‎Software: Citation correction

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Now that the LibreOffice Conference has finished, we’re back to our regular contributor interviews. This week it’s the turn of Regina Henschel who helps LibreOffice users by answering questions, testing new features and working on bug reports.

What is your IRC nickname / location / social media page?

I live in Dortmund (Germany). You can best contact me via the mailing lists. I don’t have any account on Twitter or Facebook or similar, and I seldom use IRC (nickname pppregin).

Do you work for a LibreOffice-related company or just contribute in
your spare time?

I do all of my work for LibreOffice in my spare time. In my daily job I’m teacher of mathematics.

How did you get involved with LibreOffice?

That is a wide range: I’m member of the Open Document Format Technical Committee (ODF TC), I answer questions on ask.libreoffice.org and on the mailing lists, I discuss and test new features and work on Bugzilla issues, and sometimes I contribute code.

What areas of the project do you normally work on? Anything else you want to tackle?

Currently I watch the development of some new features coming in from the Google Summer of Code, including testing, and I need a lot of my time for to prepare me for ODF TC meetings.

I would like to do much more coding. But especially in Draw, which I like most, the code is complicated and I don’t have enough spare time to learn it quickly. My special interest is in the 3D features of Draw.

What was your initial experience of contributing to LibreOffice like?

I started with user support for StarOffice in Usenet newsgroups more than sixteen years ago, and have got a lot of product experience with OpenOffice.org. A really surprising aspect of LibreOffice was how much easier it has become to build on Windows. Using Gerrit was unfamiliar for me, but help on IRC or mailing list was always there.

What areas of LibreOffice do you think need to be improved?

We need more volunteers to look after the increasing amount of users, and manage the growth of questions and bug reports. Also, we need more testers for new features and people to document user interface changes and new features.

Which is your preferred text editor? And why?

A lot of my work is creating test files and examining file formats. For that I use XML Notepad 2007, where I can work directly on the nodes, without need for all the quotes and angle brackets, which are needed in a simple editor. And I use Notepad++. It has syntax highlighting for XML and C++ (among lot of other languages), folding, it reformats XML, and makes diffs. Sometimes I use PSPad, mostly as a notepad, because of its quick starting, or I use its HexViewer. That is all on Windows, as you might have noticed.

What do you do when you’re not working on LibreOffice?

Besides my daily job, all the other time goes to my family.

Thanks Regina! And thanks indeed to our whole community – if you’re reading this and want to get involved, join us today and help to make LibreOffice even better.

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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Brno, September 7, 2016 – The Document Foundation (TDF) has celebrated the opening session of LibOCon with the announcement of LibreOffice 5.2.1, the first minor release of the LibreOffice 5.2 family.

LibOCon is a showcase of the project activity, and will feature over 60 talks in three days, covering development, QA, localization, ODF, marketing, community and documentation, a business session in Czech focused on large deployments of LibreOffice, and a meeting of the Open Source Business Alliance (OSBA).

Details of the conference, including the program and collateral activities such as the traditional “hacknight” – a hands-on session where developers hack over food and drinks – are available on the event website: http://conference.libreoffice.org.

LibreOffice 5.2.1, targeted at technology enthusiasts, early adopters and power users, provides a number of fixes over the major release announced in August. For all other users and enterprise deployments, TDF suggests LibreOffice 5.1.5 “still”, with the backing of professional support by certified people (a list is available at: http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/professional-support/).

People interested in technical details about the release can access the change log here: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/5.2.1/RC1 (fixed in RC1) and https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/5.2.1/RC2 (fixed in RC2).

Download LibreOffice

LibreOffice 5.2.1 is immediately available for download from the following link: http://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-fresh/.

LibreOffice users, free software advocates and community members can support The Document Foundation with a donation at http://donate.libreoffice.org.

Several companies sitting on the TDF Advisory Board (http://www.documentfoundation.org/governance/advisory-board/) are providing either value-added Long Term Supported versions of LibreOffice or consultancy services for migrations and trainings, based on best practices distilled by The Document Foundation.

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‎Future: +1 link

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The new manual supports the large number of organizations and individuals deploying LibreOffice “Still” 5.1 to get superior quality and stability

Berlin, August 16, 2016 – Volunteers active in LibreOffice Documentation Project within The Document Foundation announce the availability of the Getting Started Guide for LibreOffice 5.1. The book updates the traditional introductory text with the new features provided by the “still” version of the software, targeted to enterprise deployments and to individual users looking for superior quality and stability.

