Millions of people around the world use LibreOffice every day – but there are still some people who haven’t heard about our free, powerful, open source, Microsoft-compatible office suite. So here are some ideas for spreading the word – and click the image to learn more about our marketing projects:

"And my final test as to whether or not Debian succeeded was: could the founder step away from the project and could the project keep going because that is the only point at which you know that the project has basically taken a life of its own." ~ Ian Murdock

Last week, we talked to the design community about their preparations for the upcoming LibreOffice 6.2 release. Today we hear from Sophie Gautier, who helps out with localisation (l10n) – that is, translating the software’s user interface, documentation and website into other languages…

What new feature(s) in LibreOffice 6.2 are you most excited about?

The many improvements and new features added to the online version will push it a step further and speed up its adoption. I think it’s a key asset for our project and its visibility, and I hope it will bring many more people to contribute to development, design or translation of the software.

What has the localisation community been working on in preparation for this release?

New features have a lot of new strings; the Design project has worked on the user interface and the Documentation project has made a lot of updates and completions in the help files. All this is reflected in localization work. Moreover, the l10n community is also maintaining the strings of the en_US version, so whenever a typo exists there, it triggers the localization process again. If you add the preparation needed for the press release, all in all the team has done incredible work!

Looking further ahead, what else are you planning – or want to achieve?

If it’s compatible with our workflow, I would like to give Weblate a try and see if it eases the work of our l10n team. Pootle is a great tool, but we lack some features, one of which is very important for me: an easy way to credit contributors and value their work through the tool.

Finally, how can people get involved with localisation?

If you are a translator, it’s very easy to participate by helping on translating press releases, and videos for marketing purposes. If you are more interesting on producing documentation, either translating into your language or in English would bring a great help to the project. A bit more technical – but still easy – is to translate the software UI and the help in your language, bringing LibreOffice in their language to many many people. For all topics, we have a page to get started, so join us on the mailing list!

Thanks Sophie – and coming up next week, we’ll talk to Xisco Fauli from the QA (quality assurance) community…

I finished my migration of a first Plone addon some a week ago sucessfully and started with migration of a further addon, collective.dexteritytextindexer to Python 3 compatibility. I was able to migrate the source code of the addon itself, but run into issues with the behaviors test script. The tests ran successful on Plone 4.3 to 5.2 and Python 2.7, but failed on Plone 5.2 on Python 3.

I did pour volunteer work for LibreOffice and its antecessor for about sixteen years. I worked in different roles for the open source project during this long periode.  The project consumed a lot of my spare time. But then I experienced a ‘nice’ communication experience inside the community (from some ‘core’-members), that showed me a lack of respect for my project work, its value and also for my person. Thus I decided to completely stop my pour volunteer work within the project three month ago. The LibreOffice extensions and templates website (extensions.libreoffice.org) lost its maintainer and project reviewer since that time.

I used my free cycles to improve my fitness. And I was able to do this way something in balance to my day by day payed office work. Seemed it was a smart decision

LibreOffice’s worldwide community is active in many areas: translations, QA, marketing, design, documentation, coding and more. Today we chat to a couple of community members about their experiences in the project…

Mohamed Trabelsi

Where do you live, and what are your interests?

I’ve been living in Kobe, Japan for three years now. I was Master student at Kobe Institute of Computing for two years, then I did internship for six months at iCRAFT Corp, a Japanese IT company in Kobe. And now I work as a Network Engineer at the same company.

Outside of work, I’m usually playing soccer, watching movies, traveling around Japan with some friends and family, and going for some volunteering activities nearby.

In which areas of the LibreOffice project are you active?

My LibreOffice activities are around QA/bug triaging, the translation projects (to Arabic), and LibreOffice promotion by giving presentations at IT-related events in Japan.

How did you get involved with LibreOffice?

A few years ago I was involved in social volunteering activities like charity events, earthquake clean-ups and so on. In the last year during my internship at iCRAFT Corp, which was supporting the project, I was assigned to contribute to LibreOffice development in any area I wanted or found interesting. I liked the idea, and considered it as a new way of volunteering in my life – let’s call it “Digital Volunteering”.

What was your initial experience of contributing to LibreOffice like?

It was my first experience with open source development, so it took me a while to get adapted to the activities. But seeing the progress of my contributions in numbers, like the LibreOffice Arabic translation improvements, motivated me a lot.

What does LibreOffice need most right now?

I think that all what LibreOffice needs is to keep improving support for other formats than Open Document, like docx and xls from Microsoft Office.

Anything else you want to mention?

I’m looking forward to meeting other LibreOffice members and celebrating all new improvements together!

Jim Raykowski

Where do you live, and what are your interests outside of LibreOffice?

I live in beautiful Kodiak, Alaskam USA. Apart from LibreOffice, I mostly deal with laundry stuff in one way or another, and play guitar – not so good, even though some say different. Oh and I try to catch fish with fair success.

In which areas of the LibreOffice project are you active?

User interface bug fixes and enhancements.

How did you get involved with LibreOffice?

Calc cell protection wasn’t working and I needed it for some macros I made using Basic. I thought I might be able to fix it. It got fixed before I could even see day light through the code jungle I had entered. After a while of hacking my way through the jungle I managed to change a old school pointer to a std::unique_ptr for my first commit.

What was your initial experience of contributing to LibreOffice like?

Truly exciting to be contributing with others from all over this planet.

Finally, what tools do you use for your work (eg text editor)?

I mainly use Qt Creator. Qt is what I’ve used for most of the programming I’ve done.

Thanks to Mohamed and Jim for their time, and contributions to LibreOffice! If you’re reading this and want to help out, and make new contacts in our friendly worldwide community, see this page to get started.

The Online Help Editor is getting a shape

I have improved and fixed a bit the XHP editor, and changed the page address:

https://newdesign.libreoffice.org/help_editor/index.html

 The editor is still work in progress, but starts to become interesting for creating and editing Help pages.

What's new

• Mike Saunders implementation of the autocompletion of XHP tags for Codemirror editor.
• The left and right panes are now fixed in browser screen and scrollable,
• The right pane uses 99% of the current Help transformation rendering, plus
• some visual debug information left intentionally to help Author in adjusting <embed>s, <image>s and <link>s . 
• You can now open a Help page directly from the interface. 

• The help page is normally source/text/AAA/BBB/myHelpPage.xhp  
• Type /AAA/BBB/myHelpPage.xhp in the text box and click Open File to load in the editor. 
• Press Render page to see it on the right. 

• A set of buttons with XHP snippets to shorten editing workload: 

• For <paragraph>s, <note>s, <heading>s, <emph>s, <menuitem>s, etc... select the raw text or contents and click the corresponding button. The raw text will be wrapped with the opening and closing tag. For paragraph-like contents, an unique id will be created automatically, a feture required for translations. 
• Other snippets builds fragments of XHP tags, such as <table>s, <tablerow>, <list>s, <section>s, and more.
• Just play with and do not forget to render the page on the right. 

Restrictions

• The editor works with Firefox only. Issues with Chrome and Edge. Other browsers not yet tested.
• Saving files not implemented. However you can copy the editor contents and finish the patch in you preferred editor
• More XHP checking are under development, specially id's unicity and DTD checking
• If you get a blank page on the right, this is because you hit a bug in the browser transformation. Unfortunately debugging the browser transformation is very hard, support is almost none.

