• Into Cambridge for an interview with Chris in the morning - had lunch together.
• Thrilled to see Dennis' multivariate regression work for Calc pushed & published - go Dennis.
• CP board meeting; drove home, customer call, took H., M., Elize & Alish to Soham for the Young Musician of the Year competition / concert - good music, home. Built ESC minutes, bed.

There’s a lot going on in the LibreOffice community, in the lead up to LibreOffice 6.1, in development, documentation, design, QA, translations and much more. Here’s a summary of news and updates in June…

• LibreOffice 6.0.5 was announced, and includes almost 100 bug and regression fixes. See the announcement for the full details.

• We started posting out stickers to contributors from the Month of LibreOffice, May 2018 – a big thanks to everyone who took part! We hope you enjoy receiving these in the post…

• The Document Foundation announced the results of the image handling rework tender. Collabora was selected to do the work, and we posted a technical summary of the results.

• The LibreOffice Conference 2018 is coming up on September, and the call for papers is still open until July 15. If you’re attending the conference (and you totally should!), you can submit a presentation idea here.

• We talked to Andreas Kanz from the LibreOffice design community. He described the new table styles, icon themes and Notebookbar improvements he has been working on – take a look and see how you can help too!

• And, of course, there was progress towards LibreOffice 6.1. A second beta release was made available, while preparations were made for the next Bug Hunting Session. Join in the testing to make it a super-solid release!

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!

Recently I added the support for doing multivariate regression in LibreOffice Calc via its regression tool along with other related improvements. Now the regression analysis output includes a lot more statistical measures including confidence interval for all estimated parameters.

The improved regression tool in Calc can be accessed via Data > Statistics > Regression
Here is a screenshot of the regression dialog box showing the new features highlighted with red boxes.

Lets go through each of these new features –

A.  Now you can enter a single range that contains multiple X variable observations (along columns or rows). In this example the data-set contains three X variables namely My_X1, My_X2 and My_X3 and the dependent variable My_Y. To do a regression on this data, enter the range A1:C11 to the “Independent variable(s) (X) range” box and the range D1:D11 to the “Dependent variable (Y) range” box as shown above in the figure. With this data we want to estimate the slopes and intercept of a linear function relating the Y and X variables given by :-

My_Y  =  Slope_1 * My_X1   +   Slope_2 * My_X2   +   Slope_3 * My_X3    +    Intercept

B.  The user can now let the regression tool know that the data ranges for X and Y have text labels (or variable names) in them.

C.  In earlier versions, the regression tool only computed the slope and intercepts, so there was no way of knowing how uncertain these numbers are. Now the users can specify confidence level as a percentage and the tool will compute the corresponding confidence intervals for each of the estimates (namely the slopes and intercept).

D.  Finally now there is a way to opt out of computing the residuals for all observations. This is beneficial to someone who is only interested in the slopes and intercept estimates and their statistics.

Following screenshot shows the output of the regression tool.

So, for our toy dataset the estimates for Slope_1 = 0.0075 (Cell B42), Slope_2 = 0.0343 (Cell B43), Slope_3 = 1.0663 (Cell B44) and the Intercept = 101.4513 (Cell B41). The 95% confidence interval for these estimates are in the columns F and G. For example Intercept’s 95% confidence interval is [98.6231, 104.2795].

Note that the above is the result of a linear regression. We can do logarithmic and power regression with multiple X variables as well in the same way.

These new features can be seen in the current development build of LibreOffice Calc and will be available in the 6.2 release. The source code patch for these features can be seen at https://bit.ly/2KI3aVk

I would like to thank Collabora Productivity for their continuous support and encouragement to work on this feature.

LibreOffice users around the world help developers to test new features and fix bugs before a new version is released. After the first and second Bug Hunting Sessions of LibreOffice 6.1, which were held on April 27th 2018 and May 28th 2018 respectively, we’re glad to announce the third Bug Hunting Session on July 6th – the last one before the release of LibreOffice 6.1!

LibreOffice 6.1 is due to be released in mid August with many new features described in the release notes and this is our last chance to test and find issues before its release.

In order to find, report and triage bugs, the tests during the Third Bug Hunting Session will be performed on the first Release Candidate version of LibreOffice 6.1, which will be available on the pre-releases server on the day of the event. Builds will be available for Linux (DEB and RPM), macOS and Windows.

Mentors will be available on July 6th 2018, from 7.00 UTC to 19:00 UTC for questions or help in the IRC channel: #libreoffice-qa (connect via webchat) and its Telegram bridge and there will be a dedicated session to test the new offline help system available in LibreOffice 6.1 from 14:00 and 16:00 UTC.