Updated by members of the community, the book is an effort to fill the gap in official documentation for LibreOffice. The Document Foundation is working hard to reduce the delay between the release of the software and its companion documentation, for a better user experience and a stronger competitive offering.

“Many communities consider the Getting Started Guide as a source for translation into their native language, to create localized textbooks for teaching LibreOffice in all environments, from academia to the enterprise,” says Olivier Hallot, documentation coordinator at TDF. “A timely release of these books will send a strong message about the commitment of the community for professional collaterals.”

“In addition to the free downloads of the book in PDF and ODT (editable) forms, users can buy printed copies,” says Jean Hollis Weber, volunteer writer, editor, and publisher of the official LibreOffice guides. “I’ve been working with a great group of other documentation volunteers, but we always need more people.”

To download or buy copies (from Friends of OpenDocument Inc., an Australia-based volunteer organization with members around the world, which supports the LibreOffice project), visit https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/documentation.

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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LibreOffice 5.1.5 “still” announced, for enterprise class deployments

Berlin, August 3, 2016 – The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 5.2, a feature-rich major release of the best free office suite ever created – targeted to early adopters and power users – with several user interface improvements and enterprise grade features.

At the same time, LibreOffice 5.1.5 has been released, for enterprise class deployments and more conservative office suite users.

LibreOffice 5.2 provides document classification according to the TSCP standard, and a set of improved forecasting functions in Calc. In addition, multiple signature descriptions are now supported, along with import and export of signatures from OOXML files.

Interoperability features have also been improved, with better Writer import filters for DOCX and RTF files, and the added support for Word for DOS legacy documents. Additional type argument values for interoperability with other spreadsheets, along with wildcard support in formula expressions for compatibility with XLS/XLSX and ODF 1.2, have also been added.

In term of user experience, a single toolbar mode has been added to Writer and Calc to help users really focus on content, and some icons have been added to the default toolbars to make several frequently used functions – such as hide/show track changes, and freeze the first column or row of a spreadsheet – quicker to access. Also, most of the context menus can now be customized, for even greater control.

LibreOffice has been downloaded 140 million times since the launch in January 2011. The office suite is deployed by large organizations in every continent, with the latest addition being the Lithuanian Police with over 8,000 desktops.

Other New Features of LibreOffice 5.2

• New drawing tools, including filled curves, polygons and freeform lines, have been added to all program modules.

Writer

• When printing a document, Print to File is now available in the list of printers.

• If you use Google Drive for storage, two-factor authentication support has been included.

• The Save toolbar button includes a quick Save as Template option, so you don’t have to go through the menu.

Calc

• New functions have been added, along with extensive tooltips that describe what a function does as you type it.

• Multiple status bar functions can be active at the same time, to provide a quick overview of your data.

• The currency toolbar icon now includes a drop-down menu to quickly choose the currency you want to use.

• When removing the border from selected cells, you can also choose to remove the border from adjacent cells as well.

Impress

• When working with custom animations, you can now quickly add an effect to an element via the sidebar, instead of using a separate dialog box.

• The list of effects in the sidebar now includes a description of the effect, along with the element name.

• In the properties sidebar, a new Slide Background panel lets you quickly change the format, orientation and background image of a slide.

A complete list of the better documented new features is available in a separate PDF document (http://tdf.io/lo52features), and on the website at http://www.libreoffice.org/discover/new-features/. Short videos presenting the most significant new features for Writer, Calc and Impress are available at: http://tdf.io/52vids.

LibreOffice 5.2 has also been improved “under the hood,” thanks to the work of hundreds of volunteers (https://people.gnome.org/~michael/blog/2016-08-03-under-the-hood-5-2.html). This translates into an open source office suite which is easier to develop, maintain and debug. Although this is not visible to users, it is extremely important for enterprise deployments.

According to Coverity Scan, the number of open issues for 1,000 lines of LibreOffice 5.2 source code at the time of release is a record setting 0.00 (for 7,8 million lines of source code), against an industry average of 0.61 for open source software and 0.75 for proprietary software.

