Every contribution to the LibreOffice project – whether it’s a large code patch or just a small bug report – makes the software better for everyone. Over the last few years we’ve had many thousands of contributions from all around the world, and in May 2016 we really want to highlight all the effort goes in to LibreOffice. So we’re running a new campaign to credit everyone who contributes to the project! Barnstars If you’re involved with LibreOffice development, design, documentation, translation or QA, and want to show your appreciation for someone’s efforts, award them a barnstar on our special wiki page. This is a bronze, silver or gold icon that shows your thanks for that person’s help or contribution, like so: To award a barnstar, all you have to do is visit the wiki, log in, and copy and paste the template. Fill in the details for the person you want to credit and show your appreciation! Badges Meanwhile, LibreOffice contributors can earn badges throughout May by doing various jobs. These include: confirming a bug report, having a code patch committed to the LibreOffice source tree, translating a string in the interface, helping users, and more. They look like
The Document Foundation (TDF), the charitable entity behind the world’s leading free office suite LibreOffice, seeks for companies or individuals to design and implement a profile safe mode for LibreOffice to start work as soon as possible. For bug reports and QA issues, users are from time to time required to use a fresh user profile, i.e. without settings different from the built-in defaults, with no document restore enabled and with all extensions disabled. Until now, the easiest route to achieve this is to delete or rename the existing user profile. A feature should be implemented that enables the user to start LibreOffice in a temporary safe mode as outlined above, without having to manually delete their profile, and with the ability to return to the regular state afterwards. In addition, the user should be able to choose which elements are to be put in safe mode, e.g. configuration, extension, documents, templates, and also be presented with an option to actually reset their profile permanently. Besides an UI item from where the functionality can be triggered, the safe mode dialog should also pop up after a program crash to help the user identify and report the problem. The scope of
Bruce Byfield, a journalist who specializes in writing about free and open source software, has recently released Designing with LibreOffice, a book about our beloved free office suite, which is not the usual death march through the menu and standard tasks. Instead, the book takes two fresh approaches to the world’s most popular free office suite. First, it explains the importance of using styles and templates in order to use LibreOffice with the most convenience and the least effort. Second, it explains the basics of modern design and how to apply them in LibreOffice, expanding on the open secret that LibreOffice is as much a desktop publishing application as an office suite. The result of these approaches is a unique overview of using LibreOffice. If you are a new user, the book will help you get up to speed with LibreOffice. If you have already used LibreOffice, then this book will leave you with a clearer overview of the program and its capabilities. Designing with LibreOffice has been published by Friends of OpenDocument under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License. Readers do not need to ask for permission to copy, share, or re-use the contents of Designing with LibreOffice. However, the
Wednesday, February 10, we have not limited our activity to the launch of LibreOffice 5.1, but we have also updated the look of the 5 years old TDF website – our first web property, and our first website – by using the same template of the LibreOffice website. We have also reorganized contents, to simplify the navigation. We now have a menu bar with the following items: Foundation (Statutes, Financials and Affiliations), Governance (Foundation Bodies and History), Community, Certification, Get Help (Professional Support) and Contacts. With the overhaul of the TDF website, we have now renovated all project’s web properties. TDF, LibreOffice and Document Liberation websites are complemented by this, which is supposed to become the place where people go for the last news.
LibreOffice can be configured according to user needs with the menu Tools > Options, which opens a context sensible dialog window with a menu on the left and many corresponding option pages on the right. One of the least known options pages is the Paths one, where the user can modify (or add to) the default directories used by LibreOffice to store – among the others – Images, Documents and Templates. The screenshot represents my own configuration, where I edit the three highlighted paths according to my working habits: I store all documents and images in two different folders, and I have a separate folder for templates. By tweaking the configuration, when I access templates, import an image or open/save a document, the dialog window will always point to the right folder inetad of the default one. Of course, this is especially handy for large deployments, as LibreOffice can be configured to access a shared storage area instead of the local folder.
LibreOffice Writer was born – as StarWriter – to produce lengthy documents, such as thesis and relations, and as such offers a number of specific features in this area. Two of the most important are Templates and Styles, which facilitate the creation of good looking documents, and make it easier to reproduce a standard document once the layout – including Styles – has been defined and consolidated. LibreOffice offers an almost hidden feature to produce a Template, which can be accessed from the menu File > Send > Create Master Document. This opens a “save as…” dialog window, which allows to save the open document as a Template.
