Consider a donation to LibreOffice to help the project produce even more gadgets for volunteer contributors, free software advocates and proud users, to raise the awareness of LibreOffice and Open Document Format (ODF)

The new year at The Document Foundation starts with FOSDEM, where many LibreOffice contributors gather for the largest Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) meeting in Europe. In 2018 we had a booth in the main hall of building K, where most of the largest projects are based, and a devroom focused on OpenDocument Format (ODF) editing software.

The marketing team at TDF was in charge of the booth and the devroom, and also of logistics for the internal meetings and the hackfest organized at ICAB just after FOSDEM. I also helped to cook some real Italian pasta for the social dinner on Saturday, where the community gathered together with some friends.

Just before FOSDEM, we announced LibreOffice 6.0. We coordinated the announcement, drafting the documents for the press kit and organizing several pre briefings with journalists. As usual, thanks to the efforts of localization volunteers we were able to distribute the press release in some local languages.

We then followed up with announcements of minor releases, with a reduced emphasis in comparison with the major announcement.

After FOSDEM, we started working on TDF’s Annual Report, drafting most of the content and illustrations, and collecting images from community events for the final version. We have managed the final layout, using only free software (LibreOffice for drafting text and drawings, GIMP for tweaking images, and Scribus for creating the final layout, using the free fonts Carlito and Caladea).

After releasing the Annual Report, we started to concentrate on the next major announcement, preparing journalist mailing lists. We have a large number of contacts in media outlets around the world, which we have to update regularly.

Mailing lists are key to maintaining regular contacts with journalists. Of course, relationships must be nurtured over time, and the fact that we have always been proactive and responsive has increased our reputation. We have always replied to requests in due time, and pitched new article ideas as often as possible.

We also increased TDF and LibreOffice presence on social media, by increasing the number of tweets and posts. This will further grow in the next few months, as an increasing number of journalists are shifting to social media as the main source of information for news stories.

In early August we announced LibreOffice 6.1, with a test of the increased Twitter activity, based on a policy document that we drafted and shared with community members. We duplicated step-by-step most of the activities from the previous announcement, but we managed to organize a smaller number of pre-briefings.

In addition to these “major” marketing activities, we also managed several background tasks which are useful to keep TDF engine in good shape. The first is keeping track of donations, which provide the economic resources for the project. We are closely following donation trends, and have been implementing A/B testing for the donation page.

Starting from the month of November, this will include fundraising. If we want to bring the project to the next level, we need to raise money to increase the level of support for local communities, and for marketing and education activities behind the OpenDocument Format.

Last, but not least, we warmly invite community members to attend marketing calls. If the schedule is not the right one please let us know, and we will change it to suit your needs. If necessary, we can schedule two different calls to talk with people in different time zones (Asia and the Americas are hard to fit into the same time slot, but we have active community members in both continents).

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Software: add MS Office 2019

This year’s LibreOffice Annual Conference has been held in Tirana, Albania on September 25 to September 28, 2018. It was organized by a group of independent volunteers from the Open Labs Hackerspace in Tirana.

I will try to give some information about my talks, and share my experience.

Talk Less, Listen More

In these kind of events, I usually tend to propose multiple talks and/or workshops, trying to do as much as possible in a limited time; but since the conference program was full of interesting talks and workshops, I wanted to watch & learn more, and talk less this time. :)

I have attended this year’s conference with two talks, one regular and one lightning.

Talk 1: ODF and LibreOffice Adoption in Turkey: a Status Report

Migration of public institutions to LibreOffice and ODF is going on in Turkey, backed by Turkish Academic Network And Information Center (TUBITAK ULAKBIM). Some ministries, public institutions and municipalities have already completed their migrations to LibreOffice and ODF. Migrations in some institutions are in progress. And many public institutions are waiting in the line. I talked about the history, current status, problems and the future plans of Turkey’s migration to ODF, LibreOffice, GNU/Linux (particularly Pardus) and open source software in general; and tried to answer the questions of the audience.

The reaction of the audience was very positive and encouraging. I got various help/support offers. We have also discussed/brainstormed on ways to ensure the success of the migrations in Turkey, during the Certification Workshop with Lothar Becker, Italo Vignoli, and the other fellow community members. This seems like one of the upsides of having such a great community full of fantastic people. :)

The slides of the presentation on Speaker Deck

Talk 2 (Lightning): Customize Dialog: The Road So Far and the Next Steps

In this lightning talk, I tried to give a quick status report on: What has been done/improved/fixed in the Customize dialog after GSoC 2017 until now; what is the current status, what is left to do, and the future plans.

The slides of the presentation on Speaker Deck

The New MC

I have run for membership of the new Membership Committee of the Document Foundation, and has been elected as a deputy for the next term. It was a pleasure being introduced to the community as part of the MC.

We had a joint meeting with the Board of Directors, and also some private MC meetings.

Must Do’s in Tirana and Some Tips

Tirana is nice and small Balkan city. You can go everywhere on foot or via a bike. Although there are more to do (like a walk to the mountains, or a bike tour to the north), I’ll try to give just a few tips.

Attend a Free Walking Tour

In my last day in Tirana, I attended a free walking tour. It took about 2 hours, and was guided by a nice Albanian named Eri. He showed all of the significant places in the city center, and gave extensive information about these places and the history of Albania & Tirana.

The tour starts at 10am and 6am every day, and the starting point is in front of the Opera house at the Skanderbeg Square. You may give some tip at the end, but there is no pressure to do so; the guide was super polite. You can find more info on their web site.

Eat Traditional Food

They have delicious food, mostly meat, and they use pork extensively; but you also have a lot of other options if you are a vegan or vegetarian.

You might try Era for some traditional food in a small and calm environment.

Bike Sharing

There some bike sharing services in Tirana (like Mobike). You may download their app to your phone, and see/rent the nearest bike. There are separate bike lanes in the main roads.

Buy Tourist SIM

If your GSM service provider also has high roaming prices like the most, then you should definitely get a tourist pack from a Vodafone store as soon as you arrive at Tirana. It costs around 10 EUR for 5GB data plan, 10 min international and plenty of domestic call minutes; and it will be valid for 2 weeks. There is a Vodafone store at the airport.

Avoid Exchange at the Airport

The exchange office at the airport (in the arrival hall) has a bad rate. Try to do your EUR <->LEKE exchanges in one of the offices in the city center. Many stores and taxis will also accept EUR.

Try Daily Tours

If you are going to stay for a longer period, then you might get bored after a while. So taking some daily tours to nearby cities might be a good idea in such a case.

Berat is one of the several options. This 2,413 years-old city, the pride of Albanian architecture which is under the protection of UNESCO, is located 120 km from Tirana.

Some Points of Interest

• Skanderbeg Square
• Opera
• Clock Tower
• Bunkers
• Pyramid
• Et’hem Bey Mosque

The Language

You can speak in English with the most of the younger people in Tirana. Their language (Albanian) is called Shqip. Po means Yes, Yo means No. And here is a survival dictionary.

Overall

It was a great experience overall, with many interesting and illuminating talks from different parts of the world. We have met new friends, and had a good time with the old ones also.

Looking forward to the next LibOCon in Spain!

In September 2018 Friends of OpenDocument published the printed edition of the LibreOffice 6.0 Getting Started Guide, written by the LibreOffice Documentation Team. Free PDFs and ODTs are available from the LibreOffice website. Purchase printed copies from our store at Lulu.com.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Rescuing 1 sources and tagging 1 as dead. #IABot (v2.0beta8)

August was a big month for our project, with the release of a brand new version of LibreOffice! And surrounding the release, there was lots of activity in our development, documentation, design, QA and translation communities…

• LibreOffice 6.1 was announced early in the month, with many new features and updates including new icon themes, improved EPUB support, a revamped image handling engine, and the ability to sort anchored images in Calc. Check out the announcement for more details, and this video for a demonstration of the new features:

• The day after the release, we organised an “Ask us Anything” session on Reddit. TDF team and board members, along with community participants, answered questions, responded to ideas, and shared feedback about the new release. The Reddit post has over 33,000 views at the time of writing, so a big thanks to everyone who took part!

• One week later, we looked at some statistics relating to the new version. LibreOffice 6.1 had been downloaded 373,758 times (for comparison, it’s 649,158 now). We had 274,916 visits to our website, 192,232 visits to our blog, and 21,347 impressions of the announcement tweet.

• Meanwhile, the LibreOffice 6.0 branch continues to be maintained, and is recommended for enterprise deployments. Our hard-working documentation community released the LibreOffice 6.0 Writer Guide, with a general introduction to Writer followed by chapters about specific features. It’s available in ODT and PDF formats, and also in hard-copy (printed). If you find the documentation useful, you can give the community a hand!

• Also in August, we showcased the results of the tender to implement of a HSQLDB binary format import in LibreOffice. Tenders are aimed at improving LibreOffice in several strategic areas, and documenting the approach and work carried out, to foster sharing of knowledge and inclusion of the wider volunteer community. Collabora was assigned this specific tender, and our blog post links to technical explanations from developer Tamás Bunth.

• In the middle of the month, we chatted to Sam Tuke, a long-time Free Software supporter and campaigner, who helps the LibreOffice project in marketing and QA (quality assurance). We plan to post regular “Community Member Monday” interviews on this blog, so stay tuned!

