but due to COVID-19 we were unable to hold it. This year, for the first time, the meeting was held online, with speakers and participants joining the Jitsi meet, which was also broadcast live on YouTube. The maximum number of connections was around 27 people for both. We are grateful to The Document Foundation and iCraft for sponsoring the event. Thank you very much! The day’s events can be viewed on the YouTube archive. The slides are available on the TDF wiki. The keynote speaker, Ahmad Haris, who leads the Indonesian community for LibreOffice, gave an introduction to our work in Indonesia. Indonesia is made up of many islands scattered over a wide area, and is the equivalent in distance of London to Baghdad. The local LibreOffice Conference in Indonesia in 2018 was a success and the community is very active. Currently there are 795 participants in the LibreOffice Indonesia Telegram group. Translation is focused on UI, then Help, while QA events
In 2020, the infrastructure team added new services, implemented a new Extensions and Templates site, and worked on a replacement for Ask LibreOffice (This is part of The Document Foundation’s Annual Report for 2020 – the full version is here.) LibreOffice’s infrastructure team is responsible for maintaining the hardware, virtual machines and services that enable the wider community to develop, market, test, localize and improve the software. The public infrastructure is powered by around 50 kernel-based virtual machines (KVMs) spread across four hypervisors, plugged to an internal 10Gbps switch, hosted at Manitu in St. Wendel (Germany), and managed with libvirt and its KVM/QEMU driver. The virtual disk images are typically stored in GlusterFS volumes – distributed across the hypervisors – except for some transient disks (such as cache) where the IOPS requirement is higher and the redundancy less important. In 2020, the infra team added various new services, such as the new SilverStripe-based Extensions and Templates site. Some background to the technical and design decisions behind the site are here on the blog. Meanwhile, Discourse was investigated as a likely AskBot replacement, while several VMs for deployment tests outside the scope of infra were handed over (such as decidim). The
The Annual Report of The Document Foundation for the year 2020 is now available in PDF format from TDF Nextcloud in three different versions: low resolution (4.7MB), medium resolution (18MB) and high resolution (24.7MB). The annual report is based on the German version presented to the authorities in April. The 54 page 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. All pictures are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 License, courtesy of TDF Members from all over the world. Stock photos are CC0 by Pixabay. Lothar Becker, Chairman of TDF Board of Directors, has written in the welcome address: You will learn that our jubilee year was one of the most successful in our history. With all activities that took place, despite the situation that we could rarely meet
