Planet ODF

‎Adoption - turned on link to Russia article

Added reference to answers of the German government to its policy of usage of ODF and OSS

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Sunday, July 9, is the Day against DRM. The Document Foundation supports the global campaign led by FSF, to raise the awareness of issues related to the so called Digital Rights Management software. As any other proprietary technology, DRM is killing user freedom of choice, and should always be avoided.

LibreOffice users are fighting a similar battle when they are promoting the ODF standard file format against the OOXML pseudo-standard, and they should be amongst the first to support the Day against DRM on social media or by educating their contacts.‌

The post Day against DRM appeared first on The Document Foundation Blog.

Sunday, July 9, is the Day against DRM. The Document Foundation supports the global campaign led by FSF, to raise the awareness of issues related to the so called Digital Rights Management software. As any other proprietary technology, DRM is killing user freedom of choice, and should always be avoided.

LibreOffice users are fighting a similar battle when they are promoting the ODF standard file format against the OOXML pseudo-standard, and they should be amongst the first to support the Day against DRM on social media or by educating their contacts.‌

The post Day against DRM appeared first on The Document Foundation Blog.

‎See also

The software development community working on LibreOffice have greatly scaled up their bug-hunting efforts, using automated software test tools made available by Google. Beneficiaries include the many European public administrations that use up-to-date versions of this suite of office productivity tools.

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Friends of OpenDocument has just released another excerpt from Bruce Byfield’s book Designing with LibreOffice, called Styles and Templates.

Styles and Templates contain most of the information on the subject included in Designing with LibreOffice, with some alterations in structure and edits for continuity. It is intended for those who want information on LibreOffice styles and templates but would prefer not to have the complete book.‌

The post Design with LibreOffice: Styles and Templates appeared first on The Document Foundation Blog.

Pivot chart field button actions

Figure 1: Pivot chart field filter

Improvements to pivot chart buttons

ODF support and compatibility

Tests

Final demo

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The French city of Nantes (Nantes Métropole) has released an open source tool used to schedule its migration to LibreOffice. The shift from proprietary software to the free and open source LibreOffice productivity suite started in 2013 and is intended to save  the administration EUR 260,000 per year. The transition was finalised in April 2016.

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Plan of National Chi-Nan University to Stop Purchasing Microsoft Office from 2018 Raises Heated Discussions in Taiwan

April 23, 2017, Taiwan – The migration of ODF keeps going in many different fields in Taiwan. Since 2016 the Ministry of Education in Taiwan entrusts the Information Service Association of Chinese Colleges (ISAC) and Software Liberty Association Taiwan (SLAT) with the task of promoting and migrating ODF/LibreOffice in universities in Taiwan. Among all the university, National Chi-Nan University (NCNU) is the earliest one, which started migrating LibreOffice since 2014 and has been working on it for three years.

Then on April 20, 2017, a student from NCNU posted an article on Dcard forum saying that, according to her teacher, NCNU “Will not use Microsoft Office anymore due to the budget issue. LibreOffice will be used to replace Microsoft Office.” The student strongly questioned, “LibreOffice is totally unknown to everyone. I don’t know what the administrative staffs of our school are thinking about. Microsoft’s software is a very basic skill for enterprises to recruit people. This decision will make students lost their core competitiveness.”

This article raised heated discussion on the Internet. Some people questioned the NCNU about the usage of the budget, saying that such a big national university may never lack the budget to buy Microsoft licenses. Also, there were still a number of people questioning about the interoperability between LibreOffice and OOXML. However, more people disagreed with the student’s thoughts about “Microsoft equals core competitiveness.”

Ben Jai, a famous entrepreneur and public opinion leader in Taiwan, said on his Facebook page: “For a student, it should be more important to actively explore new things rather than waiting for someone to teach him. If he just waits for teachers to teach him how to use a tool and plans to use the tool all his life, he will be very easily eliminated.”

Matthew Lien – a.k.a. BlueT in open source communities in Taiwan – who was one of the main promoters of LibreOffice in NCNU, explained the policy on Facebook: “The budget is just one of the reasons but not all. The budget of schools should invest on students and education, but the Microsoft’s license fee is going higher and higher and starts to supplant budgets of other items. Therefore, we’ve worked on promoting ODF and LibreOffice for three years. It’s not an impulsive decision. BTW, we won’t forbid anyone to use Microsoft Office, just that NCNU won’t purchase Microsoft Office anymore.”

