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November 30, 2020

Official TDF Blog

LibreOffice monthly recap: November 2020

Here’s our summary of updates, events and activities in the LibreOffice project in the last four weeks – click the links to learn more…

  • November kicked off with a new Month of LibreOffice. This is a campaign we run twice a year, in which we award sticker packs (and the chance to win some bonus merchandise) to all contributors in the LibreOffice project. Thanks to everyone who took part – instructions for claiming your stickers will be posted here soon!

  • Our Turkish community reported back from the Linux and LibreOffice Migration at Eyüpsultan Municipality. They said: “Open source software has many advantages, including flexibility, high performance, major savings on licensing fees, independence from any particular company, and compliance with open standards. The benefits of open source software are recognized all over the world.”

  • On November 9, we talked to Arnaud Mez from our French-speaking community. He’s helping to spread the word about LibreOffice and free software in Congo, organising talks and “sprint” events. A big thanks to Arnaud for all his contributions!

  • Over in the Documentation project, community members announced the LibreOffice Calc Guide 7.0. This was a team effort of Steve Fanning, Gordon Bates, Kees Kriek, Annie Nguyen, Samantha Hamilton, Olivier Hallot and Jean Hollis Weber, coordinated by Felipe Viggiano.

  • More docs news: Paul Sutton has created some LibreOffice tutorial videos, aimed at beginners, and shared them on his website. He plans to make regular updates, so if you’re introducing someone to LibreOffice, check it out!

  • Finally, we chatted to Yusuf Keten, who has added new features to LibreOffice as part of the Google Summer of Code. He’s also decided to become a Member of The Document Foundation, the non-profit entity behind LibreOffice – so, welcome Yusuf!

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

by Mike Saunders at November 30, 2020 02:41 PM

November 27, 2020

Miklos Vajna

Better handling of cached field results in Writer

Writer now has much better support for preserving the cached result of fields in documents. This is especially beneficial for Word formats where the input document may have a field result which is not only a cache, but re-calculating the formula would yield a different result, even in Word.

Motivation

A Collabora Office customer gave us a DOCX document, which is essentially a calendar for planned IT maintenance windows at some organization. These calendars are tables with fields in it. The document is halfway through towards changing it to a newer year: the formulas are already changed to calculate a newer year, but all the cached field results are still for the old year.

The request was to keep showing these results and not throw them away during save, either. Their primary workflow is to fill the calendar with manual entries, not to tweak the calendar layout itself.

Results so far

The calendar now looks like this:

https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/6o7pvix-dJ9QhCX65FUkWeQZ60B89sHqDpBvd7WVRLtAzBW1323odrQ13aV_CgEFvgh7Iee-ePq95oPOf1Q-jMxvX1MBsz9FhgKd9vymyrdMBIZbF459hNKE1dM4XLcwXkGYh8ksmok=w1920
Figure 1. New render result in Writer

Matching the reference rendering:

https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/GJd2zcnspXDb7Wa2p32TInf9C8MAgt92h3G6PYuUwUvpQi5f3AdRbl5yGq8FN7kUPMcZwuFpohTKmX33s8u-AxFSO9rZFgH4X-fwrg8jShtJoA1KyGws_-ymUvINmK-5xo2_hd7YmLI=w1920
Figure 2. Reference render result

While it looked like a broken calendar previously:

https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/bpOVqcZX2CcKouuADNyPx1PMyI3I6CyjIDIAnUbylsT-ZimxSkPcUaRbMDd8MzHlG3Uqw2d-TunD4m7U4DUlm_O_esJt6CAY-H7Z5tdQxZ6q_MYxgJphutr_-JRVYh8uLmspiiI532U=w1920
Figure 3. Old render result in Writer

You can see that the day numbers were broken previously and now they line up properly.

How is this implemented?

If you would like to know a bit more about how this works, continue reading… :-)

As usual, the high-level problem was addressed by a series of small fixes:

With these, it’s now possible to edit these calendars, without breaking the fields which provide the day numbers.

Want to start using this?

You can get a snapshot / demo of Collabora Office and try it out yourself right now: try unstable snapshot. Collabora intends to continue supporting and contributing to LibreOffice, the code is merged so we expect all of this work will be available in TDF’s next release too (7.1).

by Miklos Vajna at November 27, 2020 08:08 AM

November 26, 2020

Michael Meeks

2020-11-26 Thursday

  • Mail chew, sync with Thais, COOL community meeting. Called out to help an older man with Altzheimers who had fallen and broken his hip with J. poor chap - not all interruptions to the flow are bad.
  • Plugged away at a proposal; call with Bob about Christmas, exchanged contracts on house.

November 26, 2020 09:00 PM

November 25, 2020

Michael Meeks

2020-11-25 Wednesday

  • Damien arrived to help finsh & fibre-glass the roof with Martin (a new Father) - more insulating, located and fixed the missing silicon around the shower causing the free shower below.
  • Sales team call, poked at code with Kendy & Ash; procurement call, plugged away at some diagrams.

November 25, 2020 09:00 PM

November 24, 2020

Michael Meeks

2020-11-24 Tuesday

  • Worked on a paper, some customer / support ticket handling. TDF team call. Poked at a PHP proxy related issue.