Invitation for developers and testers

• You are invited to test the editor, report bugs and suggest improvements.  
• The user interface is simple HTML and Javascript. If you have skills in these technologies you are a potential developer for the editor, but we know that PHP will be the right tech choice in near future.  
• The source code is in the dev-tool repository. 
• To clone the dev-tool repository : 
•  git clone https://gerrit.libreoffice.org/dev-tools dev-tools 
• The editor is in dev-tools/help3/html/ 
• If you have a web server working in your computer (Apache, Nginx, etc...) you can run the editor locally: create a link between the web server root and the editor. For example, under Debian-like Linux: 
• sudo cd /var/www/html 
• sudo ln -s help-editor /dev-tools/help3/html 
• and point your browser to http://localhost/help-editor 

Seeking Help and discussion on the editor

Please use the documentation list, the developer list and our IRC channels to get in touch with the development of the editor. 

Ackowledgements

The Javascript editor used is CodeMirror and was carefully selected by Mike Saunders who also set the initial confguration for working with XML and our XML dialect XHP, as well as configured the autocompletion features.

The XHP snippets were originally designed for the KDE Kate editor and ported to the online editor.
 

Resolved - 2019-01-14 07:25:14 UTC

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Resolved - 2019-01-14 07:25:11 UTC

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Resolved - 2019-01-14 07:25:10 UTC

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Resolved - 2019-01-14 07:25:10 UTC

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Resolved - 2019-01-14 07:25:10 UTC

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LibreOffice 6.2 is due to be released at the end of this month, and many communities in the project have been working hard on new features. Today we talk to Heiko Tietze, The Document Foundation’s UX designer, about the upcoming release…

What new feature(s) in LibreOffice 6.2 are you most excited about?

Two years ago, The Document Foundation announced the MUFFIN concept, that is supposed to give users the freedom to change the user interface to what they are familiar with, and to adopt to any usage scenarios. Now, with the upcoming LibreOffice 6.2 release, we finally made this feature available for everyone, not only the brave users who enable experimental features.

We present the “Tabbed” and “Groupedbar” variants in the first stage (View > User Interface in the menu). The Tabbed variant aims to provide a familiar interface for users coming from Microsoft Office. It is supposed to be used primarily without the sidebar. Here’s a quick animation of it in action:

Meanwhile, the Groupedbar design follows the mantra “Simple by default, powerful when needed” with the basic principle to access “first-level” functions with one click, and second-level functions with a maximum of two clicks.

What has the design community been working on in preparation for this release?

We also made massive changes and improvements to icon themes, in particular Elementary and Karasa Jaga. Here’s Elementary:

Plus, the icons are now shipped as SVG vector graphics. If the rendering is stable and accurate we plan to switch completely in one of the upcoming releases. Read more on the technical background on this blog.

Another great step ahead has been made regarding the personalization feature (Tools > Options) that took ages in the past to show results. Now it brings up the Firefox personas within a second or two. Read more about this here.

Looking further ahead, what else are you planning – or want to achieve – in the community?

We will continue the work on the Notebookbar variants. Some concepts are almost ready for publication. Ideally, users load the Notebookbar variants as an extension. And we are aware that a lot of work has to be done in this regards.

Other than that, we discuss the ideas from the community on a daily basis. Some would be great enhancements; others are probably not suited to an office suite. The evaluation of this input takes some resources. And last but not least, we have many “creaking doors” that might benefit from a redesign: bullets and numbering, outlines, bezier curves, bibliography…

So how can people get involved?

Everybody is welcome to join the design group. Most of us are active on Telegram and you can just lurk around there and listen. But your input on tickets on Bugzilla with keyword needsUXEval is also very welcome. We pick some of those topics and discuss it in the weekly meeting, biweekly either on Wednesday evening (7pm UTC) or Thursday afternoon (1pm UTC).

All information about who we are, how we work, and how to get in contact are provided on the LibreOffice wiki.

Thanks to Heiko and the whole design community for their great work. We’ll be talking to other communities over the next few weeks, so keep an eye on this blog for more…

The LibreOffice Quality Assurance ( QA ) Team is happy to announce LibreOffice 6.2 RC2 is ready for testing!

LibreOffice 6.2 will be released as final at the beginning of February, 2019, being LibreOffice 6.2 RC2 the forth pre-release since the development of version 6.2 started in mid May, 2018. See the release plan. Check the release notes to find the new features included in this version of LibreOffice.

LibreOffice 6.2 RC2 can be downloaded from here, and it’s available for Linux, MacOS and Windows.

In case you find any problem in this pre-release, please report it in Bugzilla ( You just need a legit email account in order to create a new account ) so it can get fixed before LibreOffice 6.2 final is released.and last

For help, you can contact us directly in our IRC channel.

Happy testing!!

…

The post LibreOffice 6.2 RC2 is ready for testing appeared first on LibreOffice QA Blog.

Donations to The Document Foundation help us to support the LibreOffice project and community, in terms of events, infrastructure, knowledge-sharing and more. For instance, this image shows how donations were put to good use in 2017.

We’ve accepted Bitcoin donations for a while, but now, via CoinGate, LibreOffice supporters can donate using many other digital currencies including:

• Litecoin
• Ethereum
• Dash
• Nano
• Telcoin
• Zcash
• XRP (Ripple)
• Augur
• Stellar
• Decred

…and more. So if you have some cryptocurrency and want to help the LibreOffice project, we appreciate your support!

(Of course, we still have regular ways to donate – including credit/debit card, PayPal, and bank transfer.)

This continues, and concludes a series of items on Vendor Neutral FLOSS projects and how they do marketing which you can read here.

TDF / LibreOffice Branding

If we want to grow our community, and to drive this with marketing – we need to position our brands to make this easy and ideally unconscious. Currently we have two brands, taking the descriptions from their websites:

• LibreOffice is Free and Open Source Software Development is open to new talent and new ideas, and our software is tested and used daily by a large and devoted user community (link).
  • ie. it is pretty clear: 'LibreOffice' is software.
• The Document Foundation - It is an independent self-governing meritocratic entity, created by a large group of Free Software advocates, in the form of a charitable Foundation under German law (gemeinnützige rechtsfähige Stiftung des bürgerlichen Rechts). (link).
  • ie. it is clear this is a Stiftung – and by association / default comes to also mean the handful of employees who comprise the paid team there with some oversight from the board.

Unfortunately – it seems we have two brands, and neither of these means “The community”, or “The people who do most of the hard work”. These are the people we need to be encouraging, recruiting, building up, and talking about. The degree to which TDF’s paid staff represent ‘the community’ is unclear. The board is elected to represent the community, and oversees TDF but is also not itself the community (but the board). When TDF says “our software” - how can we ensure that everyone feels included in that ‘our’ ?

It seems clear that we need to solve this dis-connection with some formulation, strap-line, brand or form of words that we use to highlight and emphasize our contributor’s input – and use this repeatedly.

LibreOffice vs. Commercial branding

Branding is really important as we have seen: shipping identical software, at the same price in the Mac app store with just the LibreOffice vs. Collabora Office brand changed shows – that the LibreOffice brand is simply far better known & sought after gathering the overwhelming majority of interest. This however brings a problem – if development work is funded by leads generated from brands then TDF promoting eg. LibreOffice Online under its own brand can easily radically impair leads, investment and thus code-flows into LibreOffice Online without any offsetting advantage. The picture below compares two branding approaches for the 95%+ of commits that Collabora has put into LibreOffice Online. The 0.05% is the proportion of visitors to LibreOffice that discover that they should fund development buying professional services (from anyone) – as we shall see below.

TDF marketing in practice

How does LibreOffice get marketed from this perspective ? How do companies get leads from TDF so that they can sell to some fraction of them their products, support & services thus allowing re-investment back into LibreOffice ? Answer: very poorly. Recently we’ve done a better job of telling people about LibreOffice, a recent release announcement says:

"LibreOffice 6.1’s new features have been developed by a large community of code contributors: 72% of commits are from developers employed by companies sitting in the Advisory Board like Collabora, Red Hat and CIB and by other contributors such as SIL and Pardus, and 28% are from individual volunteers."

and also encourages people to use an LTS version – which is not itself provided by TDF – which is a major improvement:

"For any enterprise class deployment, TDF maintains the more mature LibreOffice 6.0, which should be sourced from a company providing a Long Term Supported version of the suite (they are all members of TDF Advisory Board, and are listed here: http://www.documentfoundation.org/governance/advisory-board/)."