Another article on The Inside Media discussed this topic and gave a conclusion by asking this question: “Maybe Microsoft Office has been the basic skill of many enterprises. However, why our education only teaches our students a single tool, instead of training our students to learn and adopt new skills actively?”

The post News about the migration to ODF in Taiwan appeared first on The Document Foundation Blog.

v1.41b - WP:WCW project (Unicode control characters)

‎External links: {{List of International Electrotechnical Commission standards‎}}

This week, a new version of the ODF Toolkit was released. The most notable change in version 0.6.2-incubating is the password encryption and encryption manifest handling in the underlying ODFDOM library.

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Link to DAB page repaired

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‎Support for OpenDocument: Cleanup SSRN links. Report bugs, errors, and suggestions at User talk:CitationCleanerBot.

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Berlin, March 6, 2017 – The Document Foundation’s Documentation Team announces the immediate availability of the new Getting Started with LibreOffice guide version 5.2. The guide was updated to include the developments of LibreOffice 5.2 and previous releases.

The Getting Started guide is an introductory text for end users on using the LibreOffice office suite. It is written for individuals as well as organizations that deploy LibreOffice as their preferred office suite tool. The text allows users to get familiar with the features and resources of LibreOffice and shorten the time to become productive in office document edition.

The guide is written in LibreOffice Writer in Open Document Format (ODF). The team worked to not only update the contents but also to clean the formatting used in the text with a double objective: One is to make the text suitable for computer aided translation (CAT) tools and the other is to generate an online version (XHTML) of the guide.

The documents composing the Guide were formatted using styles only, avoiding direct formatting that has impact on CAT tools and on HTML export. For HTML export, the underneath template of the documents was adapted to handle the unmatched formatting properties between ODT and XHTML. At the end, a unique content source was able to produce the guide in ODT, PDF and XHTML formats.

The Getting Started with LibreOffice guide, its PDF and ODT version can be downloaded or read online by navigating to the page http://documentation.libreoffice.org. The online version of the guide can be accessed through http://documentation.libreoffice.org/en/english-documentation/getting-started-guide/read-online-5-2/

About the Documentation team

The Documentation team is in charge to develop, modernize, update and enhance all form of documentation related to LibreOffice in all languages supported by LibreOffice. It includes the authoring of LibreOffice guides for all modules, the Help system modernization and contents update, and to offer ways and means for the community to contribute to the LibreOffice project. Communities interested in contributing or translating contents can get it touch with the team by sending an e-mail to documentation at libreoffice dot org

Italy’s Ministry of Defence is sharing the eLearning course that it developed together with LibreItalia, the Italian promoters of LibreOffice. The course is made available via the LibreItalia website, and the source material is available on GitHub. The Ministry hopes that making it available will inspire others to modify and reuse the LibreOffice course.

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It has taken a while, but we’ve finally edited and uploaded the last batch of presentations (for which we have video) from last year’s LibreOffice Conference in Brno, Czech Republic. You can see all of the videos in the embedded playlist below – click the list button in the top-left corner to navigate through the videos.

Alternatively, scroll on for a full list of presentations. You can do a search in your browser for topics of interest (eg “ODF” or “LibreOffice Online”), or for presenters. Happy viewing, and we look forward to seeing you at this year’s conference in Rome!

Full list of presentations:

