Editor of the new version of the ODF standard document format sponsored by the Community of ODF Specification Maintainers (COSM) * Berlin, November 7, 2019 – The Document Foundation welcomes the release to OASIS of TC Committee Draft of ODF Version 1.3 for ratification. At the end of the process, ODF Version 1.3 will be submitted to ISO to become a standard. The final approval is expected in late 2020 or early 2021. Editing of ODF Version 1.3 Committee Draft has been sponsored by the Community of ODF Specification Maintainers (COSM), a project launched by The Document Foundation in 2017 with the donation of a seed of euro 10,000 to get the COSM project started, plus up to euro 20,000 to match each euro donated by other stakeholders. So far, the COSM project has been backed by Microsoft, Collabora, the UK Government Digital Services, CIB, the European Commission’s StandICT project and Open-Xchange. The money has been used to pay an editor to finalize the ODF 1.3 specification and manage it through the OASIS review and ratification process. Major new features of ODF 1.3 are digital signature and OpenPGP-based XML encryption of documents, plus several improvements to features already available in
The Annual Report of The Document Foundation for the year 2018 is now available in PDF format from TDF Nextcloud in two different versions: low resolution (6.4MB) and high resolution (53.2MB). The annual report is based on the German version presented to the authorities in April. The 52 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 Albania, Brasil, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Nepal, Taiwan and Turkey. Stock photos are CC0 by Pixabay. Marina Latini, Chairwoman of TDF Board of Directors, has written in the welcome address: After eight full years, the challenge is to further grow the project, by leveraging the presence of active volunteers, enthusiastic supporters and happy users in many
Berlin, August 8, 2019 – The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 6.3, a feature-rich major release of the LibreOffice 6 family with better performance, a large number of new and improved features, and enhanced interoperability with proprietary document formats: Writer and Calc performance has been improved by an order of magnitude based on documents provided by end users: text files with different bookmarks, tables and embedded fonts, large ODS/XLSX spreadsheets, and Calc files with VLOOKUP load and render more quickly. Saving Calc spreadsheets as XLS files is also faster. The Tabbed Compact version of the NotebookBar user interface, introduced in LibreOffice 6.2, is now available for Writer, Calc, Impress and Draw. It leaves more space for user documents, spreadsheets and presentations on laptops with wide screens. In addition, the new Contextual Single UI is ready for Writer and Draw. In Calc, a new drop-down widget in the formula bar replaces the old Sum tool, giving the user quick access to the most frequently used functions. Also, a new FOURIER function has been added, to compute the discrete Fourier transform of an input array. Export as PDF has been improved with the support for the standard
Today we’re talking to Jun Nogata from our Japanese community! To start, tell us a bit about yourself! So, I live in Himeji, Japan where UNESCO World Heritage site Himeji Castle is. I work a part-time lecturer at a local university. I am a big fan of free and open source software (FOSS). I started to use Linux from Slackware 95, and I’m using Debian Sid at the moment. I am active in the Debian community in Japan and I’m also an OpenStreetMap mapper. I like listening to indie rock music, playing guitar and DJing sometimes. Also, I’m learning Korean – I want to talk to my friend DaeHyun Sung from the Korean LibreOffice community! Oh, and I created the LibreOffice Impress templates “Midnight Blue” and “Alizarin” – thank you for using them. On social media, you can find me on Twitter and Facebook. What are you working on in LibreOffice at the moment? I am working on the Japanese Ask LibreOffice website as answerer and moderator – and I’m also involved in marketing and public relations for the Japanese team. Previously, there was no marketing from the Japanese team. December 2018, I started to post information about LibreOffice from
Thanks to your generous donations, and contributions from our ecosystem of certified developers, we released two major releases of LibreOffice in 2018: 6.0 on January 31, and version 6.1 on August 8. In addition, 14 minor releases were also made available throughout the year, for the 5.4, 6.0 and 6.1 branches. Meanwhile, several Bug Hunting Sessions were held in preparation for the new major releases. These typically took place on a single day between set times, so that experienced developers and QA engineers could help new volunteers to file and triage bugs via the IRC channels and mailing lists. The Bug Hunting Sessions for LibreOffice 5.4 were held on April 27, May 28 and July 3 – while those for LibreOffice 6.2 took place on October 22, November 19 and December 21. LibreOffice 6.0 On January 31, LibreOffice 6.0 was officially released after six months of development. This included a new ePUB filter, for saving documents as eBooks, while support for opening QuarkXPress documents was added as well. Other new features included: a revamped special characters dialog; OpenPGP support for signing and encryption on all desktop platforms; a brand new web browser-based help system; and better flexibility when using custom
Today we talk to Ahmad Haris, who helps out with LibreOffice events in Asia, and has recently joined The Document Foundation’s Membership Committee. (Click here to learn more about the benefits of membership.) Here’s what he had to say… Where do you live, how can people find you on the web, and what are your interests outside of LibreOffice? I live in Bogor, West Java, Indonesia. However, I was born in East Java (the opposite side). I’m active on Facebook, Twitter, and sometimes Google+ and IRC (last one only for meetings with GNOME Foundation Members). When I’m not working on LibreOffice, I play the guitar, or ride my motorcycle 🙂 What have you been doing in the LibreOffice community? I helped to organize the Indonesia LibreOffice Conference 2018 in March this year. (See the full report here.) That’s my biggest contribution so far. Before that, I just using and testing the software. How did you get involved? In 2008, I was migrating a city (Central Aceh – Aceh Province) and a province (Yogyakarta Province) here in Indonesia to use Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). At that time I used OpenOffice.org. I was helping the government to use it for