However the website still has a large number of issues in this area, investing nominal fees into Advisory Board membership is a marginal contribution vs. the substantial investments into the software & community. A better approach is the single page that educates users about the availability of professional services – which is the get-help/professional-support/ page which highlights certified competent migraators, trainers and developers. So how does this hero list of contributors to LibreOffice's success fare when people visit our site, lets see by checking out the metrics on page visits:

It is interesting to see that those interested in professional support – only around 4700 this year (1/3rd of 13000) exited to either close the session, or visit a supported version provider. The bounce rate suggests that the majority of people arrive on the professional support page from elsewhere, and not TDF’s own properties. This matches with what is seen by vendors analyzing what arrives from TDF. Compared with the total visits as of (2018-09-07):

the number of people exiting to find professional service from that page is 0.05% of our 9.5 million visitors so far.

The contrast between the "Economic and code contribution flows in today's ecosystem" and even the helpful description in the 6.1 release marketing acknowledging 72% of commits, compared with the 0.05% actual click-through rate is extraordinarily stark. It seems clear that our users are not being educated as to the importance of supporting the certified ecosystem - certainly in the area of code, but almost certainly also in other certified areas such as training & migration.

Visualizing 0.05%

This is rather a tricky task – it rapidly turns into something like visualizing the geometry and distances of the solar system. Two charts are shown – a pie chart with the corporate contribution to the code in commits – and a crop to the center of another showing the flow of people clicking through the page to find professional services which go to 1improve LibreOffice (in blue) and others in red:

It is of course unclear what %age of our visitors are enterprises and thus should be encouraged to seek professional help, however 0.05% seems an implausibly low fraction by perhaps two orders of magnitude.

Marketing – Product expectations

Another side-effect of majoring on LibreOffice as a free, always and forever and for everyone free, no catches, product – is creating mistaken expectations in our users around how the relationship works. Here is a simple example mail from 2018-04-19:

“Please help me to installLibreOffice at Lubuntu17
 my donation number via PayPal is 1TV07632F2376242R”

Apparently the donor believes there is some connection between his donation and installation support, despite our donate page being quite explicit that this is not so. This is buttressed by rather regular E-mails of the form I made my donation, but still can't download it - apparently people love to miss the LibreOffice is Free Software and is made available free of charge. Your donation, which is purely optional, supports our worldwide community. text there.

This example is relatively friendly. Some chunk of user interactions are much less friendly – criticizing the product, attacking the project for not fixing their particular issue on their timeline, or investing in their particular problem. A peripheral, but amusing pathology is of users from time to time augmenting the urgency of a request by generously offering a $50 donation to TDF to cover the (often) multiple-person-week of (pet) feature work needed.

By setting a more realistic expectation around support, enterprise suitability , and particularly by encouraging people on our main properties to contribute – it is possible to build a consumer, community brand – rather than a pure product brand. This may have a positive impact on reducing the feeling of entitlement that some of our users have.

Similarly enterprises deploy the wrong software, without support, fail to keep it up-to-date, and then believe that we are responsible for helping them, a recent mail to the security list highlights this, names removed to protect the mislead:

Subject: Security issues within Libre Office
My Company, XXXXX, uses the latest ( I think ) version of Libre Office.
We also use the Qualys tool for security Compliance. It has found a vulnerability
with Libre Office. Are you familiar with this, And how do I remediate your application?

... signature reads ...

FORTUNE Magazine World's Most Admired Companies® 2014|2015|2016|2017|2018

A kind reply, funded by RedHat’s formidable security investment:

It might be that its already fixed in the latest stable release, or its
a false positive, or even something that remains to be fixed, but we'd
need more information to judge.

And then we find out:

The version we have is:
C:\Program Files (x86)\LibreOffice 4\program\soffice.exe Version is 4.2.0.4
Have you found similar vulnerabilites? Is there a newer version that we can
download and test against the above reported vulnerabilities.

They use a version that is four years old today, and this is from a significant company, saving plenty of money and apparently investing nothing – instead, consuming time from those who are. Far from an isolated example, some of them are ruder with a more explicit sense of entitlement.

Our marketing – setting expectations

The software industry is an industry typically driven by hype, where software startup marketing has this rather ‘visionary’ approach, something like:

Text:	"Look at this awesome product (demo), come and buy it !"
Sub-text:	“so when you bought it we can fund actually delivering the product.”

This could be called the Sagrada Familia model, as long as people know this is what they’re buying it has a certain logic. Arguably TDF’s current marketing has a leaning towards:

Text:	“Look at this awesome product, come get it for free !”
Sub-text:	“we’ll work out how to get people to contribute to fully deliver on our promise of awesomeness sometime later”

Almost certainly a more helpful marketing approach might be:

Text:	“Join our awesome project and contributors to improve our great product”
Sub-text:	“community should be fun, and we need to grow it, we’re here to promote you if you contribute.”

The experience of selling a supported LibreOffice

Against this – the experience of selling a supported version of LibreOffice is hard. LibreOffice has a powerful brand, and it is associated with everything being free as in beer. Some small subset of our community appear to believe that building product brands and businesses around LibreOffice is non-ideal, and that we should focus on providing ever more services free to enterprises. The perception that the ‘genuine’ version is LibreOffice from TDF is real one, and stoked by the lack of systematic acknowledgment of the great benefits provided by the ecosystem.

Contributors are sometimes deeply emotionally attached to the project, and the LibreOffice brand and feel that to promote an alternative brand, even if in doing so that helps fund the work, is some sort of betrayal – or lack of neutrality. This sometimes extends to being eager to duplicate functionality, packaging, documentation etc. simply to re-brand it to LibreOffice.

This too is profoundly unfortunate. Others believe that FLOSS is fundamentally identified with a zero per-seat cost – perhaps plus some consultancy (perhaps installation, or some migration support), and that having no SLA, and letting others fund long term product investment is the only sensible approach to choose: maximising their apparent saving. Discussions with such parties are quite interesting – often oscillating between variants of: “I should pay nothing per seat because its FLOSS”, and “The product is not yet quite good enough for us – you must fix it for free before we [don't] buy your product”.

It would be good to have TDF’s explicit support for selling branded support services and versions around LibreOffice to make this more socially obvious to those who are not members of our community.

Conclusions

The commercial ecosystem around LibreOffice is an un-necessarily tough environment to operate in. Companies contribute a large proportion of the work, and yet get very little acknowledgement – which in turn makes it hard for them to invest. This also creates an un-necessary tension with companies marketing – which has to focus on building their own brands. Companies should not fear the arrival of the LibreOffice brand to squash, claim credit for, and present their work as created by someone else – thus effectively depriving them of leads. This is unsustainable.

The LibreOffice project should give a new focus to promoting and celebrating all participants in its community – including ecosystem companies. This is far from a problem unique to companies. It is routinely the case that individual community members feel under-appreciated – they would like more recognition of their work, and promotion of their own personal public brands as valued contributors. This is something that TDF should re-balance its marketing resource into, in preference to product marketing.

The LibreOffice project should explicitly create space for enterprise distributions by explicitly pointing out the weaknesses of LibreOffice for enterprises on its hot marketing properties. This would have a positive effect of encouraging companies to acknowledge and build the LibreOffice brand safe in the knowledge that anyone visiting LibreOffice will get an accurate and balanced picture of their skills and contribution.