• Finally, our Taiwanese community reported back from the “LibreOffice Asia Meetup”, an event held in Taipei. The attendees included LibreOffice and other Free Software community members from Japan, Korea, Indonesia and Taiwan. Franklin Weng, TDF board member and one of the organisers, said: “Besides sharing our experiences of adopting ODF and using LibreOffice, we can also learn from many different countries and help each other”.

Keep in touch – follow us on Twitter, Facebook and Google+. Like what we do? Support our community with a donation – or join us and help us to make LibreOffice even better!

This is the latest release of our powerful open-source Qt component, KD Chart, that allows you to create business charts and much more.

Release Highlights

• Builds with modern Qt versions, at least up to Qt 5.10
• Improves tooltip handling
• Fixes horizontal bar chart
• Uses @rpath for OSX dynamic libraries
• Fixes build on Qt4/ARM

KD Chart makes use of the Qt Model-View programming model that allows re-use of existing data models to create charts. KD Chart is a complete implementation of the ODF (OpenDocument) Chart specification. It now includes Stock Charts, Box & Whisker Charts and the KD Gantt module for implementing ODF Gantt charts into applications.

Read more about KD Chart…

Get KD Chart here.

KD Chart is available under both a free software license (GPL) and a commercial license. The code is exactly the same under both licenses, so which license type you should choose depends on the project you want to use it for.

The post KD Chart 2.6.1 Released appeared first on KDAB.

Community members from five different countries had a good time, and talked about holding a LibreOffice Asia Conference in the future

Event report by: Wally Lian, PR & Marketing Consultant, Software Liberty Association Taiwan

This summer is hot in Taiwan, and so are the FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) communities! From the end of July to the middle of August, there were several big FOSS events in Taiwan. The first one coming on stage was the Debian Conference, which was held in Taiwan and Asia for the first time, and lasted for two weeks. Then, this year three big Asian FOSS events of COSCUP, Gnome Asia Summit, and OpenSUSE Asia Summit decided to merge together and held an event at the National Taiwan University of Science and Technology on 11 and 12 August.

Besides these global and Asian FOSS events, there were also many interesting opportunities and plans going on. One of them was: LibreOffice community members in Asia planned to have a meetup during the joint COSCUP/Gnome Asia/OpenSUSE Asia event, and discussed holding a LibreOffice Asia Conference.

This meetup was held in the evening on 11 August in A+A space, which is a nice and friendly space for FOSS communities, also a community made up of several artists who use FOSS as their tools to create their artwork. The attendees included LibreOffice and other FOSS community members from Japan, Korea, Indonesia and Taiwan.

The organizer, Franklin Weng, the current President of Software Liberty Association Taiwan and current board member of The Document Foundation, said that this meetup was an important milestone. “Now the Taiwanese government is going on adopting the Open Document Format and related office suites. It is very important to link our government and our people with international communities. Besides sharing our experiences of adopting ODF and using LibreOffice, we can also learn from many different countries and help each other,” said Franklin.

At the meetup, Franklin introduced the 30-second animation for LibreOffice Android Viewer, which was generated by LibreOffice Taiwan and A+A Space. He explained that the original idea was to raise the awareness of visual design in FOSS communities. Then he explained the meaning and special Easter eggs hidden in the animation, and showed a “behind the scenes” documentary for it. Then, the host of A+A Space, Michael Wu, introduced the wonderful work from A+A Space, including 3D graphs, 3D models, VR work, classes in universities, and so on.

Then everyone started to share their work and experiences. Rania Amina, who was responsible for visual design in the LibreOffice Conference Indonesia, showed his wonderful artwork to attendees. Ahmad Haris also shared his experiences holding LibreOffice Conference Indonesia, which was a huge success. Shinji Enoki shared the current status of Japanese support in LibreOffice, and many events held in Japan. Daehyun Sung introduced himself and shared some interesting things in Korea, including the system North Korea is using.

Also, Bobby Tung, a senior FOSS member in Taiwan who also contributed a lot to W3C standards, shared the current status of Unicode support for CJK. Kevin Lin, a LibreOffice Migration Professional in Taiwan, showed his work on LibreOffice Online and Web form API usage. Shelandy Ting shared his interesting artwork using Gimp.

After sharing, attendees split into different groups and talked with each other. During this meetup, members from Japan and Indonesia showed interest in holding a LibreOffice Asia Conference. Besides conferences, attendees also exchanged experiences migrating to LibreOffice in organizations and public administrations. We believe that the adoption of the Open Document Format and migrations to LibreOffice will advance hugely in Asia.

A big thanks to the LibreOffice communities in Asia for organising this event! If you love LibreOffice and want to help spread the word in your location or language, check out our native language communities. Together we can help to spread the word about free software and open standards!

The LibreOffice Documentation Team has published the Writer Guide for version 6.0. It is available for free download (PDF) from the LibreOffice website or can be purchased from the Friends of OpenDocument store at Lulu.com.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

LibreOffice Documentation Team has just released the LibreOffice 6.0 Writer Guide, with a general Introduction to LibreOffice Writer followed by the following chapters: Working with Text (basics), Working with Text (advanced), Formatting Text, Formatting Pages (basics), Formatting Pages (advanced), Print Export Email, Introduction to Styles, Working with Styles, Templates, Images & Graphics, Lists, Tables of Data, Mail Merge, TOCs Indexes Biblios, Master Documents, Fields, Forms, Spreadsheets Charts Objects, Setting Up Writer and Customizing Writer, for a total of 448 pages.

LibreOffice 6.0 Writer Guide is available from TDF Wiki as ODT and PDF, both the complete book and individual chapters, and from ODF Authors as ODT of individual chapters.

LibreOffice 6.0 Writer Guide is also available as a printed book from Lulu, by Friends of Open Document Inc., an Australia-based volunteer organisation with members around the world which will be using profits from the sale to benefit the LibreOffice community.

Rescuing 1 sources and tagging 0 as dead. #IABot (v2.0beta5)

External links: Move {{Authority control}} to bottom.

External links: Add {{Document markup languages}}.

I looked into a migration of the ODFAuthors site to a current Plone version with the data from the website yesterday. It took me a lot of hours to figure out the most easy way to do this. I tried to migrate from LinguaPlone to the new multilingual Plone plug-in first, but without success. I could update the buildout inside a test environment with the new plug-in, but I wasn’t able to migrate the content to the new framework. And even I wasn’t able to get rid of LinguaPlone. I didn’t get the option to remove it. I got always a traceback and found some users that run into the same issue without a solution. Thus I had to change my strategy. I exported the content that I need to migrate, set up a new and clean Plone 4.3.x environment and tried to updated it to the latest version of 4.3. I had to do some editing on the buildout and had to drop some Plone add-ons from the current buildout script of ODFAuthors. Once I had done this the buildout runs fine and I got a clean new Plone environment. Then I added the plug-ins plone.app.contenttypes and Products.contentmigration to the buildout script and run buildout again. I started the Plone instance, created a new Plone site and imported the content (exported from the current ODFAuthors site).
I activated the plug-in plone.app.contenttypes and run the migration scripts from Products.contentmigration. I had to migrate more than 4200 content objects and took a fair amount of time. But in the end the migration from the old Archetype content types to the new Dexterity ones was successful.
The next step would be the migration of the instance from Plone 4.3.x to Plone 5.0.x or 5.1.x.

If the website ODFAuthors should be improved for the future use the first step would be the change of the localization framework from the old LinguaPlone to the current
plone.app.multilingual and migrate and reindex all content objects. It’s not possible to update the site to the latest Plone without that step.
I already created a Plone buildout for an upgraded ODFAuthors website that is based on version 5.1.x. This buildout is available from the Github repository of The Document Foundation: https://github.com/tdf/odfauthors.org

As of today, June 27th, I am no longer working for IBM.  Last quarter’s widely-reported “resource actions” (lay-offs) hit my group and this time my number came up.

It was a good run, 27 years with one company, something that is not so common today.

Fresh out of Harvard I started working at Lotus Development Corporation in Cambridge, Massachusetts, initially doing technical support, including for the Lotus 1‑2-3 C-language developer toolkit.  From there I worked in support’s application development team, developing and maintaining our internal information retrieval system, a hodgepodge of a DOS user-interface, a search engine (using a Bayesian inference network) and a fax-on-demand system, all over NetBIOS.

From support I transitioned over to development, to the SmartSuite team, where I first focused on Freelance Graphics, which was transitioning from C to C++, Windows and OS/2, then on a set of Windows ActiveX controls called eSuite DevPack, some Java components and attempts at an office suite running on a Java-based “thin client” or network computer (eSuite Workplace.)  It was a time when the thinking, at least in my little part of the world, was that the traditional desktop applications were dead, and all future work would be done in Java running on your desktop web browser. From this came the browser wars.

Then, in 1995, IBM came a knocking and bought Lotus.  Our focus, naturally, shifted from desktop to server-based computing, from Java applets to Java servlets.  I worked on various projects, from the K-Station Portal (based initially on Domino) to the Apache Xalan XSLT engine to XForms to WebSphere Portal.  I developed a framework for document conversions within WebSphere Portal that we called Document Conversion Services (DCS).

Then, one day, I got an odd call, out of the blue, a very senior person asking whether I was familiar with the file formats from SmartSuite and Microsoft Office.  Evidently, no one else in the company would admit to having that arcane knowledge.  So, I was drafted onto a “special project,” with a few other talented engineers, a real fun group working on various stealthy tasks, the details of which I am still not at liberty to discuss.