• State of the Project (Florian Effenberger, Michael Meeks, Italo Vignoli)
• LibreOffice and Ubuntu: A personal tale (Bjoern Michaelsen)
• LibreOffice powered by CIB (Thorsten Behrens)
• LibreOffice and Collabora (Michael Meeks)
• Development mentoring – what’s next? (Jan Iversen)
• VCL OpenGL backend performance improvements (Tomaž Vajngerl)
• More Songs About Building and Foot (Stephan Bergmann)
• Integrate your applications with LO using LOKDocView (Pranav Kant)
• Layercake – from UNO code to Writer Core (Bjoern Michaelsen)
• Screenshotting your way through the codebase (Katarina Behrens, Armin Le Grand)
• The Future of OpenCL in LibreOffice (Tor Lillqvist)
• Too Many VCLPlugs (Caolán McNamara)
• MS Office interoperability and automated bisection of regressions (Miloš Šrámek)
• UX of the Area Fill style dialog (Heiko Tietze)
• How users operate LibreOffice Draw (Heiko Tietze)
• UI Hacking explained, episode 2: Revenge of sfx2 dispatch API (Katarina Behrens)
• What could be done by volunteers to make LibreOffice more accessible? (Jean-Philippe Mengual)
• Collaborative editing using LibreOfficeKit (Miklos Vajna)
• Unifying LibreOffice Low Level Text Layout (Khaled Hosny, Akash Jain)
• Improved digital signature handling in LibreOffice (Miklos Vajna)
• Calc Beyond Cells (Eike Rathke)
• Advocating LibreOffice – talking to the press (Mike Saunders)
• Calc Tiled Rendering in LibreOffice Online (Ashod Nakashian)
• Where are women in LibreOffice? (Jona Azizaj)
• LibreOffice with a female touch (Katarina Behrens)
• The difficulties of creating a community (Anxhelo Lushka, Redon Skikuli)
• Competitive marketing strategies for LibreOffice (Italo Vignoli)
• Answering Non Technical Questions (Italo Vignoli)
• How to increase participation to make the project more inclusive (Jona Azizaj, Katarina Behrens, Marina Latini)
• Central config management of LibreOffice in Windows Server environment (Andras Timar)
• ODF Normalization (Alexander Mayer)
• Saving ODF XML of change-tracking as a sequence of pre-defined changes (Svante Schubert, Thorsten Behrens)
• ODF/LibreOffice Migration in Taiwan – Progress, Problems and What Next (Franklin Weng)
• LibreOffice and ODF, adoption by Paulista State University (Valdir Barbosa)
• #LibrexTutti: migration of Public Institute for Deaf in Rome (Sonia Montegiove, Emma Pietrafesa)
• LibreDifesa: Italian Defence chose LibreOffice (Sonia Montegiove)
• Convincing organizations to contribute (Eric Ficheux)
• Something About LibreOffice Macros (Franklin Weng)
• GenLang – new l10n tools, a vision (Jan Iversen)
• Tools for Translators (Christian Lohmaier)
• Documentation Workshop (Olivier Hallot)
• Localization community in Taiwan: challenges (Jeff Huang)
• Hidden gems in Draw / Impress (Armin Le Grand)
• Graphic design with LibreOffice and LibreLogo (László Németh)
• Lightning Talks
• This year’s Coverity, crashtesting and fuzzing data (Caolán McNamara)
• Bibisect On Demand (Bjoern Michaelsen)
• Validate me! Safeguarding standards-conformance for LibreOffice (Thorsten Behrens)
• LibreOffice Online and ownCloud/Nextcloud (Jan Holešovský)
• LibreOffice Online Deep Dive (Ashod Nakashian)
• An Introduction to LibreOffice Online thru Collabora Cloudsuite (Olivier Hallot)
• Connect, Embed, Integrate – LibreOffice as a building block (Samuel Mehrbrodt, Thorsten Behrens)
• Diving into Extension Development (Samuel Mehrbrodt)
• User-specific configuration management for office extensions (Florian Haftmann)
• Testing ODF software online (Jos Van den Oever)
• GSoC (Google Summer of Code) Student Panel
• UX & development interaction (Jan Holešovský)

changing adverb "in" and preposition "to" —> preposition "into"—wikt:in—wikt:wikt:to—wikt:into—http://public.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/into.html—User:Wavelength/About English/Expressions "into" and "in to"

I worked again on the language setting of ODFAuthors content for some hours. I was able to change the language setting of a lot of content items and there are only a smaller list of remaining items. Seemed I could see the light at the end of the tunnel.

Today marks five years since The Document Foundation (TDF) was legally incorporated in Berlin, Germany. We want to celebrate this anniversary by highlighting some recent activities and events from our Native Language Projects. These communities have been instrumental to the growth of TDF and LibreOffice, and are one of our most important assets.

Turkey

The Turkish community recently attended the Academic Informatics Conference 2017 in Aksaray, from 8 to 10 of February, with several LibreOffice related activities.

A general presentation was done by Muhammet Kara and GĂśkhan GurbetoÄŸlu in the first session (first half of the first day).

In the second half of the first day, the attendees were introduced to the LibreOffice development environment, and the tools used in the process (Gerrit, Vim, Git‌). The attendees were walked through the process of joining the LibreOffice community, and building the LibreOffice source code for the first time.