We badly need to increase diverse investment into our ecosystem by building an environment where deep investment into LibreOffice is a sound economic choice: economics ultimately drives ecosystem behavior. By creating the right environment – often not by acting, but by clearly and deliberately not acting in a space – we can build a virtuous circle of investment that produces ever better software that meets TDF’s mission.

It has been said that in life - "You can either achieve things, or get the credit". Unfortunately, in the world of FLOSS – in order to sustainably achieve things you need to get the credit (and associated leads and hence sales). During the early creation of the project it was strategically necessary to under-emphasize corporate involvement, particularly of SUSE heavy lifting – but these days are long past. Similarly, we need to build a brand or formulation that stands for all volunteer contributors to LibreOffice and acknowledge these fulsomely.

This is the state of play today in the LibreOffice world, but the good news is, this is just the background for a series of positive discussions and suggested actions to re-balance TDF's marketing. No significant change is proposed to our development process, timeline, branching etc. I believe most of these are common-sense, and should be supported by the majority of the outside community, as well as those involved with the project - who have a more intuitive feel of the balance here. Some suggestions may be relevant to vendor neutral non-profits; but most are specific to LibreOffice. My plan is to post those suggestions to our public Marketing list and to have an open discussion there of how best to balance this. Potentially I'll add a summary here later.

Thanks for reading - perhaps this may help some other communities improve their ecosystems too. For those interested in the source for my drawings they are available

Postscript to marketers

This paper has focused heavily on ways to improve our marketing and messaging. If you read this far – thank you ! It should in no way be read as a personal critique of people doing our marketing. Our existing positioning and approach and direction is something that has accumulated over many years, and all in leadership in the project are responsible for where we are at now. If you work in marketiing – thank-you for all you do, and the many positive messages that get out. Hopefully with some adjustments we can grow the project in exciting new directions at some large multiple of its current trajectory for the benefit of all.

This way – I hope we can meet the dream of gaining wider acceptance in the enterprise market.

• Poked at vendor neutral marketing bits and updated some pictures; mail chew, pleased to get a Purchase Order six months after signing a contract, nice.

This continues a series of items on Vendor Neutral FLOSS projects and how they do marketing which you can read here.

Marketing in the commercial world

In order for companies to sell products based on LibreOffice, it is vital that they find customers to whom they can sell (or that customers find them). Here is a picture of how the process of an enterprise customer finding a product might work:

People who have expressed an interest in your product are called leads - there are many ways in today’s world to get people to be aware of your products and register an interest (ie. to generate leads). Leads are the people that are focused on by the sales team to encourage them to enjoy the great results from using a LibreOffice based product. Here are some examples:

1. You can buy per-click advertising in search engines and on web-pages. This is expensive, and the returns are typically less than the investment for low cost products in a mixed consumer & enterprise market. TDF itself has free advertising donated by Google which makes this possible for us.
2. You can sponsor conferences, and attend them. Picking the right conference is a real trick, and the costs here are prohibitive. Imagine spending ~€5k attending a conference filled with Open Source interested Government IT decision makers. Imagine presenting your product, and having the friendly & enthusiastic conference moderator personally and explicitly promote buying your products to the entire conference. Imagine the zero leads that result in paid business, and/or any return at all. Repeat until convinced that this is a dead end. TDF itself has free booths at many conferences donated by the organizers, companies do not.
3. Realize that news driving links and organic search for your brand – along with links from friendly projects, partners and products are the only cost-effective (ie. nearly free) way to get the volume of leads you need into the top of the sales funnel.

Clearly generating as many, relevant high quality leads to feed the sales pipeline is vital for any FLOSS business. If LibreOffice wants to build a successful ecosystem it needs to be deeply interested in the life-blood of sales: leads, how we can gently steer enterprises who visit us towards being interested in support and services, and encourage them towards companies who can serve them, and in doing so significantly improve LibreOffice ? Expecting companies to generate their own leads – particularly without having strong independent brands is extremely difficult, there are few, cost-effective pro-active marketing strategies available in today’s world for small companies.

Marketing & Framing in the FLOSS world

The Marketing / Investment mismatch problem

One of the particular pathologies of the FLOSS world is that where marketing and investment get out of step. This was particularly obvious around the Linux Desktop and contributed to the tragic commercial failure not only of individual desktop Linux distributions (remember Mandriva?), but also to the significant pruning of both SUSE, and ultimately RedHat’s desktop investment – before finally claiming much of Canonical’s desktop investment too.

Setting a price expectation in a market of zero (or below), forever and for everyone – is ultimately toxic to building a thriving commercial ecosystem. Therefore, ensuring that marketing and engineering investment are well aligned is in this area is something that TDF must be focused on. Those subsidizing marketing and a zero-price-point by getting others to do the engineering for them - tend to talk about their virtuous investment in growing the pie / market size for all; however driving an unhelpful price expectation for enterprises in an un-sustainable way is ultimately self-defeating.

It is vitally important that returns are correlated with investments – ie. if one company invests heavily, that its return is reasonably correlated with its investment vs. non-investors, otherwise – the tragedy of the commons yields a set of passive parties eagerly waiting for the returns generated by others’ engineering investment.

In individual projects this should be addressed through various qualitative and quantitative investment metrics, clearly presenting the realities of what has been contributed, while retaining a neutrality to vendors and investors, and advertising our model to new entrants.

When TDF was founded we deliberately positioned LibreOffice as a product of TDF, which was the right choice at the time. However this strategy no longer serves the market in its current form or scale. There is a risk that TDF (via it’s donors’) investment in the product itself can be mis-portrayed, creating an analogous situation, where TDF presents itself (perhaps with the help of some volunteers) as the creators of LibreOffice – ignoring the formidable contributions of Sun/Oracle, volunteers and present day corporate contributors.

Other projects: brand sharing open-source companies

An extremely popular model used to drive lead generation is visible in many open source projects which have single corporate stewards, for example Nextcloud, ownCloud, pydio, seafile and many many more. We are reasonably familiar with this approach from the OpenOffice days – and when done well – it can yield a flow of leads, and user interest in support and services around an open source project – but only to one company.

In this model – there are many advantages, not least from cheap or free conference attendance representing the (often identically named) open source project and widespread free advertising of your brand. The easy answer to the question “Why give all this away for free” is that every eyeball, every user will come to the owners, creators & authors to get support and services – by following the brand. This is why you see ‘Buy’, ‘Pricing’, ‘Enterprise Version’ and other such critical lead generating links prominently placed on brand sharing open source companies project pages.

TDF in contrast is a vendor-neutral project – and as such, directing all LibreOffice leads to a single company is neither desirable, nor sensible. We'll look in more detail at how TDF's marketing works in practice next time.

to be continued ...

To make this more digestible following sections will be serialized later, and built up into a reference-able whole here: https://people.gnome.org/~michael/data/vendor-neutral-marketing.html adding more flesh to the problem space

• Sync call with Kendy; admin, chat with Simon. Clever idea wrt. unit-testing failed, bother.

• All Saints; Marcus & Zoe over for lunch - good to see them. Poked at E's computer in the evening - odd HDMI sound mis-detection; hmm.

