Our global community of volunteers, represented by The Document Foundation and based on many independent native language projects, is one of the main strengths of LibreOffice. Starting from today, we launch a new weekly blog post – scheduled on Wednesday – focused on community activities: events, seminars, conferences, projects with schools and central or local government bodies, achievements, etcetera. We want to show the world how diverse and inclusive is our community, and at the same time we want our community members to be proud of being part of it.

One of the largest and strongest LibreOffice communities is based in Indonesia. From March 23 to March 25, 2018, they will organize their first LibreOffice Conference Indonesia in Surabaya: 3 days of meetings based on Workshops, Seminars, Discussions about The Document Foundation, and gathering of LibreOffice advocates and activists. The event is also intended to be a form of thanks to LibreOffice developers who have provided the outstanding free software solution.

LibreOffice Conference Indonesia will be hosted by the Politeknik Elektronika Negeri Surabaya. The event will start on March 23 with a workshop focused on testing LibreOffice builds and localizations, and will follow on March 24 with a full day of seminars on everything LibreOffice, from an introduction to LibreOffice 6.0 to success stories and technical talks. The last day, March 25, will be dedicated to the meeting of LibreOffice Indonesian community members. Call for Papers is already open, and will close on February 8, 2018.

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.

Starting from today, we launch a weekly blog post focused on marketing topics. We will try to provide ammunition to community members advocating LibreOffice and the Open Document Format, and food for thought to people still trying to understand the viability of FOSS on the desktop.

Let’s start with some numbers about LibreOffice.

Although LibreOffice defect density score – according to Coverity Scan – has been around 0.00 per 1,000 lines of code for ages, we should never forget that it is the outstanding result of the commitment to quality of LibreOffice developers (and we should always mention it with pride when we present the software).

The bulk of the activity related to Coverity Scan weekly reports is under the responsibility of Red Hat developers, but we cannot forget that the result is related to the quality of the entire development process. Of course, LibreOffice – as any other software – is not immune from bugs and regressions, but improvements with every new version have been acknowledged by both enterprise and individual users.

Let’s have a look at development numbers provided by OpenHub. During the last 12 months (2017) there have been 15,389 commits by 244 contributors, and during the last 30 days (December 2017) there have been 1,334 commits by 88 contributors. The chart on the left shows that during the last three years the monthly number of contributors has been rather stable, with highs close to 100 and lows close to 75.

After Coverity Scan and OpenHub, which are independent sources, next week we will analyze an internal tool for the analysis of development-related information: TDF Dashboard.

• Off to All Saints, enjoyed the family service; back for lunch, Got N's minetest pieces going nicely with her, played Smash-Up, with the family, Organ practice with H. Detectorists before bed.

I worked on a small update of the Plone add-ons that I created to run the new LibreOffice extensions and templates website. The source code of this update went to the github repository of the Document Foundation and I published a new release of the Plone add-ons on the cheeseshop.

I updated the LibreOffice extensions and templates website with the new code of the add-ons via buildout today.

• Breakfast in bed for J. - babes did homework, re-silicone'd the shower window, took H. into Cambridge; slugging away from the cold with the family; Julie over in the evening.

• Moderately irritated (as a remain voter) by the repeated, flaccid argument (now on the BBC) that old voters (who are dying out) voted for Brexit, and young people voted to stay: so things are somehow unfair. What a bag of hammers! It is deeply unclear to me that we should dis-enfranchise the old (and hopefully experienced & wise) in favour of the young (and arguably politically naive); but at least there is an argument there for decisions that only impact the young's future. However - the idea that as young people age and they experience life (or their brains ossify) - that their political views remain entirely static seems really unlikely and is an intrinsic assumption here. The old of today would seem to me to be a good proxy for the views of the old of tomorrow.
• Worked on nailing some contract / admin backlog. Fixed a bug at lunch. Intersted to see the X86_BUG_CPU_INSECURE patch from AMD.

