Berlin, 29 February 2024 – LibreOffice 24.2.1 Community, the first minor release of the free, volunteer-supported office suite for personal productivity in office environments, is now available at https://www.libreoffice.org/download for Windows, MacOS and Linux. The release includes more than 100 bug and regression fixes over LibreOffice 24.2 [1] to improve the stability and robustness of the software. LibreOffice 24.2.1 Community is the most advanced version of the office suite, offering the best features and interoperability with Microsoft Office proprietary formats. LibreOffice is the only office suite with a feature set comparable to the market leader. It also offers a range of interface options to suit all user habits, from traditional to modern, and makes the most of different screen form factors by optimising the space available on the desktop to put the maximum number of features just a click or two away. Highlights of LibreOffice 24.2.1 Community The main advantage of LibreOffice over other office suites is the LibreOffice Technology engine, a single software platform for all environments: desktop, cloud and mobile. This allows LibreOffice to provide a better user experience and produce identical – and interoperable – documents based on both ISO standards: Open Document Format (ODT, ODS and
Berlin, 31 January 2024 – LibreOffice 24.2 Community, the new major release of the free, volunteer-supported office suite and the first to use the new calendar-based numbering scheme (YY.M), is now available at https://www.libreoffice.org/download for Windows (Intel, AMD and ARM), macOS (Apple and Intel) and Linux. The new numbering scheme will help users keep their LibreOffice installation up to date. LibreOffice is the only open source personal productivity office suite with a feature set comparable to the leading product on the market. It also offers a range of interface options to suit different user habits, from traditional to modern, and makes the most of different screen form factors by optimising the space available on the desktop to put the maximum number of features just a click or two away. The biggest advantage of LibreOffice over any other office suite is the LibreOffice Technology engine, a single software platform for all environments: desktop, cloud and mobile. This infrastructure allows LibreOffice to offer a better user experience and, most importantly, to produce identical – and perfectly interoperable – documents based on the two available ISO standards: the Open Document Format (ODT, ODS and ODP) for users concerned about compatibility, resilience and digital
ODF is the Open Document Format, the native format used by LibreOffice (and supported by many other apps too). It has various sub-formats such as .odt for text files, .ods for spreadsheets, and .odp for presentations. Meanwhile, the ODF Toolkit is a set of Java modules that allow programmatic creation, scanning and manipulation of ODF files. And at the end of last month, the developers announced a new version: 0.12.0! Big changes include a new ODF 1.3 mimetype “Text master template”, while the API for Text Selection was completely refactored. In addition, there were many fixes to improve reliability and security. Check out the full announcement and link to the release notes here
ICTer International Conference is the successor to the seminal International Information Technology Conference (IITC) held in Sri Lanka since 1998. We have been invited by the conference organizers, thanks to the connection established by Daniska Navin, a long time project member, to attend the 2023 event on November 8 and November 9, to present LibreOffice during a keynote speech, and to manage a two day workshop about LibreOffice and the Migration Protocol, on November 7 and November 10. I attended the conference and provided the keynote speech about LibreOffice Technology, and together with Lothar Becker – Certification Co-Chair – managed the two day workshop. The conference was a huge success, as we met many interested people, including some students who asked to organize a similar workshop in 2024 at their universities in other cities of Sri Lanka. We will definitely be back next year to attend ICTer 2024, and to visit the other universities for a workshop. During the workshop we covered many topics: Workshop Day 1: LibreOffice project’s history, the technical evolution of the development platform, LibreOffice’s six modules, with an introduction to main features, an introduction to open source software and open standards (for software and for documents),
Recently, Linux New Media released an updated version of its “LibreOffice Expert” magazine, which contains tutorials, tips and tricks about LibreOffice. And some articles were contributed by members of the LibreOffice community! The magazines come with DVDs that include LibreOffice for Linux, Windows and macOS, alongside extra templates, extensions, videos and guidebooks. We have some copies to give away, for schools, universities and local communities. Ideally, we’d like to get these magazines out to places where internet connections aren’t always available – so that the users can really benefit from the DVDs. So, if you can help us to distribute these magazines, drop us a line! Please note that we can only send a maximum of five copies to any one place, to make sure many people get a chance. When you contact us, please include this information: What you want to do with the magazines How many you want The address to which we should post them Include that information in an email to us and let’s see what we can do! (Note: if you want to buy the magazine directly from the publisher, you can do so here.)
The Annual Report of The Document Foundation describes the foundation’s activities and projects, especially in regards to LibreOffice and the Document Liberation Project. We’ve been posting sections of the 2022 report here on the blog, and now the full version is available in PDF format on TDF’s Nextcloud server in two different versions: low resolution (8.2MB) and high resolution (57.4MB). The Annual Report is based on the German version presented to the authorities. The 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. We at The Document Foundation are very grateful to all contributors to our projects and communities in 2022 – none of this would be possible without you!