Of course, hunting bugs will be possible also on other days, as the builds of this particular Release Candidate (LibreOffice 6.1.0 RC1) will be available until the end of July, when the second Release Candidate will be available.

With your help, we can make LibreOffice 6.1 the best release yet – thanks!

• Mail; admin, product team call, managed to finally get J's and my gmail / Android calendars to sync. up after another horrible scheduling conflict. Skype call with great news from Rob & Amelia.

LibreOffice is working and already can be installed via HaikuDepot. Here is the full announcement https://discuss.haiku-os.org/t/libreoffice-is-now-available-for-haiku/6917

I started this week with adding support to one of the feature “txAnchorVert” which specifies the y-axis anchoring of the text area in a shape, but due to the problem I was facing in git, I was unable to push the patch.

However, I think the problem is solved and I have pushed the patch of Unit test for snake algorithm based smartarts, which tests the position of the child nodes in normal from left to right layout and from right to left layout, but I think it should show merge conflict as it is related to one of the patch which is not merged, but it’s not showing merge conflict.

I’ll be including more unit tests in order to check the smartart features, smartart documents, and will fix some of the issues in the upcoming week.

• Played at All Saints in the morning; stayed for meal with the church. Home to play Vive with Alfie; afternoon movie Wonder - interesting, read stories to babes.

• J. out much of the day with Louise; riveted E's netball hoop and put it up on the trampoline; needs some adhesive to stop it rotating. Some mail bits.

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.

• Mail chew; call with Kendy & Miklos, a frenzy of estimating and processing the admin backlog.

At FOSS Backstage 2018 in Berlin I had the opportunity to give a talk about “The Document Foundation: The open, transparent and meritocratic future of free office software”. I’ll tell you what The Document Foundation is about, how it’s built and what our core values and principles are.

Find the full video here.
(External link to YouTube.)

Video of my talk about The Document Foundation

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

I finished my work on the update of the two Plone add-ons which I used for the LibreOffice extensions and templates website. I published a new release for each of them. Today I updated the website with the new features of this add-ons. I run a buildout script for this. The  site was only a few minutes offline and is available already again.

It is possible to remove items from the list of available licenses without side effects for already published releases with the outdated (etc.) licenses now.

The LibreOffice extensions and templates website runs on the Content Management System (CMS) Plone and uses some plug-ins that I created. I’m currently working on a new feature for this plug-ins, which make possible to remove licenses from the selectable list without any issues for former releases with such licenses.

This week, I have written unit test regarding the Basic block diagram, for normal i.e., from right to left as well as for reverse i.e., from left to right, but i don’t know why, jenkins is comparing that unit test with old code base that was without my change, I am working to find out what could be the possible cause for this.

I plan to write unit tests for various smartarts, such that when they are fixed we can find out by the unit test if anything is wrong or not.

Moreover, I am trying to fix some issues regarding smartart-pyramid and working to fix the issues where visibility of the bullets is off.

Yesterday I was reviewing a nice feature implemented by the User Experience Team of LibreOffice about the Style menu in WRITER. Like all help pages I review, I must test and explore the feature, looking to get the benefits but also to note the possible pitfalls.

What caught my attention was a nice combination of LibreOffice UI and menu customization. LibreOffice allows documents to carry the customized user interface menus, toolbars and much more. If you have a document that requires a specific set of commands you can customize the user interface in Tools - Customize and store the user interface in your document. When opening the document in another machine with LibreOffice, the user interface carried by the document is displayed. I used this feature professionally when I had to convert some old Excel macros to LibreOffice and the macros had hundreds of lines just to modify the user interface. I drop these lines, did the changes in UI once and stored in the document.



So I applied the same strategy to the Styles menu. I was glad to see that you can format your document with little amount click or by activating the style menu with the keyboard. All my custom style were in the menu.

Then closed my document and opened a new document. I wanted to apply my custom styles as before but hey... it does not work. The custom styles were just doing nothing.

The trick is to customize the Styles menu with your preferred styles and add them to your document instead of the LibreOffice Writer interface (the default). This detail slipped under my nose.



Lessons learned: If you want a document with custom styles in the Styles menu, create a template with your custom styles and custom user interface and each new document based on the template will have everything set up.

Happy Text Styling !

Here's what the native GTK widget mode for the color picker looks like at the moment under Wayland. A GtkMenuButton displaying a color preview of the currently selected color and a GtkPopover containing the color selection widgetry.

While under X, because there the GtkPopover is constrained to its parents size, falling back to using a GtkWindow to contain the widgetry

Last week I wrote a quite long help page on a poorly known feature of LibreOffice aimed to Basic macro programmers.