• Mail chew; admin, sync with Jona, then Kendy, ESC call.
• Irritated by dish-washer, why is it that a dish-washer cannot have a colored LED on the front with a large diffuser that shows green: if it has been through a wash-cycle, and the door has not been opened yet (ie. 'clean'), that slowly decays into red over a minute or so after opening the door. The current effort has an un-lit display to denote both dirty and clean states, with a lit-up one for washing; hey ho.

• Up early; larger babes to school; back to work. Mail, sync with Miklos. Plugged away at admin and accumulated task backlog bits, call with Andras. Practiced bass guitar in the evening.

LibreOffice 6.0 is due to be released at the end of this month (or in early February), and you can learn about the changes in on the wiki. Closer to the release, we’ll make a short video showing off the new features in action. But as we head towards LibreOffice 6.0, we want to hear from the many communities that have contributed to this version. We start off by talking to Sophie Gautier, who has been working with the localisation community to make the software available in as many languages as possible…

What has the localisation community been doing in preparation for LibreOffice 6.0?

Each time a developer makes a change to the user interface (UI), that means some work for the localisation team, both in terms of the UI itself and the help system. And our UX/Design team has been very busy moving menu entries, designing new dialogs and making new toolbars – so all this work ends up in the hands of the translation team.

Once we have finished the translations of the suite, we have to check that our translations are correct. Sometimes, the localisation process means that you’re translating out of context, with very poor references for where you are in the interface.

Then, there are also press release preparations, new features pages for the website, videos, and all the work done by the marketing team that we have to translate and adapt to our languages, to cover the LibreOffice 6.0 launch.

What are your favourite new features in this release?

I’m not sure I have a preferred one – I’m just always amazed by the work done by the community at each level. I’m very grateful for it, but to name a few: I like the new and easy way to customise the UI, OpenPGP signing of documents, and the work done to modernise the help system.

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

Most of the teams use Pootle as an online tool for translations. Some other teams use Pootle as a repository for their files, but also use a computer-assisted translation tool (like OmegaT) to work on the files. Some others don’t use Pootle as a
repository and commit their files directly to Gerrit. We want our teams to be able to use the tools they like the best to translate.

To search for the strings in the source code and get some context (which dialog the string is in, other strings in the dialog, accelerators, etc.) we use OpenGrok which is a simplified web interface for browsing the code.

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

If a language team already exists, it’s best to contact them directly (the address can be found on our wiki). If none exists, then the best way is to ask on l10n@libreoffice.org for the creation of the language – both in LibreOffice itself, and on Pootle. We will help the newcomers with the first steps in localisation.

Also, Yousuf Philips has written a script that categorises and references the most important strings to translate at the beginning. This shows what is most visible in the interface, and will be of the most help for the users.

Thanks Sophie for that overview – and indeed, a hearty thanks to the whole localisation community for their great help with preparing LibreOffice 6.0. Over the next couple of weeks, we’ll be talking to other communities in the LibreOffice project, so stay tuned to the blog…

A smiling Michael Meks with a smiling LibreOffice icon. Happy 2018 !!!

I added a new repository for backports to my fresh installed Debian Stretch on my old netbook and installed LibreOffice 5.4.4 from this backports. The netbook is running the current stable LibreOffice yet.

15GB per month for €25, while in the neighbor country Denmark you get Unlimited GB for the same price..

• DFMonitor: Data caps and prices - country view
• Country brief: Germany (DE) - Digital Fuel Monitor
• Country brief: Denmark (DK) - Digital Fuel Monitor

I installed the Debian stretch release on my old Medion netbook from 2008. I choosed the desktop Xfce, because it is much smaller than KDE or Gnome. I used an USB Blue ray player and the netinstall cd for the installation and got further packages from a mirror. The default installation contains LibreOffice version 5.2.7.

The Notebookbar implementation Tabbed Compact is finished and can be tested. Download LibreOffice Master for

• Windows
• Linux

Configure Notebookbar:

• Tools -> Options -> Advanced -> Enable experimental features
• View -> Toolbar Layout -> Notebookbar
• View -> Notebookbar -> Tabbed Compact

And this is how it will look like

The idea of the Toolbar is that you get all actions grouped in different tabs. The benefit is that there is enough space for most actions from LibreOffice and you can show action icons and labels. In addition the UI is sizable.

