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
The LibreOffice Documentation community announces the immediate availability of the Calc Guide 7.1, with additions based on the the improvements in LibreOffice Calc 7.1, which was released in February this year. The Guide is the volunteer effort of many members of the documentation community. Revisions and enhancements on the contents are the work of Rafael Lima from Brazilian community, Martin Van Zijl and Kees Kriek from the Dutch community, Celia Palacios from the Hispanic language community. A special mention to Yusuf Keten from the Google Summer of Code program on new extensions and templates dialogs, to Steve Fanning for his editorial review and to Jean Hollis Weber for her improvements and organization of the text. The LibreOffice Calc Guide 7.1 update activities was coordinated by Felipe Viggiano from Brazil. The book is available in PDF format and contains 545 pages, covering all basic and advanced features of the spreadsheet module of LibreOffice, and is a must-read book for exploiting the maximum of LibreOffice Calc. Download the Calc Guide 7.1
The Brazilian LibreOffice community is pleased to announce the immediate availability of the Portuguese Impress 7.0 Guide, the complete guidebook for creating high quality presentations in any environment, be it family, cultural or professional. The book is 330 pages, and details the fundamentals of Impress, before covering the concepts of slide masters, styles, presentation templates, graphic objects, transition effects, object animations, export to other formats and much more. It’s rich in illustrations and examples – as well as scripts for the most important operations when editing and running presentations. The documentation team in Brazil grew with the arrival of Luciana Mota, Diego Marques Pereira and Márcia Buffon Machado. Here are the newcomers’ messages to all! “I already used LibreOffice professionally when it was still BrOffice.org. I learned about the work of the documentation team in Brazil through social networks, and decided to participate. It was a good surprise to get back in touch with former colleagues and everyone excited about reviewing the texts and answering questions. I’m learning a lot from this team. The Impress Guide was just the beginning, and I am already working on the Writer Guide with this great team!” said Luciana Mota. “I followed the activities
By helping to translate and market LibreOffice around the world, native language projects bring enthusiasm and passion to the global community. Here’s what they did in 2020… (This is part of The Document Foundation’s Annual Report for 2020 – the full version will be posted here on the blog soon.) Central Kurdish Support for the Central Kurdish language was added to LibreOffice in 2021, and Jwtiyar Ali helped to drive the translation of the suite’s user interface. In addition, a Telegram group was created for community members to talk about upcoming translation projects, and bring new translators on board. Throughout the year, the Central Kurdish team worked on translating strings, with the goal in 2021 being to complete all translations, and also provide a dictionary for the language. For more on this project, see our interview with Jwtiyar here. Czech InstallFest, which took place in Prague on 29 February and 1 March 2020, was an event focused on GNU/Linux, helping new users to install the operating system. But it also had lectures and stands for many other free and open source software projects, and the Czech LibreOffice community was there with a booth. The vast majority of visitors were from
Get the LibreOffice introductory Guide and start producing professional documents. The Documentation Team is happy to announce the immediate availability of the LibreOffice 7.0 Getting Started Guide, updated to include all LibreOffice 7.0 features. The guide is written for anyone who wants to get up to speed quickly with LibreOffice. Readers may be new to office software, or may be familiar with another office suite. This guide is a valuable asset for all users.
