Free Software Foundation Europe has developed an “I Love Free Software” template for the upcoming Valentine Day, to allow free open source software advocates to express the reason why they love FOSS, and they support it as volunteer contributors, or as simple users. FSFE template was developed using Inkscape, which is an outstanding FOSS application to create and manage vector images, but is also rather difficult to use if your graphics skills are limited. So, I imported the Inkscape SVG template into LibreOffice Draw, and tweaked it a bit by using Liberation Sans and Liberation Sans Narrow fonts – which are installed by LibreOffice and as such are always available to LibreOffice users, and by replacing the lines of text with a text box, to make it easier to write the personal notes and the name. I have also added a text box with instructions on how to fit the user portrait inside the heart shape, which is a rather easy operation with LibreOffice Draw. Here you are. This is my FOSS Valentine made with LibreOffice Draw (and if you wonder why the font looks different, it is because I replaced Liberation Sans with IBM Plex Condensed, a different FOSS
Do you use LibreOffice Impress? Want to do more with your presentations? Check out the brand new Impress Guide 7.0 update, created by our awesome documentation community: This 330-page book explores the basics of Impress, before moving on to master slides, styles, templates, graphic objects, effects, exporting in various formats, and much more. Download the PDF version here! Who made this happen? Answer: our community! Many thanks to Peter Schofield, Felipe Viggiano, Claire Wood, Regina Henschel, Dave Barton, Jean Hollis Weber, Samantha Hamilton and Olivier Hallot for their work on it. We asked Peter to summarise his experiences as he updated the text: I am experienced with LibreOffice in creating documents. Also, I have had over 30 years of experience as a Technical Writer in many fields of engineering, construction, electronics and software. However, I am not experienced in creating presentations, so writing the user guide was an experience and I now know more about creating presentations. Did I enjoy it? Yes, because I enjoy having a challenge when writing instructions. Also, it gave me the opportunity to write the guide from the perspective of a novice in using presentation software. I do find that in some of the other
Today we’re talking to Yusuf Keten, who added new features to LibreOffice as part of the Google Summer of Code 2020. He was mentored by Muhammet Kara from Collabora Productivity. Here’s what he had to say… To start, tell us a bit about yourself! I was born on February 25, 1998 in Istanbul, Turkey. Currently I’m a third-year Computer Engineering student at Hacettepe University in Turkey. I really like coding. Nowadays, I am working on computer graphics. Also, I have academic projects about GPGPU programming. I am contributing to LibreOffice in my free time because of my enthusiasm for open source culture. Apart from programming, I like to spend my time playing electric guitar, drawing. Also, I describe myself as a coffee lover! You can find me on Twitter and LinkedIn. Why did you decide to become a member of The Document Foundation, the non-profit behind LibreOffice? I came across TDF when I attended a LibreOffice Bootcamp given by Muhammet Kara. He explained what TDF does, and its values. I was really impressed, because supporting an open source project is a wonderful mission. Also, there are lots of talented people in TDF. Therefore, I wanted to be part of this
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 chatting with Adolfo Jayme Barrientos, a long-time member of the LibreOffice community. He told us how he joined the project, what he’s working on, and where he thinks we should go in the future… Our yearly conference took place this month (more on that later), but before it started, we added merchandise to our online shop. It’s still there, so don’t miss the chance to get a cool 2020 hoodie, T-shirt, bag or baseball cap! There were two bugfix updates to LibreOffice in October: 7.0.2 on the 8th, and 7.0.3 on the 29th. With these releases, LibreOffice 7.0 is becoming a mature branch of the suite, and 6.4 will no longer receive updates after the end of November. Meanwhile, the Indonesian LibreOffice community announced the results of their Impress template contest. Check out the results – they created many professional and attractive templates for presentations. Great work, everyone! On the 19th, we caught up with Marcin Popko, who joined the project recently to help out with social media in Poland. Thanks
The Document Foundation (TDF) is the charitable entity behind the world’s leading free/libre open source (FLOSS) office suite LibreOffice. We are looking for an individual or company to finish transition of LibreOffice to ODF 1.3 (ODF 1.3 delta). This tender builds on the previous ODF 1.3 tender and aims to implement additional features. The work has to be developed on LibreOffice master, so that it will be released in the next major version. The following required features (section A) need to be implemented: chart:data-label-series. Missing feature. It is needed for import from Excel. Relevant bugs in TDF’s Bugzilla: #94235, #133176 OASIS reference: OFFICE-2117 chart:regression-moving-type. Implementation of types “center” and “average-abscissa” is missing. It is needed for interoperability with Gnumeric. For this feature, there is existing code that can be extended. Relevant bug in TDF’s Bugzilla: #133423 OASIS reference: OFFICE-3959 <text:index-entry-link-start> and <text:index-entry-link-end> in user-index. The link marks exist, but the function itself is not implemented. For this feature, there is existing code that can be extended. Relevant bug in TDF’s Bugzilla: #121842 OASIS reference: OFFICE-3941 The following are desirable features (section B): draw:fill for background of pages. Attribute draw:background-size specifies whether a background fill covers the entire page or only
This year, LibreOffice was once again a mentoring organization in the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) a global programme focused on bringing more student developers into free and open source software development. We ran six projects – and all were finished successfully. Students and mentors enjoyed the time, and here we present some of the achievements, which should make their way into LibreOffice 7.1 in early February 2021! You can experiment with the new functionality by using daily builds and report any problems in our bug tracker. Styles Inspector for Writer by Shivam Kumar Singh Mentors: Tomaž Vajngerl, Mikhail Kaganskiy (Collabora) Dealing with styles and formatting in complex documents can become tedious, especially when you are working on something you did not create yourself. The Styles Inspector implemented by Shivam conveniently displays all the properties of the elements making up a document. It will surely become an essential tool for Writer experts. Learn more about the Styles Inspector in the final report. Additions – Tight integration of extensions by Yusuf Keten Mentor: Muhammet Kara (Collabora) Thanks to the work of Yusuf, users are now able to fetch extensions, templates and other resources as well as discover guide books without ever