Download and test it.

With many approaching the holiday season, it looks like the heated discussions about the LibreOffice mascot have settled down. It is probably too early to re-launch the project, as memories of what has happened in October and November are still rather fresh, and so we would like to share our thoughts and plans on this project with you before we the next steps are taken.…

The post LibreOffice mascot – lesson learned and an apology appeared first on LibreOffice Design Team.

I’m working on another script for the administration of the LibreOffice extensions site. I’m looking for the value that has been set for the LibreOffice version compatibility. The values are all stored in the portal_catalog of the site (I added an index for this already). I run this script for the latest stable version of LibreOffice: 5.4. The query results in a number of only 86 extension and template releases with an explicit set compatibility for LibreOffice 5.4. We need to improve this list by running tests for all other extension and template releases against LibreOffice 5.4 and also (for all releases) against the upcomming LibreOffice 6.0. I’ll publish a list of the test candidates soon and am looking for volunteers  running the tests.

Anfang November haben einige Mitglieder der deutschsprachigen Community von LibreOffice auf der Open Rhein Ruhr überlegt, für LibreOffice einen Stammtisch zu veranstalten. Er sollte in Duisburg noch im Jahr 2017 stattfinden. Ich habe dafür die Initiative ergriffen und es wurde dann – nach einer kleinen Umfrage auf der Mailingliste – der 15. Dezember.

Wir haben uns am letzten Freitag im Cafe Museum in der Duisburger Innenstadt, in fußläufiger Entfernung zum Bahnhof getroffen. Neben bekannten Gesichtern fanden auch mehrere an LibreOffice Interessierte den Weg an den Stammtisch (West). Es wurde sehr lebhaft über verschiedene Themen rund um LibreOffice und die Community diskutiert. Die Zeit verging wie im Fluge und die letzten haben erst nach fünf Stunden den Heimweg angetreten mit dem Wunsch, den Stammtisch im nächsten Jahr am gleichen Ort zu wiederholen.

Two months ago I start to finalize the existing Elementary icon theme for LibreOffice. It’s about 2.000 icons and now they are available in LibreOffice 6.0 beta. In addition all icons are available as svg file so it can be used and edit in an easy way.

Please download and test LibreOffice 6.0 beta to give feedback. You switch the icon theme with Tools -> Options -> View -> Icon Style. We talk about a lot icons not all are perfect. Feedback is always welcome.

Test LibreOffice 6.0 beta

Mary Christmas and an shiny new year with LibreOffice 6.0.

How to Prepare Labels with Libreoffice.org by Bruce Byfield.

This tutorial covers using templates, how to import images and use text, in-depth instructions on using mailmerge and more.

For more reading on using labels with Libreoffice:

Creating fancy labels with Libreoffice

Mail merge address labels with Libreoffice

Working with Barcode with Libreoffice/Openoffice

Have more questions about using labels, feel free to visit the forums and engage the community in helping you

So I’m finally resurrecting this blog to life after a long time.

I’m simply going to talk about what I’ve been currently working on in Collabora Online or LibreOffice Online, as part of my job at Collabora.

In our quest to bring more features available to our users editing documents in the browser, we are attacking something that contains the majority of the features in LibreOffice – the dialogs. One of the complaints that power users make in Online is that it lacks advanced features: they cannot add coloured borders in their paragraphs, manage tracked changes/comments, correct the spelling and grammar in the document, etc. The question before us is how do we bring these functionalities to the cloud at your disposal in your browser tab?

We really don’t want to write another million lines of code in Javascript to make them available in your browser and then dealing with separate set of bugs for time to come.

So we decided to come up with a plan to just tunnel all the hard work that developers have done for the past couple of decades: come up with appropriate infrastructure to open the dialog in headless mode, paint them as a bitmap in the backend, and tunnel then image to you in the browser. And then add life to them by tunnelling your mouse/key events as well which will invalidate and update the new image you are seeing the browser. Don’t worry; we are not sending the whole dialog image back to your browser every time. Only the part that needs updating in the dialog is sent back to the browser saving us precious time and network bandwidth improving your UX.