Attendees who had relatively older computers were provided with SSH access to a 32-core machine, courtesy of TUBITAK ULAKBIM. The last session (first half of the second day) was held like a hackfest. Questions from attendees were answered by the speakers.

LibreOffice community members were pleased to see that the participants were eager to learn about the software, and together they established a WhatsApp group for further communication. A more detailed presentation about LibreOffice development activities in Turkey was given by GĂźlĹŸah KĂśse and Muhammet Kara on the last day (morning) of the conference.

Taiwan

The first LibreOffice QA Sprint in Taiwan – organized by Software Liberty Association Taiwan and supported by two professors of the Department of Computer Science and Engineer, National Cheng-Kung University: Professor Joseph Chung-Ping Young and Alvin Wen-Yu Su – was held in Tainan City on December 17, 2016. In this four-hour sprint the attendees found and reported many issues. Attendees were students, teachers, employees of enterprises and governments, LibreOffice developers and lecturers, and all four TDF members in Taiwan.

Early in the afternoon, a live video-session with Italo Vignoli, one of the core members of The Document Foundation, gave most of the attendees exposure to the international community for the first time.

Han Lu, a student in NCKU, summarized the issues found by attendees. After the summary, Franklin Weng explained how to report bugs on the LibreOffice Bugzilla. Also, Cheng-Chia Tseng introduced the Pootle translation platform for LibreOffice and gave some tips on how to translate LibreOffice.

Japan

LibreOffice Kaigi 2016.12, Japan’s annual LibreOffice conference, was organized in early December 2016 with great success! The word Kaigi is the Japanese word 䟚議, which means conference. The name means not only Japanese regional, but also Japanese users-specific.

Around 25 people gathered and enjoyed several talks (migration to Open Document Format in Taiwan, by Franklin Weng, LibreOffice/ODF and styles, maintaining Math and Japanese translation), along with a few lightning talks and a panel discussion.

I’m working with the current ODFAuthors site for the migration to a new Plone version. I change the language settings for nearly all content items to language independent. I had to do this manually.

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‎Support for OpenDocument: linked to document no longer online via Internet Archive

I created a test environment for the migration of the ODFAuthors site to the current Plone version. I updated the test site to the latest version of Plone 4.3.x and am working on the migration of the localized folders and files inside the site now. They need a migration from the LinguaPlone settings to the new plone.app.multilingual. It seems there are some issues to solve and it could take me some time.

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I’m currently working on the upgrade of the ODFAuthors website to the newest version of the Content Management System (CMS) Plone. I worked on the source code for the new environment during the last days. Today I created a new test buildout for the site on a virtual server. I run it with a copy of the current ODFAuthors website and updated it to the lastest version of Plone 4.3.x. This worked out smoothly. I’ll work on the change over from LinguaPlone to the new multilingual app during the next days. This is a step that had to be done before the upgrade to Plone 5.0.x could take place.

alphabetized the categories

‎Support for OpenDocument: Fixed typo: form changed to from

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Press release

OpenDoc Society held its 12th ODF Plugtest on 16 and 17 November 2017, hosted in Paris by the French Ministry of Finance and POSS. Delegates came from Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Russia, UK, Ukraine, Taiwan, The Netherlands, Luxemburg, United States and Belgium. They represented application vendors, standards bodies, governments, the European Commission and the European Parliament.

The ODF Plugfest aims to improve interoperability among applications that use the Open Document Format (ODF), which is an open standard created by OASIS that is supported by most productivity tools in the market today and is mandatory for use by governments throughout the world. It is also published as an international standard, as ISO/IEC 26300. This edition of the ODF Plugfest featured a new testing infrastructure for the creation and excution of ODF autotests, partly financed by the Dutch government. Prior to the plugfest, developers had already submitted a significant set of tests to the server. The ODF Plugfest focused on triaging these tests, running them, analysing their results, creating new tests, identifying additional features to be tested and improving the test methodology.

One of the tests revealed that a number of established office suites lose heading hierarchy when opening and saving a document in ODF format, due to flaws in the alignment of their own legacy formats and the ODF standard. Loss of hierarchical structure makes a document far less accessible to disabled users who rely upon assistive technologies such as reading software or braille outputs to navigate through documents. The uncovered flaw damages common functionality for all users, such as the generation of tables of content but also influences automated content classification and information retrieval.