“LibreOffice 5.2 is a significant step forward for Free Software on the desktop, and will soon be available as a full featured cloud office suite,” says Michael Meeks, a Director at The Document Foundation (TDF) and a leading developer of LibreOffice Online. “The tight integration between desktop and cloud will provide enterprises a value added experience, with the best of both platforms always available to all users.”

“LibreOffice is growing fast, thanks to distinctive advantages such as the standard document format, which is recognized by a growing number of governments as the best solution for interoperability,” says Thorsten Behrens, a Director at The Document Foundation (TDF) and a member of the OASIS ODF Technical Committee.

Availability and enterprise deployments

LibreOffice 5.2 represents the bleeding edge in term of features for open source office suites. For enterprise class deployments, TDF maintains the more mature 5.1.5 version.

LibreOffice 5.2 “fresh” and LibreOffice 5.1.5 “still” are immediately available from the following link: http://www.libreoffice.org/download/. LibreOffice users, free software advocates and all community members can support The Document Foundation with a donation at http://donate.libreoffice.org.

LibreOffice 5.2 for GNU/Linux is also available in new packaging formats, which make it easier for end users to install and update the application: Flatpak from Red Hat and Snap from Canonical.

In any case, TDF suggests deploying or migrating to LibreOffice with the backing of certified professionals providing Level 3 support, migration or training consultancy according to recognized best practices worldwide (http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/professional-support/).

Several companies sitting in TDF Advisory Board (http://www.documentfoundation.org/governance/advisory-board/) are providing either value added Long Term Supported versions of LibreOffice or consultancy services for migrations and trainings, based on best practices distilled by The Document Foundation.

LibreOffice 5.2 and LibreOffice 5.1.5 are built with document conversion libraries supporting proprietary document formats from the Document Liberation Project: http://www.documentliberation.org.

Additional technical details

LibreOffice 5.1.5 change logs: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/5.1.5/RC1 (fixed in RC1) and https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/5.1.5/RC2 (fixed in RC2).

LibreOffice 5.2 change logs: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/5.2.0/RC1 (fixed in RC1), https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/5.2.0/RC2 (fixed in RC2), https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/5.2.0/RC3 (fixed in RC3), and http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/5.2.0/RC4 (fixed in RC4).

LibreOffice Conference

In 2016, LibreOffice Conference will be hosted by the Faculty of Information Technology at Brno University of Technology, and organized by OpenAlt, from September 7 to 9. Registration for the LibreOffice Conference is open at: http://conference.libreoffice.org/2016/registration/.

Press Kit and Screenshots

The press kit, with press release, infographic, and backgrounds, can be downloaded from: http://tdf.io/lo52presskit. Linux based screenshots can be downloaded from: http://tdf.io/lo52screenshots.

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.

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‎Adoption

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The LibreOffice documentation team produces the guidebooks, reference materials, wiki and online help to support users of the software. We’re working hard to add all the exciting new features and functions of recent LibreOffice versions, to show how your office productivity can be improved thanks to the free office suite – and your help would be very much appreciated! Even if you can only spare 30 minutes each week, your contribution would be very valuable, and you’ll also get experience with a big-name open source project. Read on for the full details…

20,000 Lines Under the C

I am borrowing Jules Verne’s famous classic book title to make the community aware of all the work that goes on, beyond and “under the C” source code, in LibreOffice development and adoption.

These “20,000 lines” are the documentation lines we need to write or review relating to all LibreOffice features, in order to support users and bring LibreOffice further into the workplace. And that includes all media available, from text to graphics, from videos to computer-based training, and from English to Mongolian, crossing landscapes of Hindi or Guarani-speaking people.

It’s not an easy task to undertake. And there is no way one individual can carry all this. LibreOffice needs its community of users and writers to build the edifice of creating solid documentation.

The good part of this is that people don’t need special skills to write about LibreOffice, beyond basic knowledge of an office suite. The game is open to a wide range of knowledgeable people.

Today we have three main lines for documenting LibreOffice, under The Document Foundation (TDF). Each of them deserves care and attention and is what the community can help with:

• The help content, that is installed alongside your main LibreOffice installation and is opened when you press F1 on a dialog box
• The Guide books, worked on by the ODF Authors team, which aim to be the reference books on LibreOffice
• Our Wiki, with information spread here and there with a continuous effort to collect pages in chapters or volumes, and dealing with multiple language and with new and obsolete content.