The current state of the project looks really promising. Not just the modeless dialogs, we are able to tunnel the modal ones as well which is not something we had expected earlier.

Since text is boring, here’s a preview that shows dialog tunnelling in action in our test tools, GtkTiledViewer. The integration with Online is ready too and undergoing some final polishing. But it’s not something you’d have to wait for too long; we are polishing a big refactor to LibreOffice core master to install the dialog infrastructure needed for integration. Now you will be able to do pretty much all the things in Online (and in CODE version 3.0 soon to be released) that you’ve always wanted to do.

Here are the slides from the talk I delivered on the same topic in our annual LibreOffice Conference in Rome this year.

Flathub is the app store for all things Flatpak. And LibreOffice is now available there, too!

When we started flatpak’ing LibreOffice, we made builds of the LibreOffice “Fresh” stream available on the Document Foundation download pages. Since LibreOffice 5.4.2, we now provide such builds through Flathub.

The benefit to you as a user is that there are builds for more architectures (currently aarch64, i386, and x86_64), and that you need to keep track of one less single-app Flatpak repo. (Check out what else is available in the Flathub repo!)

The benefit to me as provider of the original Document Foundation flatpak builds is that the Flathub infrastructure now does those builds for me. We will stop providing the Document Foundation builds after the current LibreOffice 5.4.3.

Data.gov.il was created in 2011 after the Israeli social justice protests as part of the the public participation initiative and started to offer data held by the government. Back then the website was based on Drupal. In 2016 it was changed to CKAN, a designated system for releasing data. This system is licensed under the AGPLv3 requiring source code availability for anyone who can access the the system over a network, de facto for every user.

Since the change to CKAN, open source people asked the state to release the code according to the license but didn’t get a clear answer. All this time when it’s clear it’s violation.  This led Gai Zomer to file a formal complaint in March 2017 with the Israeli State Comptroller. Absurdly, that same month the ICT authority mentioned a policy to release source code it owns, while failing to release code it has taken from others and adapted.

With the end of the summer break and Jew holidays, and after I wasn’t able to get the source, I decided to switch to legal channels, and with the help of Jonathan Klinger and my company, Kaplan Open Source Consulting, we notified they should provide the source code or we’ll address the court.

Well, it worked. In 3 days time the CKAN extensions where available on the website, but in a problematic way, so users weren’t able to download easily. This is why we decided not to publish this code release and let them fix it first. In addition we made it clear all the source code should be available, not only the extensions. Further more, if they already release it’s recommended to use git format instead of just “dumping” a tarball. So we told them if they aren’t going to make a git repository we’ll do that ourselves, but in any case, would prefer them to do that .

While this issue is still pending, the ICT authority had a conference called “the citizen 360” about e-gov and open government in which they reaffirmed their open source plans.

A slide about open source from the Israeli ICT authority presentation

Now, a month later, after our second letter to them, the about page in data.gov.il was updated with links to the ICT authority GitHub account which has the sources for the website and the extensions. A big improvement, and an important mark point as the commit to the repository was done by an official (gov.il) email address.

Beyond congratulating the Israeli ICT authority for their steps forward and the satisfaction of our insisting on them became fruitful, we would like to see the repository get updated on a regular basis, the code being given back to the various CKAN extensions (e.g. Hebrew translation). In general, we hope they would to get inspired by how the how data.gov.uk is doing technical transparency. If we allow ourselves to dream, we would like to see Israel becoming a dominate member in the CKAN community and among the other governments who use it.

We’re happy to be the catalyst for open source in the Israeli government, and we promise to keep insisted where needed. We know that due to other requests and notifications more organizations are on their way to release code.