The flaws discovered are a testament to the importance and effectiveness of the new testing methodology we have adopted, says Michiel Leenaars of OpenDoc Society. Losing document information which is so critical to people with disabilities should be considered a major shortcoming of any application. One key aspect of moving from vendor-specific legacy file formats to ODF as a global office standard is that we are able to uncover this kind of significant data loss. Now the three vendors involved can get to work and improve the implementation in their products.

The testers also found other issues, for example with the way that applications treat Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese language with vertical writing, or how applications process colours in different and sometimes unexpected ways.

These results show that even digitally born documents are not safe for future generations as long as we don't modernise the tools we work with, says Jos van den Oever, co-chair of the ODF Technical Committee and member of the UNESCO Persist Technical Taskforce. Van den Oever, an expert on document formats employed by the Netherlands government, is the architect behind the new testing framework. The fact shows that we have to be careful which tools we adopt, if we care about our information in the long term. The fact that the visual appearance is consistent between the original documents and the damaged documents makes these particular flaws even more treacherous. Merely opening and saving in the wrong office application is enough to cause permanent damage to user documents, and the end user cannot actually see the difference.

Not for publication:

• Link to the full report of the 12th ODF Plugfest:
  http://odfplugfest.org/2016-paris/report.html

FOSDEM is one of the largest gatherings of Free Software contributors in the world and happens each year in Brussels (Belgium) at the ULB Campus Solbosch. In 2017, it will be held on Saturday, February 4, and Sunday, February 5.

As usual, the Open Document Editors DevRoom will be jointly organized by Apache OpenOffice and LibreOffice, on Saturday, February 4, in room 4.401 in Building K (from 10:30AM to 6:30PM). The shared devroom gives every project in this area a chance to present ODF related developments and innovations.

We are now inviting proposals for talks about Open Document Editors or the ODF document format, on topics such as code, extensions, localization, QA, UX, tools and adoption related cases. This is a unique opportunity to show new ideas and developments to a wide technical audience. Please do keep in mind, though, that product pitches are not allowed at FOSDEM.

Length of talks should be limited to a maximum of 30 minutes, as we would like to have questions after each presentation, and to fit as many presenters as possible in the schedule. Exceptions must be explicitly requested and justified. You may be assigned LESS time than you request.

All submissions have to be made in the Pentabarf event planning tool at https://penta.fosdem.org/submission/FOSDEM17

To submit your talk, click on “Create Event”, then make sure to select the “Open Document Editors” devroom as the “Track”. Otherwise, your talk will not be even considered for any devroom at all.

If you already have a Pentabarf account from a previous year, even if your talk was not accepted, please reuse it. Create an account if, and only if, you don’t have one from a previous year. If you have any issues with Pentabarf, please contact ode-devroom-manager-AT-fosdem.org.

The deadline is Monday, December 5th, 2016. Accepted speakers will be notified by Sunday, December 11th, 2016. The DevRoom schedule will be published on the same day.

Recording Permission

The talks in the Open Document Editors DevRoom will be audio and video recorded, and possibly streamed live too.

In the “Submission notes” field, please indicate that you agree to have your presentation recorded and published under the same license as all FOSDEM content (CC-BY). For example: “If my speech is accepted for FOSDEM, I hereby agree to be recorded and to have recordings - including slides and other presentation related documents - published under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) 4.0 International License. Sincerely, Name”.

‎Adoption: Added Latvia

Region to switch to proprietary cloud office alternative

For the second time this year, an Italian public administration is ending its use of open source office productivity software. A source in the IT department of the Emilia-Romagna region confirmed to the Open Source Observatory last week that the region will end its use of OpenOffice. The region will move to a cloud-based proprietary office solution, others say.

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‘The longer you use open source, the more you save’

Switching to open source means the end of the periodic recurring charges from proprietary software vendors, says Eric Ficheux, change management specialist at Nantes Métropole, France’s 6th largest city. “The total cost of ownership of LibreOffice is far lower than of its proprietary predecessor”, he says.

read more

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The twelfth ODF plugfest will be hosted by the French Direction Interministérielle du Numérique et du Système d'Information et de Communication d'État (DINSIC), with support from Logius and organised by OpenDoc Society.

For more information, please visit: http://odfplugfest.org

‎Software: Citation correction

ordinals not normally used for dates (WP:DATESNO)

The Italian military have switched the first 8000 PC workstations to Libreoffice, an open source office productivity suite, reports Sonia Montegiove, a software analyst working for the Italian province of Perugia who is helping the military with the switch to LibreOffice.