LibreOffice - since it was named OpenOffice.org long time ago - carried a set of Basic libraries with no documentation (that I was able to find). The libraries were created to support some important features such as Euro conversion or WikiEditor, but also had a set of modules and macro very handy for the ad-hoc or professional Basic programmer of LibreOffice.

The library is distributed in the LibreOffice installers and can be opened in the LibreOffice Macros container, accessible when opening the Basic IDE.





I got fond of the TOOLS library because it has many handy macros that otherwise requires quite a lot of hard code writing and LibreOffice API knowledge even for simple operations.

Things like getting the last used row in a spreadsheet, get the value of a cell, get the filename out of a long URI are the kind of Function's and Sub's we don't want to write again but use GetLastUsedRow, GetValueofCellbyName or FileNameoutofPath for the task.

To use the LibreOffice Tools library , add the statement

GlobalScope.BasicLibraries.LoadLibrary("Tools")

before the first macro of your module. The help page is already online in 

https://help.libreoffice.org/6.1/en-US/text/sbasic/shared/03/lib_tools.html

Note that not every library is described in details in the set of Help pages but if you feel motivated to peek in the code and write a simple description of the remaining modules and macros, join our documentation team!

Happy macro programming!

LibreOffice get new app icons. The style is the same than before cause I love the existing work. So in general it’s only a more flat app icon set cause it fit’s now better into the design language of the operation systems and desktop environmental.

As I don’t have OS-X it would be very helpful if someone can generate the (38) .icns icon files. All files are available in svg and png.

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.

Last week was the week of evaluation with minor fixes in the code I submitted.

I got information about the Coverity error in my submitted patch “Corrected Line Algorithm” : “*** CID 1436015: Code maintainability issues (UNUSED_VALUE)”.

I’ve fixed that in this week. Moreover, child width and height doesn’t depend on nIncX and nIncY, so I’ve removed that code, it relates only to the position of the child. I’ve submitted the patch with the name “coverity#1436015 UNUSED_VALUE” and it has been merged.

There is no such significant change in the rendering of the smartart but it was important for future changes.

I have also submitted the unit test for the Line Algorithm which asserts the position of the child nodes as well as it asserts that the child nodes are in the same horizontal level.

I’ll submit more unit tests in the coming week with some major changes in the smartarts, and will be adding the test documents to test the rendering of the shapes.

P.S. I passed my first evaluation. Thanks to the whole community.

Well, lately the TDF Wiki Admins luckily hadn’t much to do, but well I still do want to provide some statistics as the results are very impressive.

Our activated “abuse filter” has caught 2214 edits in the the time from 26 March 2018 to 12 June 2018 (so within 78 days) done by 1244 users. Be careful in interpreting the data as after many weeks the spammer detected the problem and tried to hit enter multiple times but with a new session (so all the accounts do not get blocked, part 2 of the rule was never hit except one false positive and by one of my test accounts!).

 

For a very short test in the night this filter seems very successful at the moment at least for my nerves for the last 3 months. Finger crossed that this stays so in our wiki (and of course all other platforms we provide – if they have spam problems, I do not know, except nabble)!

Some manually work still include 9 classical spammers (so it seems somebody other) who tried to post something in the “main space” / “article space” which we need to block and delete manually, but in 78 days this were only 9 times!!! That’s admin work as I love it: concentrate on the content, not fighting spam!

To mention: another abuse filter which hits much more the false positive, but is alive since ages has protected us from another 5 edits by 4 users from spam. This is ok, as the warning was reworked to make it more clearly what we do want and that most regular users also got excluded finally…

At FOSS Backstage 2018 in Berlin I had the opportunity to give a talk about “The Document Foundation: The open, transparent and meritocratic future of free office software”. I’ll tell you what The Document Foundation is about, how it’s built and what our core values and principles are.

The slides are available for download (PDF file, 7,8 MB).

The Document Foundation – The open, transparent and meritocratic future of free office software (talk at FOSS Backstage 2018)

This presentation was recorded at GOTO Chicago 2018 C++ is an old language only used by the unfortunate few that absolutely have to, right? Wrong! C++ is not the language it used to be: clunky, error-prone and lacking in tooling. A lot has changed in the last decade: three new language revisions, new compilers and all-new: [...] Download slides and read the full abstract here: https://

Hi,

From now on you need the newest updater JAR. I hate that this happened… Updater download

Bottom line: The main application is no longer a ZIP, which needs to be extracted. From now one it is a JAR file, which can be started by a double click…. Therefore the updater procedure had to be changed.

I am sorry for this change, but I am quite sure that should not happen too often ( I do not want to say “should not happen again”, but I would not know a reason to change that again…)