I worked on my first migration oft a Plone addon to Python 3 during the last days. There were some instructions available on Github how to procide and I followed them. I was able to run the addon inside my local environment, but I got some issues with the continous integration test on Travis-CI, once I submitted a pull request. I had to fix the scripts inside the addon for building and testing on Travis-CI and was successful with the great support from a member of the Plone community. He merged my pull request and released a new version of the addon cioppino.twothumbs today: https://pypi.org/project/cioppino.twothumbs

General Activities

• LibreOffice 6.1.4 was announced on December 18
• LibreOffice 6.2 RC1 was released and it’s ready for testing
• On December 21, the bug hunting session for LibreOffice 6.2 RC1 took place
• bibisect repositories for LibreOffice 6.3 were created
• Katarina Behrens (CIB) fixed some Drag&Drop problems on KDE5
• Drew Jensen tested the Firebird assistant migration with an assembled group of test files
• Luboš Luňák (Collabora) did lots of OpenCL fixes
• New Bugzilla component “iOS”
• Moggi wrote a blogpost about automated testing in LibreOffice
• NISZ LibreOffice Team reported many Conditional formatting issues
• LibreOffice 6.1.4.2 and 6.2.0.1 for macOS have been rebuilt to solve crashes and freezes affecting many users on MacOS Mojave
• Jens Carl moved dozens of Java tests to C++
• Balázs Varga fixed a bunch of chart issues
• Justin Luth fixed an old annoying issue, where clearing direct formatting would damage the document styles
• Andreas Kainz made dozens of Notebookbar and icon improvements
• New team member Durgapriyanka continued to do a significant amount of triaging
• KDE4 support was removed in master
• Eike Rathke (Red Hat) reworked the Statistics dialog
• Mike Kaganski (Collabora) added Scan support for LibreOffice x64 on Windows
• Vasily Melenchuk (CIB) added support for exporting to .xltx and .dotx
• Michael Stahl (CIB) reimplemented the hiding tracked changes mechanism
• László Németh (NISZ) added support for native copy&paste of spreadsheet data in Writer tables
• Many new features and improvements in LibreOffice Online

Reported Bugs

560 bugs have been reported by 347 people.

Top 10 Reporters

1. NISZ LibreOffice Team ( 22 )
2. Xisco Faulí ( 21 )
3. Regina Henschel ( 12 )
4. Michael Weghorn ( 12 )
5. Drew Jensen ( 10 )
6. Vera Blagoveschenskaya ( 10 )
7. Mike Kaganski ( 9 )
8. Robert Großkopf ( 8 )
9. Markus Elfring ( 7 )
10. Roman Kuznetsov ( 7 )

Triaged Bugs

570 bugs have been triaged by 77 people.

Top 10 Triagers

1. Xisco Faulí ( 105 )
2. Dieter Praas ( 51 )
3. raal ( 36 )
4. durgapriyanka.arun ( 35 )
5. Timur ( 35 )
6. Roman Kuznetsov ( 30 )
7. Oliver Brinzing ( 22 )
8. Heiko Tietze ( 22 )
9. Alex Thurgood ( 21 )
10. V Stuart Foote ( 20 )

Fixed Bugs

208 bugs have been fixed by 49 people.

Top 10 Fixers

1. Caolán McNamara ( 37 )
2. Mike Kaganski ( 29 )
3. andreas kainz ( 12 )
4. Xisco Fauli ( 7 )
5. Eike Rathke ( 6 )
6. Roman Kuznetsov ( 5 )
7. Michael Weghorn ( 5 )
8. Katarina Behrens ( 5 )
9. László Németh ( 4 )
10. Balazs Varga ( 4 )

List of critical bugs fixed

1. tdf#120576 CRASH: Base crash without any notice with the option to migrate the embedded database from HDBSQL to FIREBIRD. ( Thanks to Caolán McNamara )
2. tdf#122116 LibreOffice 6.1.* crashes by recovering file at start over and over on Linux ( Thanks to Michael Weghorn )
3. tdf#120454 kde5: Sporadic crash when right-clicking items in toolbar ( Thanks to Katarina Behrens )
4. tdf#122059 ReportBuilder: GTK3: Crash in: Wallpaper::operator= Format -> Page crashes ( Thanks to Caolán McNamara )
5. tdf#121935 Cancelling database wizard at step ‘Set up connection to text files’ crashes ( Thanks to Caolán McNamara )
6. tdf#121810 Crash in: libgobject-2.0.so.0.5600.3 when selecting more on error dialog ( Thanks to Caolán McNamara )
7. tdf#121555 GTK3: Crash displaying menus with new elements ( Thanks to Caolán McNamara )
8. tdf#121838 Firebird: Mirgration: Certain ODB crashes application during Migration Assistant execution ( Thanks to Caolán McNamara )
9. tdf#121815 Crash in: FreetypeFont::GetFtFace ( Thanks to Jan-Marek Glogowski )
10. tdf#122136 clicking on class path make LO crash ( Thanks to Julien Nabet )
11. tdf#122020 CRASH in SvTreeList::InvalidateEntry(SvTreeListEntry *) ( Thanks to Caolán McNamara )
12. tdf#122127 Crash in: libmergedlo.so FORM EDIT using drag drop to move control from one dataform to another causes crash ( Thanks to Noel Grandin )
13. tdf#121180 Crash restarting LibreOffice after applying an option (no crash if going via “OK”) ( Thanks to Mike Kaganski )
14. tdf#122269 CRASH: Closing LibreOffice after installing an extension with the extension manager open ( Thanks to Caolán McNamara )
15. tdf#121247 KDE5: Impress crashes at starting Slide show (presentation with animation and audio) ( Thanks to Aleksei Nikiforov )
16. tdf#122016 GTK3: Crash closing LibreOffice in full screen mode with notebookbar enabled ( Thanks to Caolán McNamara )
17. tdf#121892 gtk3_kde5: Impress presentation minimizer crashes ( Thanks to Michael Weghorn )
18. tdf#122152 CRASH closing LibreOffice while Sort dialog is open ( Thanks to Caolán McNamara )
19. tdf#122153 CRASH closing LibreOffice while XML filter settings dialog is open ( Thanks to Caolán McNamara )
20. tdf#122219 CRASH: closing Base while XML filter settings dialog is open ( Thanks to Caolán McNamara )
21. tdf#120750 Crash applying bold to textbox control ( Thanks to Xisco Fauli )
22. tdf#121266 KDE5: Impress crashes after selecting some of Slide Transitions ( Thanks to Aleksei Nikiforov )
23. tdf#120885 nice Crash on choosing ‘more styles’ from dropdown ‘Apply Style ‘with graphic selected ( Thanks to Caolán McNamara )
24. tdf#122038 Crash modifying several options each requiring restart ( Thanks to Mike Kaganski )
25. tdf#121399 [gtk3_kde5] 6.1 stable branch: within Plasma-5 session w/ drkonqi: lo_kde5filepicker crashes every time on close (OK/Cancel regardless) ( Thanks to Michael Weghorn )
26. tdf#122042 CRASH KDE5 backend crashes writer on close with selected text ( Thanks to Katarina Behrens )
27. tdf#122335 Crash in debug build, when save a pptx file with custom shape to strict ODF 1.2 ( Thanks to Julien Nabet )
28. tdf#121022 Contour editor crashes ( Thanks to Armin Le Grand )

Verified bug fixes

97 bugs have been verified by 17 people.

Top 10 Verifiers

1. Xisco Faulí ( 62 )
2. Michael Weghorn ( 9 )
3. BogdanB ( 8 )
4. Balázs Varga ( 3 )
5. Vera Blagoveschenskaya ( 2 )
6. Jean-Baptiste Faure ( 2 )
7. Justin L ( 1 )
8. Mike Kaganski ( 1 )
9. Aron Budea ( 1 )
10. m.a.riosv ( 1 )

Categorized Bugs

915 bugs have been categorized with a metabug by 35 people.

Top 10 Categorizers

1. Roman Kuznetsov ( 603 )
2. Thomas Lendo ( 91 )
3. Dieter Praas ( 59 )
4. andreas_k ( 32 )
5. Xisco Faulí ( 18 )
6. Aron Budea ( 14 )
7. Buovjaga ( 14 )
8. Michael Weghorn ( 12 )
9. V Stuart Foote ( 10 )
10. Vera Blagoveschenskaya ( 9 )

Regression Bugs

93 bugs have been set as regressions by 18 people.