Somewhat overlapping the above, I worked on the things that readers of this blog will be more familiar with, the development of the OpenDocument Format (ODF) standard at OASIS and ISO, and the arguments against ISO ratification of Microsoft’s Office Open XML (OOXML) file format.  This then overlapped, in part, with my work to establish the OpenOffice project at Apache, based on Oracle’s contribution, to get IBM Symphony contributed as well, and to bring those two efforts together.

Those years were among the most memorable of my career.  I was able to work with a lot of talented and enthusiastic people, within IBM, of course, but also at other companies, with non-profits, with academia and government.  I was able travel and see parts of the world I might never have otherwise seen, speak to a lot of audiences about the importance of open standards.  I even testified to a few legislative committees.  My business travels took me to Brussels, Berlin, Budapest, Barcelona, Granada, London, Paris, Lyon, Rome, Orvietto, Geneva, Amsterdam, the Hague, Beijing, Seoul and Johannesburg.  It was a lot of hard work, but it was meaningful. Open standards and open source matter.  I have many fond memories of those years.

Eventually, however, corporate interest in document editors, document standards, “social documents” and similar initiatives fizzled, and I no longer had support for remaining involved in ODF and OpenOffice.  I needed to move on, to find a new gig.

I looked internally within IBM for something that would combine my hard technical skills and my soft skills, including working closely with attorneys, an ability to “meet them half way” when discussing complicated legal/technical topics.  Since I’ve been an active inventor throughout my IBM career, with 54 patents to my name, and a good head for reading and analyzing patents, I spent a few years working as a patent engineer, helping to monetize IBM’s vast patent portfolio, developing technical evidence for infringement, identifying possibilities for patent licencing and assignment, etc.

That’s where things stood as of today, when I handed in my badge and laptop.

As for what is next, I honestly cannot yet say what “Rob 2.0” will be.  I plan on taking some time to mull things over and explore my options.

One thing I do plan to do, relatively soon, is start a new blog, a fresh start, on a new path at this domain, preserving this older blog at its current (/blog) URL.

Donations to The Document Foundation are used for many purposes, such as organising events, maintaining our infrastructure, and paying a small team to handle QA, marketing, documentation and other tasks. But donations are also used to fund tenders, whereby companies and individuals improve LibreOffice in specific areas and share knowledge with the community.

One such tender was posted in May 2017: “improve image handling in LibreOffice (#201705-01)“. When images are used in LibreOffice documents, the software manages them in a “life-cycle” which includes importing, displaying, modifying, exporting and more. To save memory – especially with large documents – images that are not currently on screen are sometimes moved out of memory and saved onto disk in a technique known as “swapping” or “paging”. The goal of the tender was to improve LibreOffice in these areas, making it more efficient at handling images and modernising the code base.

Collabora was selected to implement the tender; the work is now complete, and it will benefit all users in the upcoming LibreOffice 6.1 (due to be released in early August). Here are some technical notes about what was improved in the source code of LibreOffice, and what was achieved.

Problems with the image life-cycle

Currently, when an image is read from a document, a GraphicObject is created for the image and handled over to the GraphicManager which manages the life-cycle. When this happens we usually get back the string based unique ID of the GraphicObject with which we can always get access the image by creating a new GraphicObject with the unique ID (GraphicManager will look for the image with that unique ID).

Usually the unique ID is the one that is passed on between layers in LibreOffice (for example, from the ODF filter when loaded, to the model, where it is manipulated and then to the OOXML filter when saving) but the unique ID itself is just a “reference” to the image and by itself it doesn’t have any control over when the image can safely be removed and when not. It could happen that in a certain situation we would still have the unique ID referenced somewhere in the model, but the image would already be removed. This is dangerous and needs to be changed.

Usually for this kind of object we use a reference counting technique, where we pass an object around that holds a reference to the object resource. When the object is created, the reference count is increased; when destroyed, the reference count is decreased; when the reference count reaches zero, the resource object is destroyed.

The solution for the life-cycle

So instead of passing around a unique ID, the idea is to use the usual reference counting technique, which is normally used in this situation. The GraphicObject is mainly a wrapper around Graphic (which then holds a pixel-based image, or animated image, or possibly a vector image), and in addition it keeps additional attributes (gamma, crop, transparency etc.). It also has the implementation of swapping-in and out.

On the other hand, Graphic is properly reference-counted already (Graphic objects are reference counting the private ImpGraphic) so the solution to the life-cycle problem is that instead of GraphicObject unique ID, we would just pass along the Graphic object instead, or XGraphic, XBitmap which are just UNO wrappers around Graphic. Potentially we could also pass along the GraphicObject or XGraphicObject (UNO wrapper for the GraphicObject) when we would need to take into account the graphic attributes too. This should make the life-cycle much more manageable.

GraphicObject refactoring

GraphicObject and the implementation of XGraphicObject (UnoGraphicObject) and XGraphic (UnoGraphic) were located in module svtools, which is hierarchically above vcl. This is problematic when creating new instances like in Graphic.GetXGraphic method, which needs to bend backward to make it even work (ugly hack by sending the pointer value as URL string to GraphicProvider). The solution to this is to move all GraphicObject related things to vcl, which surprisingly didn’t cause a lot problem and once done, it looks like a much more “natural” place.

Managing memory used by images

Previously, the memory managing was done on the level of GraphicObjects, where a GraphicManager and Graphic-Cache were responsible to create new instances from uniqueID and manage the memory usage that GraphicObject take. Here’s the hierarchy before refactoring:

This is not possible anymore as we don’t operate with uniqueIDs anymore, but always use Graphic and XGraphic objects (in UNO), so we need to manage the creation of Graphic object or more precisely – ImpGraphic (Graphic objects are just reference-counted objects of ImpGraphic).

So to make this possible GraphicManager and GraphicCache need to be decoupled and removed from GraphicObject and a new manager needs to be introduced between Graphic and ImpGraphic, where the manager controls the creation and accounts for the memory usage:

Graphic swapping and swapping strategy

The new swapping strategy is relatively simple – if a lot of memory is needed by graphic objects in a certain time, we let it use it and don’t try to over-aggressively try to free it. In the past this cased swap-out and swap-in cycle that made the application completely unusable. In the future, external hints when a certain Graphic object can be swapped out may be added, so we can perform swapping more effectively. There are also several other ideas which will increase performance and reduce memory usage that can be implemented now with the new hierarchy where most all of the swapping is contained inside the Graphic itself, but all of this is currently out of the scope of this work.

In conclusion

Thanks to Collabora and TomaĹž Vajngerl for their work on this. Although the details are highly technical, the end result is a faster and more robust office suite. If you’re an end user of LibreOffice and your documents include lots of images, you will be able to enjoy the benefits of this work in future releases, starting with LibreOffice 6.1.

I worked very hard on the new Plone buildout for the ODFAuthors website during the last days. I nearly finished the buildout today. I created a new policy and a theming product for the site. I added a template for the frontpage of the new website and am waiting for the input about the content, that the new frontpage should show.

I also need some suggestions on the new publication workflow of the site. The Plone workflow tool is able to run very subtle grained ones.  The Plone Content Management System is also able to send automatic messages on all events like changing the workflow state.

Re-inserting line which seems to have been deleted in error

Software: rmv - nn / WP:EL

Support for OpenDocument: rmv - unsourced spam / WP:EL

I worked on the first bits for a new Plone development environment. I’ll use this to create a new website for the ODFAuthors team. The new site should run on Plone 5.1 or later. Maybe it is possible to upgrade the site to a Plone version that runs on Python 3.

I read already on a blog of a Plone developer that Core-Plone is already ported to Python 3, but that there are a big bunch of tests that are not yet ported and need some love (and work time).

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Let me join Mike, Miklos and Bjรถrn in the blog reporting on last month’s LibreOffice Hackfest in Hamburg (a good old tradition):

LibreOffice Python hacking

With a nice round number of 100000 (decimal 32) participants and surprisingly non-rainy and warm April weather in Hamburg, we met at very stylish freiheit.com offices that also generously provided us with food and beverages. Further shout-outs to TDF (and all its donors) for providing travel support for our volunteers and, equally importantly, sponsoring CIB’s very own Armin Le Grand fulltime mentoring on and off site.

You can find more details on contributions and work done on the event’s wiki page, and also for the simultaneous German community meetup (wiki, blog); just as much here: code-wise, we had 55 commits from hackfest participants over the weekend –

11  Zdenฤ�k Crhonek
 9  Stephan Bergmann
 5  Christian Lohmaier
 5  Katarina Behrens
 5  Sophia Schrรถder
 4  Armin Le Grand
 3  Michael Meeks
 3  Tamas Bunth
 3  Heiko Tietze
 2  Markus Mohrhard
 2  Miklos Vajna
 1  Linus Behrens
 1  Nithin Kumar Padavu

and probably another 15 or so landing in the weeks after, but with substantial work carried out during the hackfest. I’m really quite happy with the outcome, as well as with the number of new and old names in the above list!

I’d like to highlight one particular area of work (as it’s not reflected yet in the list above i.e. no commits on master yet), namely Regina’s ongoing endeavour to improve LibreOffice ODF conformance (or alternatively the ODF specification, if instead she believes LibreOffice gets it right and the spec has it wrong). This is especially noteworthy as it’s purely volunteer work, including weekly attendance and contribution to ODF technical committee phone meetings. Regina spent the weekend poring over LibreOffice drawing subsystem minutiae with CIB’s Armin Le Grand, and in the end wrote up a plan on making the layer functionality in Draw/Impress more useful and compliant to how ODF specifies layers: Make drawing layers ODF conform .