In the last 3 months we have reactivated the documentation community and we are meeting twice a month for updates on our progress. These meetings help us to align the needs of the documentation and the translation community with the available resource and initiatives of TDF. We’re always looking forward to interested new contributors to the writers community.

On the Help content side, we created a website to display the help pages in a modern browser. Even if it is work in progress, we connected it to the Pootle translation server so translators now can display the help page where the untranslated strings belongs, for better contextualization and translation quality.

Let’s not forget that the help content pages were designed 10 years ago, bearing the web environment and limitations of that era. We converted and published in our wiki the only book available on the help XML schema, so that now any change on the schema will be documented. For example, the tag <object> was designed to display multimedia and other MIME types but was never implemented. Also, we introduced in 2013 the tag <bascode> for Basic code paragraphs, that was not present in the 2006 documentation, and now is documented in the wiki.

Our classic literature on LibreOffice, carefully maintained by the ODF Authors team, is now being updated to release 5.1 of LibreOffice for immediate publishing, and we are seeking to shorten the delay time for the 5.2 edition. We think the LibreOffice major release can be synchronized with the Getting Started book, and who knows if these two projects can have the same release date, or even the book can be embedded in the local HelpContent package, called by an entry in LibreOffice Help menu.

Looking forward the next quarters in the year we would like to have a broader discussion with the documentation community and also better understand the relationship between users and the LibreOffice documentation.

If you are a LibreOffice documentation writer please tell us about your needs.

• Are you comfortable with the current book writing/updating process?
• Are you knowledgeable in modern authoring teamwork tools?
• Where do you think TDF should invest time and resources for documentation?
• Where should TDF improve incentives for writing LibreOffice documentation?
• Do you miss a specific resource for your documentation work TDF should provide?
• How can we make our publications more visible?

And if you are a LibreOffice user, let us know:

• Are you a LibreOffice Guide book reader?
• Have you ever bought a book on LibreOffice?
• How do you seek LibreOffice assistance at work?
• Are you a Help (F1) reader? Is it clear, precise, and easy to read? Where it should improve?
• How do you think a good help system will make your work easier?
• What is your preferred media to learn LibreOffice features?

Please help us to write together these 20,000 lines “under the C code” we need. Join our discussion in our mailing list and in our virtual meetings. We want to hear you.

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Adoption European Union

If you haven’t heard of the Document Liberation Project (DLP) before, we made a short video explaining what it does and why it’s important. In summary: it supports development of software libraries to read documents from many (usually proprietary) applications. If you’ve ever opened a file generated by Apple Pages, WordPerfect or Microsoft Works in LibreOffice, you’ve benefitted from the hard work of the DLP team. And DLP libraries are used in many other prominent FOSS tools such as Inkscape and Scribus as well.

For example, here’s a file being created in Apple Pages, and the same file being rendered in LibreOffice thanks to DLP libraries (click for a bigger version):

So, what has been going on in the DLP so far this year? Here’s an overview.

New releases

In January, libetonyek 0.1.6 was released with a bunch of new features. This library, which helps applications to read files produced by Apple Keynote, Pages and Numbers, can now properly parse links, lists and text languages in Keynote 6 files, while resizing of tables is handled properly. Text containing non-ASCII characters (ie, the majority of non-English languages) is now managed much better as well.

Scribus 1.5.1 was released in February, as part of the development process towards a stable 1.6 release of this desktop publishing tool. Along with many new features and updates, Scribus 1.5.1 makes use of the libfreehand 0.1.1 library, which allows it to read documents created in Adobe FreeHand. This feature is still marked as experimental – as it’s very early days – but is already working well and will be very useful to some Scribus users.

March saw the release of two other DLP libraries: libpagemaker 0.0.3 (for parsing Adobe PageMaker documents) can now read big-endian (Mac) files, while writerperfect 0.9.5 (for conversion of various document formats to ODF, EPUB and AbiWord) includes a number of build fixes and can also convert old StarOffice files.

Website updates

In order to make the goals of the Document Liberation Project clear and accessible, and attract potential new contributors, we redesigned the front page of the DLP website. We broke up the big chunks of text that used to dominate the front page, and added logos and links to several projects that use DLP libraries.