Top 10

1. Xisco Faulí ( 46 )
2. raal ( 10 )
3. Telesto ( 7 )
4. Timur ( 6 )
5. Robert Großkopf ( 5 )
6. Alex Thurgood ( 5 )
7. Roman Kuznetsov ( 3 )
8. MM ( 1 )
9. Aron Budea ( 1 )
10. Terrence Enger ( 1 )

Bisected Bugs

76 bugs have been bisected by 10 people.

Top 10 Bisecters

1. Xisco Faulí ( 37 )
2. raal ( 22 )
3. Oliver Brinzing ( 4 )
4. Aron Budea ( 4 )
5. Roman Kuznetsov ( 2 )
6. Terrence Enger ( 2 )
7. Buovjaga ( 2 )
8. Michael Weghorn ( 1 )
9. Telesto ( 1 )
10. Luke ( 1 )

Evolution of Unconfirmed Bugs

Check the current list of unconfirmed bugs here

Evolution of Open Regressions

Check the current list of open regressions here

Evolution of Open bibisectRequests

Check the current list of open bibisectrequests here

Evolution of Highest Priority Bugs

Check the current list of highest priority bugs here

Evolution of High Priority Bugs

Check the current list of high priority bugs here

Thank you all for making Libreoffice rock!
Join us and help to keep LibreOffice super reliable!
Check the Get Involved page out now!…

The post QA Report: December 2018 appeared first on LibreOffice QA Blog.

I created a new clean buildout from the Plone coredev Github repository using a checkout of the 5.2 branch. I added a local.cfg file to my local repo and added some packages to this file. This packages were checked out within the next run of buildout using the new local.cfg buildout file, extending buildout.cfg.

I created the local.cfg using the pointer from this webpage:
https://github.com/plone/Products.CMFPlone/issues/2184#issuecomment-359445243

I added a further section to the local.cfg for ‘mr.bob’. Thus my local.cfg looks like this:

[buildout]
extends = buildout.cfg

parts += mrbob

always-checkout = true

custom-eggs +=
        collective.dexteritytextindexer
        bobtemplates.plone

        
test-eggs +=
        collective.dexteritytextindexer [test]
        
        
auto-checkout +=
        collective.dexteritytextindexer
        bobtemplates.plone
        
[mrbob]
recipe = zc.recipe.egg
eggs =
    mr.bob
    bobtemplates.plone
        
        
[sources]
collective.dexteritytextindexer = git git://github.com/andreasma/collective.dexteritytextindexer
bobtemplates.plone = git git://github.com/plone/bobtemplates.plone.git

I created a new branch inside the collective.dexterity local repository with ‘git checkout -b python3’ and did on this branch the steps that are described on this website:
https://github.com/plone/Products.CMFPlone/issues/2184

I run sixer and python-modernize on the package and was able to get it running with Plone 5.2 on Python 3.6. I already created a new Plone site from scratch for this.

Then I created a new Plone add-on package using mr.bob and run sixer and python-modernize against the new package. Once this was finished I added the package to the local.cfg buildout script and run buildout again. I was able to start the Plone site with ‘./bin/instance fg’ without issues again. I installed the new addon within the ‘Site Setup’ page of Plone. The new addon had no real content at that time (only the necessary boilerplate / template).

This created the environment to migrate the current state of my Plone addons to the new Plone 5.2 version and Python 3. This migration is necessary because the support for  Python 2, currently used by Plone, ends within a year.

The LibreOffice Quality Assurance ( QA ) Team is happy to announce LibreOffice 6.2 RC1 is ready for testing!

LibreOffice 6.2 will be released as final at the beginning of February, 2019, being LibreOffice 6.2 RC1 the third pre-release since the development of version 6.2 started in mid May, 2018. See the release plan. Check the release notes to find the new features included in this version of LibreOffice.

LibreOffice 6.2 RC1 can be downloaded from here, and it’s available for Linux, MacOS and Windows.

In case you find any problem in this pre-release, please report it in Bugzilla ( You just need a legit email account in order to create a new account ) so it can get fixed before LibreOffice 6.2 final is released.

For help, you can contact us directly in our IRC channel.

Happy testing!!

…

The post LibreOffice 6.2 RC1 is ready for testing appeared first on LibreOffice QA Blog.

LibreOffice has the capability to add references to a document and finally a bibliographical index, which is essential for scientific publications. The style of references depend on the journal and the discipline. So it is common to just add numbers in square brackets like [1] in engineering whereas humanities show name and year like (author, year).…

The post Save the bibliography? appeared first on LibreOffice Design Team.

Am 15.12.2018 wurde die neueste Special Edition des Linux Pro Magazine mit dem Thema #LibreOffice veröffentlicht. CIB ist als kompetenter Partner und langjähriger Supporter von LibreOffice natürlich in der Ausgabe vertreten und gleich mit zwei Anzeigen dabei. On 15.12.2018 the latest special edition of the Linux Pro Magazine concerning #LibreOffice has been published.  As a … LibreOffice powered by CIB @ Linux Pro Magazine weiterlesen

Der Beitrag LibreOffice powered by CIB @ Linux Pro Magazine erschien zuerst auf CIB events.

As you may know, I was participating in this year Gerrit User Summit, 15th-16th November 2018 in Palo Alto, CA.

I gave two talks: Bazel build gerrit: New and Noteworthy about optimizing Gerrit Build with Bazel and Gerrit Change Workflows with details about interesting multi stop journey that replaced somewhat confusing Draft change/Draft patchset workflows with streamlined Work-In-Progress workflow.

There were plenty of great talks, including Gerrit Analytics, Kubernetes, Multi-Site and Mulit-Master deployments and details about new and shiny Gerrit 3.0 that is going to be tentatively released in Q2 2019.

During the developer hackathon, that took place before the user conference, Gerrit 2.16 release was conducted. Major new feature is: new UI has reached parity with the old GWT UI and therefore old GWT UI is deprecated in 2.16 and in fact was already removed on master and will not be included any more in Gerrit 3.0. Another major feature is Git protocol version 2.0 is fully supported through HTTP and SSH layers.

This release also included small improvements, like simplified debugging capability for UI, SSH and GIT requests. Moreover, submit rules can now be written in Java language as a Gerrit plugin, in addition to Prolog rules.

I would like to thank GerritForge Ltd. for sponsoring travel cost for my participation.

2018 has been a very special year – we were celebrating the 10th anniversary of Gerrit, on 14th November, 2018. 10 years ago Shawn Pierce created a first commit in Gerrit repository. It is such a terrible loss for the whole open source community in general and for Gerrit ecosystem in particular that long-time Git contributor and founder of the Gerrit Code Review project, passed away in January this year.

Last year we revised the workflow to insert special characters. Based on a design proposal the dialog was reimplemented in a Google Summer of Code project by Akshay Deep. The new dialog allows to easily browse through the list and to search for glyphs contained in the selected font.…

The post Special Characters: The Final Touch appeared first on LibreOffice Design Team.

What i love in Ubuntu : woobly windows via compiz https://code.mradford.com/post/the-ubuntu-compiz-desktop/

After a great LibreOffice Conference, followed by the LibreOffice Hackfest held at modulE and the SFSCon in Bolzano sponsored by CIB, the LibreOffice community met again in Sanremo on December 1st, for the annual conference of the Italian supporters and contributors, members of the LibreItalia association. Unfortunately CIB wasn´t able to attend the event, but thanks … LibreItalia Conference 2018 weiterlesen

Der Beitrag LibreItalia Conference 2018 erschien zuerst auf CIB events.