For myself, I (almost) didn’t get any hacking done but instead spent time mentoring, getting face time with many people, providing hackers with (mostly double) espressos, and had a handful of quite excellent discussions that only tend to happen with enough of smart people in the same room:

• discussed opportunities around GPG signing and encryption for the public sector with Lothar Becker
• pondered the future of application development (electron vs. browser-only vs. native ports – and all kinds of in-betweens) with Tim, Michael, and Benjamin
• got the latest news around autocrypt, memory hole and delta.chat from Bjรถrn Petersen
• went through a number of sticky problems TDF is facing with regard to upcoming GDPR end of May, with K-J, Uwe, Florian and Eike.
  • BTW for the record, I consider GDPR a broadly good thing & not an undue burden, and a useful motivation also for volunteer and charity organisations to live up to some data protection ideals.

And last but not least thanks to Armin, Bubli, Michael and Siegmund for being the local CIB posse on the ground for that hackfest; and of course thanks to CIB for letting us have such an outstanding LibreOffice team – and to all volunteers donating a full weekend to LibreOffice!

Here are some impressions from the event (thx to Sweetshark for sharing his pictures – that work is (C) 2018 Bjรถrn Michaelsen, as noted in the image description):

Lots of things are happening in the LibreOffice community – in development, documentation, design, QA, translations and much more. Here’s a summary of news and updates in April…

• LibreOffice 6.0.3 was released on April 3. It includes over 70 bug and regression fixes – see the release announcement for more details.

• From April 6 – 8, we had a LibreOffice community meeting and Hackfest in Hamburg. There were around 45 participants, who split into two groups. One group focused on a hackfest – a joint coding session. At the same time, a meeting of the German-speaking LibreOffice community took place. See here for the results of the hackfest, and what we discussed.

• We talked to Edmund Laugasson from the Estonian LibreOffice community about his efforts to promote free and open source software in his country. “ODF is quite widely used in Estonia – for instance, educational institutions usually have LibreOffice installed, along with some local authorities.” – Full interview here.

• Preparation began for the Month of LibreOffice, May 2018 – crediting contributions all across the project. If you’re a proud user of LibreOffice and would like to join our community, get involved! (We’ll even send you a cool sticker pack.)

• The next LibreOffice Conference will take place from September 26 – 28 in Tirana, Albania, and TDF put out a call for papers. All members and contributors are invited to submit talks, lectures and workshops for the conference – see here for more info.

• The first Bug Hunting Session for LibreOffice 6.1 took place on April 27. LibreOffice users could try out an alpha release of the software, and then find and report bugs. Mentors were available on the #libreoffice-qa IRC channel, and there was a particular focus on improvements to image handling and the HSQLDB import filter for firebird.

• Finally, we gave a warm welcome to our new Google Summer of Code 2018 students. We have a record off 11 students this year, and they will help to improve LibreOffice in many areas: the LOEclipse Plugin, Notebookbar, LibreOffice Viewer for Android and more. So a big hello to Daniel Silva, Ekansh Jha, Hrishabh Rajput, Kshitij Pathania, Manuj Vashist, Muammer Mert Tümer, Nickson Thanda, Raghav Lalvani, Saurav Chirania, Shobhan Mandal and Vikas Mahato!

Keep in touch – follow us on Twitter, Facebook and Google+. Like what we do? Support our community with a donation – or join us and get involved!

odt is actually zipped archived

GraphicObject refactoring

Managing memory used by images

Figure 2: Hierarchy after refactoring

So to make this possible GraphicManager and GraphicCache need to be decoupled and removed from GraphicObject and a new manager needs to be introduced between Graphic and ImpGraphic, where the manager controls the creation and accounts for the memory usage (see Figure 2).

Other changes to Graphic

The LibreOffice community communicates mainly over the internet, using our mailing lists, IRC channels and other services. But it’s often good to meet in person, to discuss ideas face-to-face, tackle problems together, and enjoy good company over food and drinks! And from April 6 – 8, in Hamburg, we did just that‌

Friday: Meet and Greet

Some participants arrived early and had a chance to explore the fascinating Hanseatic city of Hamburg, with its river, canals and lake in the centre (Binnenalster, shown below). In the evening we sampled local food at the Groeninger Privatbrauerei.

(Picture: Thomas Ulrich)

Saturday and Sunday: Hackfest

Starting on Saturday, we had around 45 participants, who split into two groups. One group focused on a hackfest – that is, a joint coding session for fixing bugs, working on new features and sharing information. Here’s a summary of the achievements from each participant:

• Miklos Vajna: mostly mentored Patrick, Nithin, Linus and ZdenÄ›k (aka raal)
• Michael Stahl: mentored Nithin and remote participant Heiko; worked with Christian Lohmeier to install a GUI text editor as an alternative to Emacs and Vim; reviewed some old Gerrit patches; and investigated regression tdf#77919 (it was already fixed on master but it wasn’t obvious how)
• Regina Henschel: worked on the topic “Make drawing layers ODF conformant”
• TamĂĄs Bunth: mostly worked on HSQLDB migration; also picked a random Firebird-related bug
• Heiko Tietze: solved (remotely) issues with inline tooltips on tracked changes, with help from Michael Stahl
• Michael Meeks: tweaked, reviewed and merged patch(es) for a 5-10x speedup for VLOOKUP
• Xisco Fauli: spent most of his time trying to make LibreOffice Viewer work on Android emulator; also showed Marina Latini how to create a bisect repository from scratch
• Markus Mohrhard: reviewed patches for ZdenÄ›k, and analysed a Calc memory corruption issue
• Patrick Jaap: worked on tdf#115094, a bug relating to misplaced images in tables when importing .docx files
• J-NA: worked on fixing up sw uitests with Linus
• Marina Latini: fixed Italian translation typos; worked on fixing a GPG problem
• Nithin: worked with Miklos on adding line feeds to section styles
• Linus Behrens: improved sw uitests, making them more pythonic with J-NA; removing unused includes
• Lothar Becker: explained the LibreOffice certification programme to Silva from the Albanian community
• ZdenÄ›k Crhonek (raal): looked at building the LibreOffice Viewer app for Android
• Jan-Marek Glogowski: worked on font problems in the Qt5 backend
• Tim Janik: talked to people, discussing toolkits and technology
• Sophia SchrĂśder: fixing up help, and some translation work
• Stephan Bergmann: mentored people; worked on fixing regressions with UBSAN, and fixing repaint issue in basic IDE
• Rheinhard: observed and interacted, as he’s writing about open source communities

So lots of great work from everyone involved – thanks so much for your contributions! The hackfest showed that meeting face-to-face is really effective for fixing issues and sharing information.

German community meeting

At the same time as the hackfest, a meeting of the German-speaking LibreOffice community took place. Last year we met in Berlin (text in German) to discuss various ideas and issues in the project, especially from a German-language perspective, and we followed them up this year to see what progress had been made.

Specifically, we talked about attending more conferences in the German-speaking region, with a more targeted focus: instead of just telling people what LibreOffice is (which most Linux users already know, for instance), we should focus more clearly on bringing in potential new contributors.

Then we turned to the topic of education. It was noted that the Citavi citation software no longer works with LibreOffice 6, and the community lacks materials that could be used to create courses (both online and in schools) about LibreOffice.

We also discussed having more regular face-to-face meetups. Silva Arapi from the Albanian community shared her experiences, but in a larger country like Germany, it’s difficult to get everyone together in the same place. So one idea was to organise more local events, like the Duisburg “Stammtisch” run by Andreas Mantke.

Finally, we set up some “action items”, including the creation of a new “Get involved” flyer for events, and a German translation of the “Get involved” page on the website.

Wrapping up

On the whole, it was a fun and productive event, with some familiar faces, some new faces, and lots of coding, ideas and proposals. Many thanks also to Bjoern Michaelsen and Thorsten Behrens for organising the event, serving up coffee and mentoring developers. And another big thanks to freiheit.com who generously hosted us – and even let us play on their pool table!

We plan to run more hackfests and local community events in the future, so keep an eye on this blog and our social media channels to hear about them: Twitter, Google+ and Facebook!

Nowadays we have different ways of converting our documents, using different tools that are available online. One option is JODConverter: (for Java OpenDocument Converter) a widely used tool that automates document conversions. Supported formats include OpenDocument, PDF, HTML, Microsoft Office formats (DOC/DOCX/RTF, XLS/XLSX, PPT/PPTX) and many others. Usage can be as a Java library, a command line tool, or a web application. Traditionally the JODConverter uses a LibreOffice process for its conversion but newer versions of JODConverter can use Collabora Online directly.*

We built a dedicated page on our website explaining why you should consider switching to either the Collabora Online backend or more simply talk directly to Collabora Online itself.

What are the main benefits of using Collabora Online for document conversion?

• Improved performance compared to startup-convert-shutdown approach;
• The REST API is more reliable than starting LibreOffice in server mode and communicating via remote UNO;
• More secure because the conversion happens in an isolated environment and this layered approach protects your infrastructure (from outer to inner layers):
  • It is easy to run it in a Virtual Machine / Docker Container;
  • Document data isolation into per-document chroots;
  • Seccomp-bpf: inside that chroot (almost) no system calls are allowed;
  • Extremely sparse filesystem inside the chroot: no shell etc.

For more details checkout our page that explains more about the benefits, performance, and how to try out JODConverter with its Collabora Online backend. If you have questions, feel free to send us an email.

Check it out!