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WaybackMedic 2

‎Future: +1 link

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Now piloting use of Ubuntu Linux

The police force in Lithuania have switched to using LibreOffice. This free and open source suite of office productivity tools is implemented on over 8000 workstations. The police has started to test the use of workstations running Ubuntu Linux.

The savings were the main motive for the switch to LibreOffice, the police confirms in an email to the European Commission’s Open Source Observatory (OSOR). The switch saves the police EUR 1 million.

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Today is the release of the long awaited ownCloud 9.1 Community Edition. It includes significant improvements for users, administrators and developers.

• Authentication – ownCloud is delivering innovative security features like pluggable authentication and token based authentication sessions. You can now also list all connected devices in your personal user’s page and invalidate sessions if needed. Another significant security improvement is device specific tokens. This allows you to control the access to your ownCloud on even more secure ways. Time-based one-time passwords (TOTP) enable users to automatically increase the security of their accounts by using services like Google Authenticator or the open-source implementation of the TOTP standard.
  ownCloud has partnered with PrivacyIDEA, an open source authentication server solution with a lot of experience with authentication, provided by Net Knights GmbH.
• Collabora Online – We’ve teamed up with the developers of Collabora Online and provided a Docker Image for collaborative online document editing. We encourage our users to use the collabora vm which can be also found here. Available formats for editing are DOC, DOCX, PPT, PPTX, XLS, XLSX + ODF.
• Ultimate Scalability – ownCloud’s goal is to get users the files they are looking for quickly and smoothly, and as larger installations are being deployed, ownCloud has collaborated with large ownCloud users, like CERN and Sciebo, to bring the scalability of ownCloud to a new level. To be able to deliver petabytes of data to hundreds of thousands of users, key areas like the storage and sharing functionality of ownCloud have been improved. ownCloud 9.1 can now use  multi-bucket object storage as a backend.
• Full Federation – ownCloud 9 brings federation of ownCloud servers to a new level with better performance; resharing a federated share does not create a chain of shares any more, but instead connects the share owner’s server to the reshare recipient.
• Contacts, Calendar and ownCloud Mail – Contacts, Calendar and ownCloud Mail have all received significant updates and improvements. They can be updated conveniently in the ownCloud App Store. For example: Birthdays are now also generated based on shared address books owncloud/core#23510 in your ownCloud Calendar.

With the latest release of ownCloud Community Edition, it is only a matter of weeks before ownCloud 9.1 Enterprise Edition will also be released and available to our customers.

remove {{#invoke:InfoboxImage}} which is a module designed for use in Infobox templates, not in articles

‎Adoption

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WP:CHECKWIKI error fix. Syntax fixes. Do general fixes if a problem exists. -, replaced: {{reflist|colwidth=30em}} → {{Reflist|30em}}

Adoption European Union

i added "text editors, word processors" to statement about which office suites will open .odt since textedit was there; i also added Bean (software) to this list

WaybackMedic

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OOXML remains but is not recommended

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‎Adoption: + ref

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The Italian Ministry of Defence expects to save 26-29 million Euro over the coming years by using LibreOffice. The LibreDifesa project aims to eventually migrate all of the organisation's well over 100,000 desktops to the open-source office productivity suite. Taking into account the deadlines set by our current Microsoft Office licences, we will have 75,000 (70%) LibreOffice users by 2017, and an additional 25,000 by 2020, says General Camillo Sileo, Deputy Chief of Department VI, Systems Department C4I, for the Transformation of Defence and General Staff.

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Even while we’re still working on fixing the last bunch of bugs for what promises to become a great 3.0 release, we’re taking the next step! It’s time for the 2016 Krita Kickstarter!
Last year, our backers funded a big performance improvement in the form of the Instant Preview feature and wickedly cool animation support, right in the core of Krita. And a bunch of stretch goals, some of which are already implemented in 3.0, some of which will come in Krita 3.1.

This year, we’re focusing on two big topics: the text tool and the vector layers. Plus, there are a lot of exciting stretch goals for you to vote on!

Krita’s text tool used to be shared with the rest of KOffice, later Calligra. It’s a complete word processor in a box, with bibliography, semantic markup, tables, columns and more! But not much fine typographic control and besides… It has always been a bad fit, it has never worked well!