(This post is a translation from Hebrew of a post in Kaplan Open Source Consulting at https://kaplanopensource.co.il/2017/11/20/data-gov-il-code-release/)

(Not so) recently I upgraded a Debian system from Jessie to Stretch. Along with that came an upgrade of the Digikam photo management application from version 4.x to 5.3. After starting that the first time the albums were empty. WTF? Putting the modified digikam4.db aside, creating a fresh one and restoring the old one and comparing those revealed that they differed in how the AlbumRoots path was stored. Digikam 4.x stored it as volumeid:?path=%2Fhome%2F... (with URL encoded %2F as / slashes) where Digikam 5 stores a literal / slash. Changing that to what Digikam 5 expects did the trick and the albums were there again. So when upgrading, before you start Digikam 5 for the first time, do the following (assuming the database is /home/you/Pictures/digikam4.db)

• backup your original digikam4.db file
• install the sqlitebrowser package if not installed yet
• on a terminal command line invoke: sqlitebrowser ~/Pictures/digikam4.db &
• go to the Browse Data tab
• Table: AlbumRoots
• select (click into) the identifier field
• in the right edit field change its content from volumeid:?path=%2Fhome%2Fyou%2FPictures to
  volumeid:?path=/home/you/Pictures
• Write changes and exit

Start digikam. All good (hopefully ;-)

Update 2017-11-27T14:50+01:00
Forgot to mention that when starting Digikam 5 the first time a dialog appears offering to migrate from version 4, it advises to not do so but has migration preselected, do not migrate there or it will mess things up. You may lose some existing personal preferences, but the migration for me at least simply did not work.
Related seems to be KDE bug 364258 though claimed to be fixed.

Today is the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women.

At the Rome Conference venue was a seat in the front row of the audience reserved for women who have been victims of violence and were killed.

SAVE SEATS (Posto Occupato) is a strong gesture dedicated to all women who have been victims of violence. Before they were cruelly killed by a husband, partner, lover or complete stranger they were all able to sit in a seat, on a bus, on a train, in the theatre, at school, in the subway, in society. We want to reserve this seat for them, so in day to day living they will not be ignored. POSTOCCUPATO.ORG

"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:

On Thursday, we came to the conclusion to close voting for the LibreOffice mascot in advance of the planned schedule in December. For a number of reasons, the process has evolved in a direction we were not expecting. When we started, we were looking for a visual image which could represent LibreOffice, a free office suite developed by an international and diverse community of friends, and not for a subject of heated discussions between groups and individuals.…

The post Statement about LibreOffice Mascot Project appeared first on LibreOffice Design Team.

As you’ve no doubt seen, over the last few months we’ve been looking for a LibreOffice mascot. This is just something fun for our community to use, for instance on T-shirts at events, so it doesn’t have to be ultra slick and professional – it isn’t a replacement for the official branding and logos that we use in the software, website and marketing materials.…

The post LibreOffice mascot survey: The progress so far appeared first on LibreOffice Design Team.

tl;dr: Please comment at https://imageboard.documentfoundation.org/posts

The voting phase has been conducted with great success. More than 27,000 people had a look at the submissions and many voted on all items. Thanks a lot for your interest and contribution! There has also been some discussion on various social media channels about the procedure.…

The post LibreOffice Mascot: Iterating the submissions appeared first on LibreOffice Design Team.

The new release 6.0 of LibreOffice is just around the corner. And we also want to update the documentation for this release. We have three proposals for new covers and would like to know which one you prefer.

Please vote by clicking option 1, 2 or 3 below and submit per “vote”.…

The post Community-vote for the new ‘Getting Started Guide’ cover appeared first on LibreOffice Design Team.

Last week I had fixed a trivial bug (a leftover from a former change where a function’s return was changed, but one place of its usage managed to escape to be not converted to properly treat the changed return). It seems to simultaneously have fixed a number of other bugs (the discussion may be found in the bug tracker issue). The little (a few characters) bug turned out to create both performance issues, and clipping of characters, so it had big impact on LibreOffice on Windows (with DirectWrite, e.g. when OpenGL is used).

The problem became trivial both to find and fix, because of great bug report by Telesto, who not only filed the report, but also had provided every relevant piece of information, including terminal output accompanied the problem manifestation. I cannot emphasize enough the importance of this: the effort of the bug reporter makes a difference. Without the effort, some problems remain very difficult for developers to be tracked down and get fixed.

I write this to praise Telesto‘s great job, and urge every reporter of a bug to follow this great lead.