The post Using Collabora Online to accelerate document conversion appeared first on Collabora Productivity.

The Document Foundation has supported the Cuban LibreOffice community, represented by Carlos Parra Zaldivar, for the Document Freedom Day 2018 in HolguĂ­n, on the opening day of the International Book Exhibition in the local library Biblioteca Provincial “Alex Urquiola”. LibreOffice is included in the Cuban GNU/Linux distribution Nova, and as such is part of the IT syllabus in all schools.

Below, some pictures shot during the event of Carlos Parra Zaldivar speaking about LibreOffice and ODF (Open Document Format) and some of the promotional materials produced by the Cuban LibreOffice community.

Rescued 1 archive link; reformat 1 link. Wayback Medic 2.1

LibreOffice is being used in governments and companies around the world, and this is largely thanks to support and advocacy from local communities and developers. Today we’re talking to Edmund Laugasson, a member of the Estonian LibreOffice community, who is promoting the software and the Open Document Format (ODF) in his country‌

How popular is Free, Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) and LibreOffice in Estonia?

To be honest, it has not yet been deeply investigated, but the Estonian Ministry of Economic Affairs and Communications has published a “State Information System Interoperability Framework” (in Estonian) where clearly ODF is the main format suggested to use. The status of OOXML is only “allowed”. OOXML should not be confused with the file formats used by MS Office, which differs from OOXML by several proprietary changes. Even LibreOffice offers two different versions to save, e.g. docx – one is OOXML and the another one is used in MS Word. The same applies also to rest of OOXML, MS Office formats that coexist in LibreOffice. As the status of ODF is “suggested”, it is not mandatory. Despite that, ODF is quite widely used – for instance, educational institutions usually have LibreOffice installed, along with some local authorities.

Research is quite challenging as people usually do not respond to questionnaires, and researchers need to meet people directly in order to get reliable answers to questions.

What is your background and involvement in FLOSS?

I live in a small city called Rapla in Estonia, but I work as a lecturer at IT College, which is part of the Tallinn University of Technology. I am involved in FLOSS in many ways. When teaching, I use FLOSS as much as possible: the operating system in university is Ubuntu Linux, and I use derivates like Linux Mint MATE, all 64-bit and the latest LTS (Long Term Support) versions. The office suite is LibreOffice everywhere under GNU/Linux but under MS Windows next to MS Office. It is very important to have LibreOffice installed on every operating system that is used. Also, at least ODF file formats should be opened by LibreOffice by default. Then it would be much easier to deploy ODF in future when the ground is prepared properly. We have a dual-boot system (Microsoft Windows 10 and Ubuntu Linux 16.04.4), and in one classroom also a triple-boot (with macOS 10.12).

In addition I am involved as a board member of the Estonian Free and Open-Source Software Association, taking care of FLOSS in general in Estonia. Also I am involved in the Network of Estonian Teachers of Informatics and Computer Science (NETICS) as a board member. There I promote FLOSS – LibreOffice in particular – to encourage people to use it.
The next involvement is my doctoral studies at Tallinn University, where the current topic is “Technology approval as a factor of adopting a free software ecosystem”.

Further activities will come when I graduate and can focus more on wider deployments of FLOSS, particularly LibreOffice. I have serious plans to arrange all this, but as people in Estonia are not very cooperative, it takes more time – regardless of the fact that Estonia is small. Lots of people just do not believe in better future full of FLOSS, and those few who still believe, will act towards that goal. So to anyone who feels the FLOSS spark inside: do not hesitate to contact me.

What do you think are the biggest obstacles to wider FLOSS and LibreOffice adoption in Estonia?

My first paper in 2013 (published at the IFIP conference) showed that awareness of FLOSS is still relatively low, but interest in getting more information is quite high. Microsoft is doing relatively strong lobbying work, also in Estonia, and the government has quite weak power regarding FLOSS. There is also sometimes controversial behaviour: five state-arranged procurements in the FLOSS field (four state procurements relating to LibreOffice, one state procurement to create an interoperability framework), but weak activities around FLOSS in general. So I decided to start my doctoral studies to fix this situation in a scientific (weighted) way.

Thanks to Edmund for his time and effort helping the FLOSS cause. Click here to see many more interviews from LibreOffice contributors – and why not become one yourself! Build up skills, join a friendly community, and help to make LibreOffice better for everyone.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I have attended LibreOffice Conference Indonesia on Saturday, March 25, and Sunday, March 26. The event, hosted by Politeknik Elektronika Negeri Surabaya (PENS), has been the first of its kind in South East Asia, and I hope it will be followed by many similar events in other countries in the region. Of course, the concept of local LibreOffice Conferences in Asia has been launched by the Japanese community, which is a leading example of commitment.

The day before the conference the Indonesia LibreOffice community has organized a localization workshop, led by Andika Triwidada, a long time contributor which has coordinated the Indonesia localization since almost forever.

The day after the conference we have visited the outskirts of Surabaya, with magnificent memories of the past. We have also visited the famous Sampoerna cigarette factory in Surabaya.

On Tuesday, in the morning we have had a meeting with a group of PENS’ IT professors, led by the university dean, with whom we have discussed the opportunity of increasing the presence of open source software in their syllabus. In addition, the university is going to evaluate the migration to open source software and LibreOffice, including the migration to ODF as a way to overcome vendor’s lock-in.

In the afternoon, Frankling Weng and me have keynoted in front of a large student audience about getting involved in open source, and have been followed by Ahmad Haris – the amazing conference coordinator – with a workshop in Indonesian on open source software. Haris has already provided a report in English about the conference, where he offers several insights on the organization. In addition, pictures of the entire event are available on Flickr.

The conference has been a fantastic learning opportunity for me, especially in terms of better understanding local communities in Asia. Last year, I started my full immersion in this topic when I visited Taiwan to attend COSCUP and meet the local community and the country’s Ministry of Innovation, Audrey Tang. Participating in local community events is very important to strengthen the ties between The Document Foundation core team – Board of Directors, Membership Committee and staff members – and LibreOffice incredible global community.

As I said several times during my talks, I have learned more about the community during the four days spent in Surabaya than in weeks of email and social media interactions. Of course, they are both important, but the human face-to-face relation is still invaluable in terms of relationship building. I hope to be able to attend similar events in the future, in other countries in Asia, South America and Africa.

The crowd at LibreOffice Conference Indonesia

Conference volunteers having fun on stage

LibreOffice t-shirts, backpacks and books

Andika Triwidada with conference team

{{nowrap}} can't wrap {{longitem}}

There’s so much going on in the LibreOffice project – in development, documentation, design, QA, translations and much more. So at the end of each month we’ll be posting summaries of recent activities and updates, to help you get an overview of what’s going on. Here’s what happened in March‌

• LibreOffice 5.4.6 was released, with almost 60 bug and regression fixes. This is part of the 5.4 branch, targeted at mainstream users and enterprises. More information in the press release.

• The Indonesian community organised a three day conference, supported by The Document Foundation. The website has details (in Indonesian), and below is a video promoting the event – English subtitles are available:

• Meanwhile, we’re already getting excited about the main LibreOffice Conference due later this year, in Tirana. But we’re looking even further ahead, and announced a call for locations for the LibreOffice Conference 2019. The deadline for sending proposals is June 30, so if you want to help out, let us know!

• In certification news, Lothar Becker (Co-Chair of The Document Foundation’s Certification Committee) announced two new certified migrators and trainers – JosĂŠ Gatica and Xisco Fauli respectively.

• Buovjaga from the QA community wrote a blog post describing the importance of quality assurance in open source projects. “QA is acting like neurotransmitters in the body of the project”, he writes, explaining that QA is involved in many different areas.

• This year’s Google Summer of Code (GSoC) is fast approaching, and we reached out to potential participants. In recent years, GSoC students have contributed many great features and updates to LibreOffice, so we look forward to seeing what will happen this year.

• Olivier Hallot from the documentation community wrote about rich content arriving in the new help system. “The new help can now access external videos on YouTube or similar services, and also open or download OpenDocument files to support the textual explanations of LibreOffice features in the help pages.”

• Also in blog news, Lera Goncharuk summarised migrations to LibreOffice in Russia on his blog. These include migrations at the federal government level, along with regional administrations.

• Finally, development continues on LibreOffice 6.1, which is due to be released in early August. You can see some of the new features in the release notes, such as the ability to sort images anchored to cells in Calc:

Keep in touch – follow us on Twitter, Facebook and Google+. Like what we do? Support our community with a donation – or join us and get involved!

Today is Document Freedom Day (DFD) 2018, an annual event to celebrate and raise awareness about Open Standards scheduled on the last Wednesday of March. Document Freedom Day was first celebrated on 26 March 2008. Since 2016, Document Freedom Day is organised by a team of volunteers of the Digital Freedom Foundation. It was previously organised by the Free Software Foundation Europe.

Document Freedom Day is a campaign about open standards and document formats, aimed at non-technical people. Open Standards ensure document interoperability, a pre-condition for knowledge sharing amongst individuals.

Document freedom addresses much more than just texts and spreadsheets, as it is about the control of any kind of digital data, which should be stored in open and standard ways to empower knowledge sharing by users. On the contrary, most digital data is normally stored in proprietary and closed formats, which constrain and manipulate users at enormous cost.

In fact, documents that are not free are locked to some particular software or company. Often, even their original author is not able to access their contents, as they are controlled by artificial technical restrictions.