Here’s a before-and-after comparison:

In addition, we added a link to the aforementioned video that describes DLP and tries to make it accessible to a wider audience. As more and more computer users recognise the downsides of non-standard file formats and vendor lock-in, projects like the DLP will become increasingly important.

Get involved!

DLP is always looking for new contributors, and appreciates all help with coding, testing and documentation. If you enjoy programming and tackling new challenges, creating a new import library can be especially rewarding! Fathoming out the insides of a closed file format is fascinating, and you’ll get plenty of appreciation from users in the future who can finally open their old documents without struggling to run ancient software in a virtual machine…

So to join, visit the contributor page for pointers to get started.

Berlin, June 16, 2016 – The Document Foundation announces that KDE e.V. is joining the organization’s Advisory Board, and at the same time The Document Foundation joins KDE’s group of advising community partners as an affiliate.

KDE is creating Free Software since 1996 and shares a lot of values around Free Software and open document formats with The Document Foundation, and brings the experience of running a Free Software organization for almost two decades to their advisory board.

Both organizations are working in the OASIS technical committee for the OpenDocument format, and also collaborate on common aspects of development of office software, such as usability and visual design. The affiliation of KDE and The Document Foundation at an organizational level will help to move forward with the shared goal of giving end users control of their computing needs through Free Software.

“The KDE project is one of the essential pieces of the FLOSS desktop initiative, and we are most happy to liaise with them now also on an organizational level. Beyond the shared goal of liberating people’s software experience, there is also lots of synergies to explore in areas ranging from document filter technologies to volunteer-driven governance,” says Thorsten Behrens, member of the board at The Document Foundation.

Lydia Pintscher, President of KDE e.V., says: “KDE has been one of the first Free Software non-profit organizations incorporated according to German law. We are happy to share some of the things we learnt over the many years we are running KDE now. Free software and open formats are two of the cornerstones which unite us with many other organizations, such as The Document Foundation, working on establishing freedom for users of digital devices everywhere. In order to achieve our vision of a world in which everyone has control over their digital life and enjoys freedom and privacy, we need strong partnerships with like-minded organizations like The Document Foundation.”

About KDE e.V.

KDE e.V. is a registered non-profit organization that represents the KDE Community: an international technology team dedicated to creating a free and user-friendly computing experience, offering an advanced graphical desktop, a variety of applications for communication, work, education and entertainment, and a platform to easily build new applications upon. More information about KDE and KDE e.V. can be found at www.kde.org.

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

Hello, I’m Rosemary, aka roses in the IRC. This year, my project proposal with LibreOffice got accepted for GSoC. In this blog, I’ll be writing mainly about my work for the project, which is “Saving ODF XML of Change-tracking as a Sequence of Pre-defined Changes“.

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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.

• Met with each other.
• Michael and Markus made presentations about following topics
• Solving arbitrary problems from a standing start - Real word engineering
• LibreOffice code structure
• LibreOffice core classes
•  Automated testing
•  Calc & Chart2
•  ODF and OOXML in LibreOffice
•  Data for LibreOffice developers

• Coding and coding :)

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Today I would like to focus on a quite interesting project, even though it is rarely spoken of: The Document Liberation Project. The Document Liberation Project is LibreOffice’s sister project and is hosted inside the Document Foundation; it keeps its own distinct goals and ecosystem however. We often think of it as being overly technical to explain, as the project does not provide binaries everyone may download and install on a computer. Let’s describe in a few words what it does. The Document Liberation project aims at developing filters handling various file formats. The output of the project is then reused inside LibreOffice as well as in other Free Software such as (but not limited to) Inkscape, Abiword, etc.

Many people have files and documents that are sitting somewhere on their hard drives and that were first generated by an ancient office suite, word processor or spreadsheet application. Most of these file formats were never publicly documented. As a result, people experience vendor lock-in as they are unable to convert them in a stable, supported and open file format they can actually use. In order to solve this conundrum the Document Liberation project has a set of export filters that convert files to ODF, epub and even Abiword format. Its crownjewel, so to speak, is the set of import filters it has been collecting over the years and that it has improved. Those filters range from MS Publisher files to Clarisworks and Apple Keynote and also have many rarely used file formats. Let’s take a look at the list mentioned on the project’s website:

libwpd
Corel WordPerfect import library.
libwpg
Corel WordPerfect Graphics import library.
libwps
Microsoft Works import library.
libmwaw
A library for import of many legacy Mac document formats.
libabw
AbiWord import library.
libcdr
Corel Draw import library.
libmspub
Microsoft Publisher import library.
libvisio
Microsoft Visio import library.
libetonyek
Apple Keynote/Pages/Numbers import library.
libfreehand
Aldus/Macromedia/Adobe FreeHand import library.
libe-book
A library for import of many e-book formats.
libpagemaker
Adobe PageMaker import library.