Now is the time to join us and make it possible to create an awesome text tool, one that is really suitable to what you need text for in Krita: real typographic and artistic control, support for various languages, for translations, for scripts from all over the world. One integrated text tool that is easy to use, puts you in control and can be extended over the years with new features.

The second topic is vector graphics. It’s related to the text tool, since both are vector layer features. Currently, our vector graphics are defined in the OpenDocument Graphics format, which is fine for office applications, but not great for artwork. There’s already a start for supporting the SVG standard instead, and now’s the time to finish the job! And once we’re SVG to the core, we can start improving the usability of the vector tools themselves, which also suffer from having been designed to work in a word processor, spreadsheet or presentation application. Now that Krita is no longer part of a suite of office applications, we can really focus on making all the tools suitable for artists! Let’s make working with vector art great!

And of course, there are a bunch of stretch goals, ranging from small ones to a really big stretch goal, Python scripting. Check out the kickstarter page for a full list!

One of the fun parts of backing a kickstarter project are the rewards. For a Krita kickstarter, these are mostly small, fun things to remember a great campaign by. But we’re trying to do something special this year! After the kickstarter is funded, we will commission Krita artists from all over the world to create art for us that we will use in various rewards!

My friend Andrew Updegrove wrote a surprising essay in his latest blog post about the irrelevance of open standards. More exactly his point, if I understood correctly, was that open standards were becoming irrelevant as a topic as everyone is using and relying on them, and the software industry can no longer afford to play the game of vendor lock-in towards customers, partners and competitors. If that’s Andy’s opinion I happen to disagree with it, but only partially. Let me explain.

Open Standards fading into oblivion as something that’s not interesting and yet so mundane because everyone would rely on them is somewhat of a good news I think. It is likely that some parts of the industry, such as cloud computing players, cannot afford to “invent” brand new proprietary platforms. Whatever you do, if this particular case is an example, is to design and develop a platform, an infrastructure or a service that is either OpenStack based, or at least fully capable of interfacing itself through Swift, AWS, Azure compatible or otherwise open APIs. While these are not all open standards, it’s a good thing: downstream players want to be compatible, but the upstream, major cloud technologies are open to some large extent as well as it is in their interest to be used and relied upon by the largest part of the market.

There are however some hiccups with vendor lock-in, in cloud computing or elsewhere. It just hasn’t disappeared. The lock-in still exists through proprietary or otherwise unimplementable file formats; through undocumented protocols and weak or non existent reversibility clauses. Vendor lock-in has not gone away, it has become more subtle by moving up the ladder. If your entire business processes are hosted and run by a cloud service provider there may be some good reasons for you to have made that choice; but the day the need for another provider or another platform is felt the real test will be to know if it is possible to back up your data and processes and rebuild them elsewhere and in a different way. That’s an area where open standards could really help and will play an increasing role. Another area where open standards are still contentious is multimedia: remember what happened to Mozilla in 2015 when they chose to embed proprietary, DRM-riddled codecs because of industry pressure.

Now Andrew suggests that the market is turning to FOSS the same way they first turned to open standards. True enough, FOSS has never been as popular as it is today, but I do not believe for a moment that it is because I.T. professionals or their clients understand what Free & Open Source Software is. That’s unfortunate of course, and we do need to keep in mind that open standards and FOSS, while being quite compatible, are two widely different things.

To come back to the original point, I believe something more incidental may explain his perception. From about 2006 to 2010, the world of open standards was full of exciting initiatives, global battles for market domination or liberation. Let’s mention a few of these: html5, microformats, RDF, ebXML and of course ODF, with the OOXML saga. That’s a lot in 4 to 5 years even for the tech industry. In some cases these standards have defined today’s state of the art, in others, they’re found anywhere on the Internet and the enterprise. After these years, open standards continued to grow of course; but the politics cooled down a bit and the bubble deflated.

Open standards are not going away, they still matter and I’m sure they will come back in the spotlight just like with pretty much everything in the I.T. industry. Look, we’re talking again about A.I. I can’t wait for the moment we’ll be bombarded by some paradigm shift in e-commerce or with the fat client as in, fat client and thin server in opposition to the thin client and the fat server where all the logic comes from the server. But I digress. Open standards help everyone who want to have a part to play in the game. Whether that standard ends up being used or not, replaced or opposed by another open standard is not what matters: that’s the life of standards. I’m confident we will see their importance being highlighted again for everyone soon or later.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.