Open Standards are essential for interoperability and freedom of choice, based on the merits of software applications. They provide freedom from data lock-in and the subsequent vendor lock-in. This makes Open Standards essential for governments, companies, organisations and individual users of information technology.

Open Standards must be:

• Subject to full public assessment and use without constraints in a manner equally available to everyone
• Without any components or extensions that have dependencies on formats or protocols that do not meet the definition of an open standard themselves
• Free from legal or technical clauses that limit its utilisation by any party or in any business model
• Managed and further developed independently of any single supplier in a process open to the equal participation of competitors and third parties
• Available in multiple complete implementations by competing suppliers, or as a complete implementation equally available to all parties

Let’s celebrate Document Freedom Day 2018 to make Open Standards a reality. Open Document Standard (ODF), the native document format of LibreOffice and many more software applications, is the only Open Standard available in the domain of personal productivity for organizations and individuals. Every LibreOffice users should advocate, support and use ODF.

[Source of Informations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Document_Freedom_Day]

‎Adoption: !

Last week the new help system – online and offline – received enhancements to add multimedia and other resources for a richer user experience of LibreOffice Help. The new help can now access external videos stored in You Tube or similar services and also to open or download OpenDocument files to support the textual explanations of LibreOffice features in the help pages.

External videos can be displayed in New Help pages

The current textual contents of the help pages is an important legacy information because LibreOffice does not have a development method that requires “a priori” documentation  of the new feature specifications. LibreOffice Help pages will continue to have text contents and external videos shall be used to support this contents and will not replace it.

Imagine the situation where a user need help on Calc pivot tables. Besides the existing help pages on the subject, a companion tutorial video can be linked in the page to further explain pivot tables with examples and different wording. If well produced, the external video stored in a video service server can even display captions in the user language, although it depends on the browser language settings, the video file service host and the video production.

Actually, production of good multimedia contents in general is not a light task. A good video tutorial requires advanced (often professional) techniques and skills, and our users will appreciate quality and effectiveness of the videos. Normally good videos are short – less than 2 minutes – have a direct communication with the user and must be rendered in low resolutions monitors.

The new help also has OpenDocument files available for download in the help pages. For the moment only ODF files allowed are of MIME type application/vnd.oasis.opendocument. prefix and “text”, “spreadsheet”, “drawing”, “presentation”, “formula” or “database” as suffix. It can be extended for other cases such as CSV, TXT or HTML if necessary. The purpose of the companion files is to offer to the Help user a working case of the feature or a starting point for a bigger work around the feature.

Files can be downloaded from New Help pages

Adding Help contents for LibreOffice is not an easy task. Besides knowledge of Extensive Markup Language (XML) and some developments skills for patch submission, the Help contents, unlike a book or a guide,  must be factual and as much accurate as possible. Poor multimedia or companion files can turn into counterproductive resources.

Are you interested in helping us to make our Help a rich experience? Do you want to improve our help contents? Join the Documentation Team!

For more information on how to add files or external videos, visit our wiki page

Happy Help Rich Contents!

Sources:

• https://olivierhallot.blogspot.com.br/2018/03/libreoffice-help-pages-can-now-download.html
• https://olivierhallot.blogspot.com.br/2018/03/adding-multimedia-to-help-pages-of.html

‎Adoption: Add Taiwan in the adoption list and provide references

Rescuing 6 sources and tagging 2 as dead. #IABot (v1.6.4)

‎Software: Fixed link to Gnumeric reference

The Swachh Bharat Mission was initiated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on 2 October 2014, with a resolution to achieve Open Defecation Free (ODF) India by ...

‎Software: Fixed link on Atlantis Word Processor reference

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Prologue

Problems with the image life-cycle - detailed

Credits

Berlin, January 31, 2018 – The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 6.0, a major release and a dramatically improved free office suite, which celebrates the 7th anniversary of the availability of the very first version of LibreOffice. Today LibreOffice is more powerful, simple and secure, and offers superior interoperability with Microsoft Office documents.

LibreOffice 6.0 is immediately available for Windows, macOS and Linux, and for the cloud. The new major release adds a large number of significant new features to the core engine and to individual modules (Writer, Calc and Impress/Draw), with the objective of providing users with the best in terms of personal productivity.

A video summarizing the top new features of LibreOffice 6.0 is available on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YHBve8v13VY.

Power

The Notebookbar, although still an experimental feature, has been enriched with two new variants: Grouped Bar Full for Writer, Calc and Impress, and Tabbed Compact for Writer. The Special Characters dialog has been reworked, with the addition of lists for Recent and Favorite characters, along with a Search field. The Customize dialog has also been redesigned, and is now more modern and intuitive.

In Writer, a Form menu has been added, making it easier to access one of the most powerful – and often unknown – LibreOffice features: the ability to design forms, and create standards-compliant PDF forms. The Find toolbar has been enhanced with a drop-down list of search types, to speed up navigation. A new default table style has been added, together with a new collection of table styles to reflect evolving visual trends.

The Mail Merge function has been improved, and it is now possible to use either a Writer document or an XLSX file as data source.

In Calc, ODF 1.2-compliant functions SEARCHB, FINDB and REPLACEB have been added, to improve support for the ISO standard format. Also, a cell range selection or a selected group of shapes (images) can be now exported in PNG or JPG format.

In Impress, the default slide size has been switched to 16:9, to support the most recent form factors of screens and projectors. As a consequence, 10 new Impress templates have been added, and a couple of old templates have been updated.

Simplicity

The old WikiHelp has been replaced by the new Help Online system, with attractive web pages that can also be displayed on mobile devices. In general, LibreOffice Help has been updated both in terms of contents and code, with other improvements due all along the life of the LibreOffice 6 family.

User dictionaries now allow automatic affixation or compounding. This is a general spell checking improvement in LibreOffice which can speed up work for Writer users. Instead of manually handling several forms of a new word in a language with rich morphology or compounding, the Hunspell spell checker can automatically recognize a new word with affixes or compounds, based on a “Grammar By” model.

Security

OpenPGP keys can be used to sign ODF documents on all desktop operating systems, with experimental support for OpenPGP-based encryption. To enable this feature, users will have to install the specific GPG software for their operating systems.

Document classification has also been improved, and allows multiple policies (which are now exported to OOXML files). In Writer, marking and signing are now supported at paragraph level.

Interoperability

OOXML interoperability has been improved in several areas: import of SmartArt and import/export of ActiveX controls, support of embedded text documents and spreadsheets, export of embedded videos to PPTX, export of cross-references to DOCX, export of MailMerge fields to DOCX, and improvements to the PPTX filter to prevent the creation of broken files.

New filters for exporting Writer documents to ePub and importing QuarkXPress files have also been added, together with an improved filter for importing EMF+ (Enhanced Metafile Format Plus) files as used by Microsoft Office documents. Some improvements have also been added to the ODF export filter, making it easier for other ODF readers to display visuals.

LibreOffice Online

LibreOffice Online is fundamentally a server service, and should be installed and configured by adding cloud storage and an SSL certificate. It might be considered an enabling technology for the cloud services offered by ISPs or the private cloud of enterprises and large organizations.

New features introduced with LibreOffice 6.0 aim to align the functionality of the desktop and cloud versions, especially in areas where users expect similar behavior. For instance, a Save As feature has been added, while the amount of rows managed by Calc has been increased to half a million. In addition, a Find and Replace dialog and spell checking support have been added to Writer, Calc and Impress.

Builds of the latest LibreOffice Online source code are available as Docker images: https://hub.docker.com/r/libreoffice/online/. Background on LibreOffice Online: https://nextcloud.documentfoundation.org/s/scDjtQPATAzpeyE.

LibreOffice Viewer for Android

The upcoming release of LibreOffice Viewer for Android will be able to create new documents, will offer a tab-based toolbar with formatting options, and will let users add pictures either from the camera or from a file stored locally or in the cloud. In addition, the Calc user interface will be improved with column headers, while Impress will offer a presentation mode. The release is planned during the first quarter of 2018.

Enterprise deployments

LibreOffice 6.0 represents the bleeding edge in term of features for open source office suites, and as such is targeted at technology enthusiasts, early adopters and power users.
For enterprise class deployments, TDF maintains the more mature 5.4 family – now at 5.4.4 – which should always be supported by certified professionals (a list is available here: 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 by The Document Foundation.

LibreOffice is deployed by large organizations in every continent. A list of the most significant migrations announced in the media is available on TDF wiki: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/LibreOffice_Migrations.

Availability of LibreOffice 6.0

LibreOffice 6.0 is immediately available from the following link: https://www.libreoffice.org/download/. Minimum requirements for proprietary operating systems are Microsoft Windows 7 SP1 and Apple macOS 10.9.

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

LibreOffice 6.0 is built with document conversion libraries from the Document Liberation Project: https://www.documentliberation.org.

Press Kit

The press kit, with background documents – Hybrid PDF, opened from within LibreOffice can be edited as normal ODT files – and high-resolution images, is here: https://nextcloud.documentfoundation.org/s/0hAzrnp6ecLJwbe.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Earlier this month we talked to the localisation community about the preparations they are making for LibreOffice 6.0, which is due to be released in late January (or early February). Now we turn to the documentation project, and Olivier Hallot, who is coordinating updates to guidebooks and a new help system…

What has the documentation community been working on in preparation for LibreOffice 6.0?

The community is engaged in delivering two major features for the 6.0 release: the first is a new and updated Getting Started Guide, a book targeted at new users of LibreOffice 6.0. We included the latest developments that are in the scope of an introductory text for LibreOffice 6.0. For 2018 we are assembling a team of writers to update our other guides, starting with the Calc Guide.