General Activities

• LibreOffice 6.2 beta1 was released
• On November 19, the bug hunting session for LibreOffice 6.2 beta1 took place
• Tabbed notebookbar moved out of experimental
• Miklos Vajna (Collabora) worked on improving Smartart
• In the FR community Pierre Choffardet has been very active these last days, helped by other members of FR QA team, he narrowed several bugs like: bug 121128, bug 121116, bug 121117, bug 121118, bug 121119, bug 121120
• Németh László worked on improving LibreLogo
• Telesto tested LibreOffice 6.2 on MacOSX in deep
• Vera Blagoveschenskaya tested KDE5
• Markus Mohrhard fixed many chart bugs
• Mike Kaganski (Collabora) implemented a proper console mode on Windows.
• Liad Skiva found some crashes in the properties dialog
• Many bugs found by NISZ LibreOffice Team regarding interoperability
• Franklin Weng, Cheng-Chia Tseng and Jeff Huang hosted a QA event at the University of Cheng-Kung, Taiwan, where 70 students attended.
• Bartosz Kosiorek improved EMF+ support with several patches
• Mark Hung improved slideshow rendering with several patches
• Jens Carl moved dozens of Java tests to C++
• Zdeněk Crhonek created two dozen UI tests
• Tomaž Vajngerl ( Collabora ) worked on Document encription
• Rizal Muttaqin worked on Elementary icons
• Jim Raykowski collaborated with Andreas Kainz to make Notebookbars accessible
• Daniel Silva rebase his work from the GSOC on the new print dialog into master
• Michael Stahl rebase his work on redlinehide into master
• Aleksei Nikiforov fixed some KDE5 issues

Reported Bugs

741 bugs have been reported by 390 people.

Top 10 Reporters

1. NISZ LibreOffice Team ( 45 )
2. Telesto ( 41 )
3. Xisco Faulí ( 27 )
4. Vera Blagoveschenskaya ( 20 )
5. 和尚蟹 ( 12 )
6. robert ( 11 )
7. Roman Kuznetsov ( 11 )
8. Gabor Kelemen ( 11 )
9. Pedro ( 11 )
10. Regina Henschel ( 11 )

Triaged Bugs

813 bugs have been triaged by 86 people.

Top 10 Triagers

1. Xisco Faulí ( 286 )
2. Dieter Praas ( 51 )
3. Heiko Tietze ( 40 )
4. Oliver Brinzing ( 34 )
5. Timur ( 31 )
6. V Stuart Foote ( 29 )
7. raal ( 27 )
8. Alex Thurgood ( 27 )
9. Buovjaga ( 26 )
10. Aron Budea ( 15 )

Fixed Bugs

176 bugs have been fixed by 52 people.

Top 10 Fixers

1. Caolán McNamara ( 38 )
2. Markus Mohrhard ( 12 )
3. Mike Kaganski ( 9 )
4. Eike Rathke ( 8 )
5. Noel Grandin ( 7 )
6. andreas kainz ( 7 )
7. Regina Henschel ( 6 )
8. Xisco Fauli ( 6 )
9. Miklos Vajna ( 5 )
10. Samuel Mehrbrodt ( 5 )

List of critical bugs fixed

1. 121143 LibreOffice sends “your system has crashed” message if “Close Application” event is defined ( Thanks to Mike Kaganski )
2. 121538 choosing additional formatting in dialog insert fields cause crash (gen/gtk) ( Thanks to Caolán McNamara )
3. 121540 CRASH deleting a form from form navigator ( Thanks to Noel Grandin )
4. 121607 Crash when closing a document (being the only active) while being prompted for data source password ( Thanks to Caolán McNamara )
5. 121417 KDE5: Recent Documents -> Clear list leads to crash ( Thanks to Aleksei Nikiforov )
6. 121290 Crash, if press F4 for a selected callout ( Thanks to Caolán McNamara )
7. 121591 CRASH: Print Preview fails if cursor inside Floating frame ( Thanks to Mike Kaganski )
8. 121743 CRASH closing LibreOffice with Parameter dialog open ( Thanks to Caolán McNamara )
9. 121432 Pressing twice on the “Help” button causes LibreOffice application to crash when the focus is on one of the tabs on Properties window ( Thanks to Caolán McNamara )
10. 121746 CRASH closing LibreOffice with confirmation dialog open ( Thanks to Caolán McNamara )
11. 121263 Calc crashes when hide multiple sheets ( Thanks to Zdeněk Crhonek )
12. 120728 crash in report editing: insert page number in footer while header is active ( Thanks to Armin Le Grand )
13. 121179 FILEOPEN: Crash opening a certain file (gtk/gtk3) ( Thanks to Noel Grandin )
14. 121246 Crash clicking on ‘row’ of a chart (with missing chart bars) ( Thanks to Caolán McNamara )
15. 120997 Crash after Ctrl+Tab to traverse points of object ( Thanks to Noel Grandin )
16. 121644 Pressing on the “Reset” button when the writing focus is on the “Value” input field of a property causes LibreOffice to crash on Properties – Custom Properties ( Thanks to Caolán McNamara )
17. 121005 Crash in: libc-2.24.so ( only 6.1 ) ( Thanks to Caolán McNamara )
18. 121198 CRASH in SdrPage::GetPageNum() ( Thanks to Xisco Fauli )
19. 121647 font list box preview certain malformed TTF fonts crash LO — when receiving ShouldUseWinMetrics() handling ( Thanks to Xisco Fauli )
20. 121394 CRASH: Opening area dialog ( gtk3 ) ( Thanks to Caolán McNamara )
21. 120115 Crash in: SfxItemSet::GetItemState ( Thanks to Bjoern Michaelsen )
22. 119945 Impress/Draw hangs/crashes when exiting while editing formula ( Thanks to Mike Kaganski )
23. 112696 Crash in: SwFEShell::IsGroupSelected() ( Thanks to Caolán McNamara )
24. 121341 choosing insert trend line causes crash ( Thanks to Caolán McNamara )

Verified bug fixes

93 bugs have been verified by 15 people.

Top 10 Verifiers

1. Xisco Faulí ( 52 )
2. BogdanB ( 16 )
3. Vera Blagoveschenskaya ( 7 )
4. Aron Budea ( 3 )
5. Michael Weghorn ( 2 )
6. Cor Nouws ( 2 )
7. V Stuart Foote ( 2 )
8. Xavier Van Wijmeersch ( 2 )
9. Micha ( 1 )
10. Timur ( 1 )

Categorized Bugs

408 bugs have been categorized with a metabug by 36 people.

Top 10 Categorizers

1. Thomas Lendo ( 163 )
2. Dieter Praas ( 57 )
3. Xisco Faulí ( 38 )
4. Aron Budea ( 27 )
5. Roman Kuznetsov ( 18 )
6. Julien Nabet ( 15 )
7. V Stuart Foote ( 14 )
8. Vera Blagoveschenskaya ( 12 )
9. raal ( 6 )
10. Heiko Tietze ( 6 )

Regression Bugs

127 bugs have been set as regressions by 21 people.

Top 10

1. Xisco Faulí ( 68 )
2. raal ( 11 )
3. Alex Thurgood ( 7 )
4. Telesto ( 6 )
5. Timur ( 5 )
6. Buovjaga ( 4 )
7. Roman Kuznetsov ( 4 )
8. Luke ( 4 )
9. Aron Budea ( 3 )
10. Regina Henschel ( 2 )

Bisected Bugs

102 bugs have been bisected by 7 people.

Top 10 Bisecters

1. Xisco Faulí ( 72 )
2. raal ( 13 )
3. Aron Budea ( 9 )
4. Oliver Brinzing ( 3 )
5. Telesto ( 2 )
6. Luke ( 2 )
7. Buovjaga ( 1 )

 
 
 

Evolution of Unconfirmed Bugs

Evolution of Open Regressions

Evolution of Most Pressing Bugs

Thank you all for making Libreoffice rock!
Join us and help to keep LibreOffice super reliable!
Check the Get Involved page out now!…

The post QA Report: November 2018 appeared first on LibreOffice QA Blog.