This list is impressive and keeps growing. One may also notice the usefulness of the project for digital artists and designers. You can help the project in three ways:
* help developing these filters and libraries
* help documenting the formats the project tries to manage
* submit test documents and assess how effective the filters are in real life.

You may of course donate to the Document Foundation as well. The Document Liberation project matters a lot. It matters for many different people and for the ecosystem of desktop software relying on these files, from office suites to graphical design tool and document processors. If you feel like you could help, do not hesitate one bit, your contribution will be much appreciated and you will help liberating the world, one document at a time.

Switches to proprietary cloud-based office service

The government of Italy's South Tyrol province will end its LibreOffice migration project, and instead intends to switch to a proprietary cloud-based office service. A decision was published on 12 April.

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Updated link

Today is Document Freedom Day, the day in the year on which we pay extra attention to open standards.

Document Freedom Day

Because OpenDocument Format (ODF) is the open standard that I am involved in most, I want to write a few words about it.

Since last autumn, I'm working on the ODF standard for the Dutch government. Supporting standards in government is an important task: new software comes and goes, but documents, once created, should be readable and reusable into the future.

Standards for Freedom

Standards help with freedom. If the standard is open, users can choose the software they prefer. The standard helps to create competition on the market.

That is why it is important to have a good standard and software that adheres to it.

It is the latter part, the 'adhering to' that I've given attention to lately. The promise of a standard is to have a common understanding of what the contents of a file mean. Users of ODF should be able to check how well ODF software follows the standard.

ODF Test Server

To find this out, a new project was started last fall: ODF Test Server. This is a web site, currently in development, where anyone can join and add test cases. The tests are then run automatically and results for all ODF software are updated immediately.

The site will cross-link the test files with the ODF standard and show what software covers which part of the standard.

Working on this site has been a lot of fun and a great learning experience. Ingredients from previous projects are coming together nicely to form this new site.

Building on previous work

The main ingredient is ODF AutoTests. ODF AutoTests is an offline version of the site that we are developing now. At the last ODF Plugfest, we evaluated hundreds of tests and wrote a report on them (scroll down for the numbers).

The testing site will improve on the ODF AutoTests. The tests can be evaluated online and only positively evaluated tests will show up in the results. The site will keep track of progress on fixes to the issues that are found.

If you want to join the fun, that's possible of course. The source code is available. It is written in Haskell (server) and Java (client). (Writing a web server in Haskell is a real joy.)

Finally, I'd like to thank NLNet and Logius for making this ODF testing website possible.

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 publisher would appreciate hearing how and where the material has been re-used.

Designing with LibreOffice has a website, with additional information about the book and the author. Of course, the book can be downloaded from the website, and purchased as a traditional paper book from the the Friends of OpenDocument store on Lulu.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Will invest EUR 200,000 in improvements and new features

In April, Nantes Métropole, France’s 6th largest city, will complete its transition to LibreOffice, a free and open source suite of office productivity tools. The city has budgeted EUR 200,000 for bug fixes and new features, specifying that all improvements are to be submitted for inclusion in the LibreOffice project.

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Bruce Byfield’s much-anticipated book, Designing with LibreOffice has been published by Friends of OpenDocument, Inc. Read about it here or jump straight to the download/buy page to get a free PDF or buy a printed copy.

Carla Schroder, Author of The Linux Cookbook, The Linux Network Cookbook, and The Book of Audacity, says this about the book:

“Designing With LibreOffice” teaches everything you need to know about document production: chapters, footnotes, citations, indexes, outlines, cross-references, incorporating images and spreadsheets, and controlling the appearance of your documents. It is well-organized and contains abundant examples, and is suitable for beginners to wizened old pros, who will probably discover things about LibreOffice that they didn’t know.