The other major feature is the new LibreOffice help system, a completely redesigned help system that now uses the operating system’s web browser to display help pages. Here’s a screenshot from the LibreOffice 6.0 release notes, showing how it looks in a mobile web browser:

What are your favourite new features in this release?

I always appreciate applications that have beautiful aesthetics. When choosing between two applications or desktop environments with the same features, I take the one that’s good-looking and has a well-crafted user interface. There are so many excellent programs with clumsy interfaces or ugly aesthetics struggling to survive. It is purely subjective but in the end, beauty pays. So my take for 6.0 are the features that bring a better and nicer UI: new icons, toolbars and redesigned dialogs. Here’s a preview of the Elementary icon set, which will be included in 6.0:

Aesthetics, together with essential technology evolutions, were the drive to develop our new help system based on web technology. We expect to open an avenue for improving the contents of our help with multimedia, animations and better navigation – altogether bringing a modern web experience for our users who are reading the help.

What tools and services do you use in the documentation community?

At the moment we use Plone as our document repository, and we have a workflow for editing, revision and publication. Released documents are available on our documentation website for download, and some l10n (localisation) communities prefer to use the TDF wiki.

With the recent developments in LibreOffice Online, I am planning to use it for document editing and production, in a simpler way than using Plone. LibreOffice Online is by far the best online editor for OpenDocument formatted files, and is an essential feature for preserving our current documents and making editing easier.

For 2018, we will work to develop an special online editor for help files, making it easier for occasional contributors to make changes to the content.

Finally, how can people get involved with the documentation community?

The first step is to read this page and follow the instructions there. We need good software documenters, along with people who really know how an office suite works, and who are capable of writing about new features with authority.

Thanks Olivier, and thanks to the whole documentation community for their work in LibreOffice 6.0. Over the next few weeks, we’ll be talking to other projects, including QA and development – keep checking this blog for updates.

‎Support for OpenDocument

While most of the posts on this blog are about LibreOffice, another project overseen by The Document Foundation is DLP – the Document Liberation Project. Whereas LibreOffice is an end-user application, DLP is a collection of free and open source software libraries that help to convert document formats. Developers can use these libraries in their programs, in order to import and export a large variety of files – including proprietary formats. Many well-known applications use DLP libraries, including Inkscape, Scribus, Calligra and of course LibreOffice.

So, what happened in DLP throughout 2017? Read on for our round-up of the year’s news…

New import filter: QuarkXPress

Aleksas Pantechovskis, as part of the Google Summer of Code, worked on a new import filter for QuarkXPress documents: libxqp. It currently supports QuarkXPress 3.1 – 4.1 documents, and this image shows it in action (original QuarkXPress file on the left, and how it’s converted into OpenDocument on the right):

Big improvements to Lotus 123 import

Laurent Alonso made some major improvements to the Lotus 123 filter, adding support for many formatting and layout options. Check out these pictures as an example – the top shows a Lotus 123 file in LibreOffice 5.3, missing almost all of its formatting. Underneath, however, you can see how it’s rendered in LibreOffice 5.4, with much more of the formatting present (click for bigger):

New library releases

Throughout the year, many libraries were updated as well. Here’s a summary:

• 2 Aug – libepubgen 0.0.1 – This fixes escaping of HTML entities, and the code has been updated to C++11
• 12 Sep – libwpd 0.10.2X – Also updated to C++11, and includes various fixes from OSS-Fuzz
• 12 Sep – libwpg 0.3.2 – Improves performance of reading image data from WPG2 files
• 14 Sep – libzmf 0.0.2 – Minor code cleanups and some fixes from OSS-Fuzz
• 15 Sep – libcdr 0.1.4 – Fixes issues found by Coverity, and require C++11 for build
• 16 Sep – libfreehand 0.1.2 – Parses more features, including text on paths, stroke patterns, arrows, and custom line and fill styles
• 21 Oct – libvisio 0.1.6 – Various improvements to import of MS Visio files, plus Coverity and OSS-Fuzz fixes
• 23 Oct – libetonyek 0.1.7 – Improves support for gradients, cell styles, non-RGB colours, and table border lines
• 13 Dec – libepubgen 0.1.0 – EPUB3 support, plus support for embedded fonts, cover images and footnotes
• 13 Dec – writerperfect 0.9.6 – Adds support for StarOffice Writer and Zoner Draw documents, and includes universal conversion tools

Find out more!

For details on the libraries mentioned above, see the projects page on the site. And check out the contribute page to see how you can help – because even if you’re not a developer, you can prepare sample documents for testing. Oh, and to learn more about DLP, watch this short video!

LibreOffice has turned seven on September 28, 2017. When we launched our first press release on September 28, 2010, our entire mailing list was quite small: 200 recipients gathered from different sources with journalists and media contacts from all over the world.

During these seven years, my main task has been media relations. One of the most important objectives has been the improvement of the mailing lists, both in terms of quantity and quality.

Today, after seven years, the size of the database has changed dramatically, as we have almost 19,000 email address in our mailing lists, which are targeted based on country, platform (desktop, iOS, Android, mobile, cloud) and focus (security and reviews). In 2017, we have started to target industry analysts, but this list is far from being complete.

Based on geography, we have 6 global lists (journalists, analysts, teams), 70 lists for Europe, 30 lists for the Americas, 5 lists for Pacific, 21 lists for Africa, 18 lists for Asia Middle East, 17 lists for Asia, and 24 lists for Asia Far East. In addition, around 5,000 records are updated and 2,500 are added each year.

Lists are global by country, plus each country – when possible – has a specific list of people who opened a previous press release. Thanks to this targeted database, we have a hit rate around 30%, twice as much as the global PR industry.

For major announcements, individual emails are sent to friendly journalists with a specific angle. I am connected to over 2,000 journalists via LinkedIn, and I have regular contacts with many of them.

Of course, taking care of mailing lists would not be enough without a monthly average of 50 personal contacts with editors, via email and/or phone, and over 100 answers to specific requests (pictures, statistics, review related questions and other info about TDF and LibreOffice).

Another project I have been working at is the production of basic slide decks on different subjects, which can be used by community members to create their own slide decks for presentations. At the moment I am working at updating the following slide decks: Project History & Background, LibreOffice & Competitive Presentation, Document Standards & Open Document Format, Advantages of ODF vs OOXML, Migration Protocol & Training Protocol, plus Useful Slides for Presentations. I also have less organized slides about Digital Citizenship, or the relationship between Technology and Individual Freedom of Choice.

Community members are warmly invited to send me an email to check if I have something which can help them to add some beef to their presentations. In fact, in some cases I test slide decks – adding new angles and concepts – in front of small audiences, before releasing them “officially” on the wiki.

Looking forward, I plan to bring analyst relations up to speed (as media), and improve community-focused activities, supporting the organization of local events and participate when it makes sense budget wise. I would also like to facilitate NLP (native language projects) involvement in the project, helping the integration of local communities within TDF and fostering their growth when they are small or even completely missing.

Update Agesic reference

"one of the great events for openSUSE community (i.e., both contributors, and users) in Asia. Those who usually communicate online can get together from all over the world, talk face to face, and have fun. Members of the community will share their most recent knowledge, experiences, and learn FLOSS technologies surrounding openSUSE."

Sponsor board and event board.  See "LibreOffice: The Document Foundation" logo!

Talk highlight

Opening Talk: LibreOffice: The Office Suite with Mixing Bowl Culture, by Naruhiko Ogasawara

Not only the full talk in mini-conference, but he also had a lightning talk on 21st Oct evening. by hisa_x.  Flickr link

I thought "interoperability" was a keyword of the mini-conference (coincidentally, many talks mentioned that).

State of CJK issues of LibreOffice, by Shinji Enoki

Shinji wearing Rome conference T-shirt. Cool! by hisa_x. Flickr link

https://speakerdeck.com/enoki/state-of-cjk-issues-of-libreoffice-libreoffice-miniconf

Shinji Enoki is a member of LibreOffice Japanese Team (Japanese NLP), same as mine.  He continuously attended LibreOffice Conference for years, and this talk was "replay" of last global conference talk in Rome.
In The Next Decade Manifesto,

WE COMMIT OURSELVES:  to support the preservation of mother tongues by encouraging all peoples to translate, document, support, and promote our office productivity tools in their mother tongue

Then, not only UI/document translations but language-dependent features work well is also important.   But sometimes it is quite hard for developers to understand what is "work well" in language which is not his/her mother tongue.  Especially CJK, RTL for a developer who uses latin language.  So we, Asian users have to improve LibreOffice by ourselves and to help developers to go the right way.
He introduced current status of CJK issues with examples such as IVS problem, and several resources provided by the project:

• CJK Metabug
• LibreOffice CJK telegram group

Introduction to Japanese Darkness "Excel Houganshi," by Rin Nakamura

Rin Nakamura talking about Excel Houganshi. by hisa_x. Flickr link

Hmm... it is quite hard to explain what the talk means because it very tied to Japanese culture... but I'm trying.

"Houganshi (方眼紙)" means "graph paper," paper with pre-printed square grids.  In Japan, it is common to use Excel like as Houganshi, to make all cell width and height exactly same.  You can easily see so many "Excel Houganshi" via google images.
Nakamura-san claimed "You don't do this (to create "Excel Houganshi"), then introduced an example that he was bothered by such Excel Houganshi, and demonstrated the trick to make it a proper document based on it.