LibreOffice has always supported usage of command line switches that allow operations like conversion of documents to different file types, or batch-printing. Using LibreOffice CLI in various scripts is a very common scenario.

But until now, it had somewhat suboptimal support for this on Windows. The main executable module – soffice.bin – being a GUI subsystem application, it could not properly output its messages to the calling console, as well as return error codes to check ERRORLEVEL for success. The hacks used to redirect the output of the GUI application to the calling console were unreliable and didn’t work at all on some supported versions of Windows. Sometimes one could not even see why the entered command line was rejected as invalid.

I have just pushed a commit that changes the situation. Now LibreOffice has proper console mode on Windows. soffice.bin is now built for console subsystem, which allows using it in abovementioned scenarios, having the stdout and stderr output, as well as return code, properly sent to console (or redirected using normal means); in debug builds, the debug output is also visible on the console. To allow comfortable usage, a new console launcher executable is introduced, soffice.com, in LibreOffice installation’s program/ folder, alongside with familiar soffice.exe, which is retained for all GUI uses, as before. This allows to continue using command lines like
"c:\Program Files\LibreOffice\program\soffice" --convert-to odt file.doc
from cmd.exe command-line interpreter, without specifying the executable extension, and have the soffice.com launched to have proper console operation (subject to value of PATHEXT environment variable). The command properly “owns” the console (does not return to command prompt) until soffice finishes.

The change will be available in LibreOffice 6.3 scheduled for Summer 2019 (if testing does not reveal a major problem which would require to revert this). I hope this will make use of LibreOffice CLI more comfortable for Windows users, on par with other platforms. If you find any problems with the solution, please report bugs to our bug tracker. Early testing using daily builds is much appreciated!

Anyone who follows my LibreOffice work knows that I spent quite some time on the automated testing frameworks for LibreOffice. As part of this blog I want to use the LibreOffice 6.2 branch-off as a chance to look at current automated testing related statistics. All of the numbers were generated on 2018-11-1, so might already be slightly outdated.

We currently have 4804 different C++ based test cases in 357 different test suites and contain a total of 26215 test asserts. The largest test suite is ucalc (a test suite in Calc that links statically against the main calc library) with nearly 25000 lines of code in several files and 291 test cases.

In addition to our normal C++ based tests, we also have 409 UI tests in 39 test suites. As part of the UI tests we have another 2282 assert statements. A special thanks here to Zdeněk Crhonek who has written 154 commits adding UI tests in 2018. Everyone else together wrote about 45 patches this year touching the UI testing code.

Less well known test concepts in LibreOffice include our callgrind based performance testing (26 out-of-tree test cases and 25 in-tree test cases) and the automatic import and export crash testing with nearly 100000 documents. We managed to run the automatic import and export crash testing, which also generates more than 200000 documents for the export tests, a total of 73 times this year.

Another interesting statistics of this year is that the bug report with the most linked commits is related to the automated testing. As part of the Bug tdf#45904 several brave LibreOffice developers, including Jens Carl and Rahul Gurung, have converted more than 40000 lines of old Java based API tests to C++. In total they have produced more than 60 commits that have been linked to the bug report in 2018 alone and 132 since 2016.

I’m most likely forgetting some additional test frameworks but wanted to give a short overview of all the work that goes into LibreOffice’s automated testing framework. If you are interested in joining the effort please talk to us on #libreoffice-dev or mail the LibreOffice developer mailing list at libreoffice@lists.freedesktop.org. We have tasks in the automated testing area in C++, python, java and some web related tasks.

 

The LibreOffice Quality Assurance ( QA ) Team is happy to announce LibreOffice 6.2 Beta1 is ready for testing!

LibreOffice 6.2 will be released as final at the beginning of February, 2019, being LibreOffice 6.2 Beta1 the second pre-release since the development of version 6.2 started in mid May, 2018. See the release plan. Since LibreOffice Alpha 1, 1252 commits have been submitted to the code repository and more than 178 bugs have been set to FIXED in Bugzilla. Check the release notes to find the new features included in this version of LibreOffice.

LibreOffice 6.2 Beta1 can be downloaded from here, and it’s available for Linux, MacOS and Windows. Besides, it can be installed along with your actual installation.

In case you find any problem in this pre-release, please report it in Bugzilla ( You just need a legit email account in order to create a new account ) so it can get fixed before LibreOffice 6.2 final is released.

For help, you can contact us directly in our IRC channel.

Happy testing!!

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The post LibreOffice 6.2 Beta1 ready for testing appeared first on LibreOffice QA Blog.

On Friday 16th we attended the SFScon, the most important and biggest Free Software conference in Italy, and a well known event all over Europe, too. We are proud to have sponsored this enlightening conference where experts from all over the world were discussing about free and open source software, community and innovative solutions for … Free Software Conference – SFScon weiterlesen

Der Beitrag Free Software Conference – SFScon erschien zuerst auf CIB events.

It was all started with the 16px blue folder that had a striking color at the time. I was really uncomfortable seeing an icon which had unmatched color choice with the larger one. It was looked so so out of place.

You Are So Out of Place, Boy

That is part of the elementary icon theme in LibreOffice that placed in LIBREOFFICE-INST-DIR/share/config/images_elementary.zip.
As soon as I unpacked the compressed file, my response at that time was "Wow, it looks like this icon theme needs more touch"

Maybe some of you know that in the latest fresh release (6.1), I managed to send my work to upstream: Karasa Jaga icon theme. That was my first real "visible" contribution so far. Unfortunately, Karasa Jaga has not been being default in any desktop environment nor operating system. So when I saw elementary, which is now the default theme of the GNOME desktop environment and its derivatives, I suddenly felt called back to plunge and immediately give more attention to this another colored icon theme.

elementary icon theme has indeed been "completed" last year, but I think there are many things that turn out to be many home works. Here some issues I've found:

1. Blurry Appearance, The Pixels Did Not Fit Right

Blurred icons are usually due to drawing process that did not follow the guide lines that are commonly available in drawing applications such as Inkscape. This causes the icon to look less clear and certainly not satisfying.

Let me show you some of the opaque icons I've found and also the work that has been done:

Blurred icons

2. Childish Appearance
Looked so unprofessional, such as being drawn in a hurry situation, especially the smallest size of 16 px, they did not meet the official HIG from elementary own.

Childish, yeaa

3. Different Appearance Between 16px*16px and 24px*24px Version
This is quite funny, but still annoying

Inconsistencies Here and There

3. Missing Many Fall Backed uno: Commands
So by default if a theme lack of an icon it will be eventually fall back to default - defined another icon theme. 

Fall Backed Menu Items

4. Missing Many Non cmd Components

As we know, Karasa Jaga, an icon theme derived from the Oxygen theme successfully entered the last fresh release of LibreOffice (6.1) on August. Since its inception for the first time, Karasa Jaga has been very complete and can even be said to have nearly 5,000 icons, because it has exceeded the number of icons that Galaxy and Colibre have had since first entering Karasa Jaga already has extra large icon support (32px * 32px).

But the work did not stop there, there were many things that should be improved. Moreover, in the next 6.2 release there are so many new icons that should be made especially to support the Notebookbar Tab interface. In addition, the existing icons also need to be adjusted, plus I want to add more SVG support.

Now I would like to show you the improvements that have been made to Karasa Jaga. Although in this period I was more preoccupied with improving the elementary icon theme, I did not leave the mandate to improve Karasa Jaga, just like I took care of my own child. :) I admit that for this period the improvement were not as massive as previously released, but significant enough to be discussed as well. Let's see

Before After

Before After Reference: https://gerrit.libreoffice.org/#/c/63315/