His message was "use tools (like office suite) with proper way."   Excel Houganshi has been a good technic in "print to paper" era, but in the digital era, it became "Japanese Darkness" culture.  No one wants to maintain Excel Houganshi document.  So, the talk was strongly related to Franklin's talk;  Excel Houganshi is exchangeable, but NOT interoperable.

Write Your Story with OpenSource, by Umul Sidikoh

Umul talking with demonstrations. by Edwin Zakaria. Flickr link

https://www.slideshare.net/Umulsidikoh/write-your-story-with-open-source

Umul from Indonesia told us how to write a document using Writer style features, with lots of demonstrations.  Live demo sometimes makes us very frustrated, but she tried well :).
This talk also related to interoperability.  Using style feature makes documents more interoperable.  It is "right way" to use Writer, instead of insert new line, white space or specify font directly, as Franklin mentioned.
I heard that this was her first overseas trip and she seemed to enjoy both the conference and Tokyo.  I believe it was a great step for her to move forward to contributing LibreOffice, and she'll continue to contribute us, with contacting other LibreOffice people.

How to build LibreOffice on your desktop, by Masataka Kondo

(Oops, I couldn't find out his photo... ><)

https://www.slideshare.net/masatakakondo16/how-to-build-libreoffice-on-your-desktop-81057881

LibreOffice is open source software.  It means, we could build LibreOffice from source code by ourselves.  Kondo-san, another member of LibreOffice Japanese Team, introduced LibreOffice building-how-to with openSUSE and Linux Mint.

Franklin commented we also could try with Docker (and he let us know the link).  I never tried to use Docker to build LibreOffice, then I would like to try near future.

Lightning Talks

openSUSE.Asia Summit has 2 lightning talk sessions in evening each of day.

In day 1 session, Franklin presented "Become a TDF Member."  It was fantastic!  Everyone was bursting laughing :).

https://speakerdeck.com/fweng322/become-a-tdf-member

In day 2 (the day of LibreOffice mini-conference) session, two interns from iCraft, the company which provides LibreOffice support in Japan and sponsored openSUSE.Asia Summit, had talks related their home country (Tunisia and Ethiopia) and LibreOffice.  They are also very interested.

TRABELSI Mohamed talking about Tunisia and LibreOffice, by hisa_x, Flickr link

Aschalew Arega Ademe talking about Ethiopian IT / FLOSS includes LibreOffice, by hisa_x, Flickr link

What is a "LibreOffice mini-conference"?  Is this different from LibreOffice Kaigi?

Anyway, I would like to explain that ;)

In my personal opinion, since LibreOffice is a consumer product, it is important that there are events where users can participate it by their mother tongue. That's why there is LibreOffice Kaigi. "Kaigi" is taken from a Japanese word "会議" means "conference," which means that it is the event for Japanese speakers by Japanese speakers. Of course, it is respect for RubyKaigi (the annual conference of the programming language Ruby), too.
Nonetheless, for the community members, of course, international exchange is also very important. We already have an annual event called LibreOffice Conference which is a wonderful opportunity to exchange information and opinions. However, the LibreOffice Conference is held in Europe (I do not want to say that is a bad thing), it is a bit difficult for Asian "neighbors" to gather. We use different mother tongues, but we live in a similar time zone, similar culture, so there should be something we can do together. Therefore, I think that it is better to have an "international, regional" conference. That is a "mini-conference."

Conclusion

Speakers group photo in our booth, by Edwin Zakaria. Flickr link

Note:

Fixed word processing and graphics link

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

IBM i (formerly AS/400) SQL tool provides XMLX support for output only.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Updated link as previous was 404-ing

Bot: link syntax

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 2018, it will be held on Saturday, February 3, and Sunday, February 4.

As usual, the Open Document Editors DevRoom will be jointly organized by Apache OpenOffice and LibreOffice, on Saturday, February 3 (from 10:30AM to 6:30PM, room AW1.120). 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 standard document format, on topics such as code, localization, QA, UX, extensions, 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: https://penta.fosdem.org/submission/FOSDEM18.

While filing your proposal, please provide the title of your talk, a short abstract (one or two paragraphs), some information about yourself (name, bio and photo, but please do remember that your profile might be already stored at Pentabarf).

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@fosdem.org.

The deadline is Monday, December 4th, 2017. Accepted speakers will be notified by Monday, December 11th, 2017. The schedule will be published by Friday, December 15, 2017.

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”.

At the recent LibreOffice Conference in Rome, we took the opportunity to meet up and talk to various contributors to the project, like Franklin Weng from Taiwan. Franklin is helping to get LibreOffice and the Open Document Format (ODF) adopted by governments and enterprises. In this interview, he talks about his strategy and experiences. (English subtitles available – click the Settings cog.)

ODF Plugfest 2017

Tomorrow, Tuesday 10th of October, we will be having the 13th ODF Plugfest. It is being held in Rome and on-line.

‎Support for OpenDocument

Reverted edits by 121.181.198.200 (talk) to last version by 82.29.90.82

Undid revision 803230618 by 82.29.90.82 (talk)

‎Response

Results of survey amongst desktop users confirm project’s momentum

Berlin, September 28, 2017 – Today, the LibreOffice community celebrates the 7th anniversary of the leading free office suite, adopted by millions of users in every continent. Since 2010, there have been 14 major releases and dozens of minor ones, fulfilling the personal productivity needs of both individuals and enterprises, on Linux, macOS and Windows.

LibreOffice deployments are supported by certified developers and professionals (list available at: https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/professional-support/). Many are employed by companies sitting in TDF’s Advisory Board (https://www.documentfoundation.org/governance/advisory-board/), who provide either value-added Long Term Supported versions of LibreOffice or consultancy services for development, migrations and training.

LibreOffice is available in over 100 native languages, and as such is contributing to the preservation of native cultural heritages, as in the case – for instance – of the Guarani language in South America, and the Venitian language in Northern Italy. All localizations are managed by local volunteers.

LibreOffice is also a reference implementation of the Open Document Format (ODF) ISO standard for office documents, which today represents the only choice in the market for true interoperability.

Results of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS Default Desktop Applications Survey

LibreOffice’s leadership amongst office suites has been recently confirmed by the survey of Ubuntu users for desktop productivity software, with 85.52% of the votes. The closest competitors were Google Docs with 4.29%, WPS Office with 3.22% and Apache OpenOffice with 1.96%.

The Ubuntu 18.04 LTS Default Desktop Applications Survey produced over 15,000 responses in total, with over 6,400 for the office suite category. LibreOffice received the largest margin of preference of the entire survey. Results are available here: http://blog.dustinkirkland.com/2017/09/results-of-ubuntu-desktop-applications.html (video and slides).

Download LibreOffice

Current versions of LibreOffice are available for download from the following link: https://www.libreoffice.org/download/.

LibreOffice users, free software advocates and community members can support The Document Foundation with a donation at https://www.libreoffice.org/donate/. Donations help TDF to maintain its infrastructure, share knowledge, and organise events such as the LibreOffice Conference, with the next one taking place in October in Rome (https://conference.libreoffice.org).

LibreOffice’s native file format is the fully standardised OpenDocument Format. This is ideal for long-term storage of data, but many of us have to work with other file formats as well, including those generated by proprietary software. The Document Liberation Project (DLP) develops libraries to help us access these files, and there have been various updates in the last two weeks, so let’s see what’s new:

• libfreehand 0.1.2 – This is a library for importing Aldus/Macromedia/Adobe FreeHand documents. In this release, the library can import more elements, such as text on paths, text effects, stroke patterns, arrows and paragraph attributes.
• libzmf 0.0.2 and libcdr 0.1.4 – libzmf is a library for importing Zoner drawing and bitmap files, currently supporting Callisto/Draw 4-5 and Bitmap, while libcdr is a library that parses the file format of CorelDRAW documents of all versions. Both have been made more secure thanks to OSS-Fuzz, which we talked about recently, and there have been build fixes as well.
• libwpg 0.3.2 and libwpd 0.10.2 – The former is for importing WordPerfect Graphics images, and has performance improvements when reading image data from WPG2 files, while the latter has had build system improvements and also fixes from the aforementioned OSS-Fuzz.

These improvements will be included in future major releases of LibreOffice, and indeed other open source programs that use Document Liberation Project libraries.

Meanwhile, DLP developer Laurent Alonso sent us this great before-and-after picture, showing recent improvements to the import of Lotus 123 spreadsheets. At the top you can see a Lotus 123 file (that contains lots of formatting) being displayed in LibreOffice 5.3 – but the formatting is missing. Thanks to improvements in DLP libraries, though, LibreOffice 5.4 can read and display the spreadsheet much more accurately, as you can see underneath (click for bigger):

The DLP community appreciates all contributions, and even if you’re not a coder, there are many ways to help – such as documenting file formats, or preparing sample documents. To learn more about DLP, check out our short video:

Updating PCWorld article link

Bot: HTTP→HTTPS

The thirteenth ODF plugfest will be hosted by the City of Rome, with support from Logius and organised by OpenDoc Society.

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

updated reference link from using http to https

The autonomous province of Trento (Italy) is revitalising its promotion of the use of free and open source software in education. In the coming months, the province will provide schools with training on free software and open standards.

In July, the province’s Institute for Educational Research (Istituto provinciale per la ricerca e la sperimentazione educativa, IPRASE) teamed up with LibreItalia, an organisation advocating the use of free software and open standards, in particular the use of the LibreOffice suite of office productivity tools.

read more