November 24, 2020 09:00 PM

LibreOffice QA Blog

LibreOffice 7.1 Beta1 is available for testing

The LibreOffice Quality Assurance ( QA ) Team is happy to announce LibreOffice 7.1 Beta1 is available for testing!

LibreOffice 7.1 will be released as final at the beginning of February, 2021 ( Check the Release Plan for more information ) being LibreOffice 7.1 Beta1 the second pre-release since the development of version 7.1 started at the end of May, 2020. Since the previous release, LibreOffice 7.1 Alpha1, 1131 commits have been submitted to the code repository and 245 issues got fixed. Check the release notes to find the new features included in this version of LibreOffice.

LibreOffice 7.1 Beta1 can be downloaded from here for Linux, MacOS and Windows, and it can be installed alongside the standard version.

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 ).

For help, you can contact the QA Team directly in the QA IRC channel or via Telegram.

LibreOffice is a volunteer-driven community project and your help is much appreciated.

Happy testing!!

Download it now!…

by x1sc0 at November 24, 2020 05:48 PM

November 23, 2020

Michael Meeks

2020-11-23 Monday

  • Planning call much of the morning, sync with Miklos, beat back the E-mail queue. Partner call.
  • Excited by some water coming through the ceiling; teething troubles. Air-tightness-test, pulled down the internal pressure by 50Pa and see.

November 23, 2020 09:00 PM

Official TDF Blog

Community Member Monday: Yusuf Keten

Today we’re talking to Yusuf Keten, who added new features to LibreOffice as part of the Google Summer of Code…

To start, tell us a bit about yourself!

I was born on February 25, 1998 in Istanbul, Turkey. Currently I’m a third-year Computer Engineering student at Hacettepe University in Turkey. I really like coding. Nowadays, I am working on computer graphics. Also, I have academic projects about GPGPU programming. I am contributing to LibreOffice in my free time because of my enthusiasm for open source culture.

Apart from programming, I like to spend my time playing electric guitar, drawing. Also, I describe myself as a coffee lover! You can find me on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Why did you decide to become a member of The Document Foundation, the non-profit behind LibreOffice??

I came across TDF when I attended a LibreOffice Bootcamp given by Muhammet Kara. He explained what TDF does, and its values. I was really impressed, because supporting an open source project is a wonderful mission. Also, there are lots of talented people in TDF. Therefore, I wanted to be part of this great organization and contribute to TDF’s activities.

What are you working on in LibreOffice right now?

I have been working on User Experience topics for nearly a year. I created a new Additions dialog as during my Google Summer of Code work. It provides an interface for adding any extension types such as fonts, templates etc. with only one click. Also, users can search extensions based on how many votes they have, downloads and comments. Check out my GSoC report.

Anything else you plan to do in the future?

In my GSoC project, there are still some bugs and missing features. I would like to fix these bugs and add these features. Also, I may add other new features to LibreOffice, if they is needed.

Even though I worked on User Experience parts until now, I may work on computer graphics aspects of LibreOffice in the future – because I’m improving my skills in this area.

We at TDF would like to share our appreciation for Yusuf for all his contributions! We’re really happy to have him on board as a member. Indeed, everyone in the community who’s active in our projects is welcome to become a member!

by Mike Saunders at November 23, 2020 03:32 PM

November 22, 2020

Michael Meeks

2020-11-22 Sunday

  • Up late, music, sermon, out for a walk, relaxed variously - watched Knives Out with J. and M. - fun.

November 22, 2020 09:00 PM

November 21, 2020

Jean Hollis Weber

Help for people still using Apache OpenOffice

Do you know someone who is still using Apache OpenOffice? Have they recently tried to open a .odt, .ods or .odp file and received this error message? “This document was created by a newer version of OpenOffice. It may contain features not supported by your current version.”

AOO error message
The notice (pictured) that pops up in Apache OpenOffice doesn’t say so, but even the latest version of AOO (4.1.8, which was released earlier this month) does NOT support features like ODF 1.3, so updating to it won’t help. AOO users would need to “update” to LibreOffice. (LibreOffice users can avoid the problem for OO users by continuing to save files in ODF 1.2.)

Note: other features are lacking in AOO, for example the ability to save files in DOCX format, even though AOO can open DOCX files. LibreOffice can do both. Wouldn’t it be nice (helpful) if the “Update Now” button in AOO took a user to the LO download page?

See also this blog post at LibreOffice.

by Jean at November 21, 2020 03:18 AM

LibreOffice 6.4 and 7.0 User Guides

I am way behind updating this blog, including mentioning the LibreOffice 6.4 user guides that have been published in 2020. These include Getting Started Guide, Writer Guide, Base Guide, Calc Guide, Draw Guide, and Math Guide.

Calc Guide 7.0 coverTwo volumes of the v7.x series of books have been published recently: Math Guide and Calc Guide.

You can download free PDFs of these books or buy printed copies of the v6.4 volumes (v7.0 print copies may be available later). See this page for links.

by Jean at November 21, 2020 03:12 AM

LibreOffice 7.0

LibreOffice 7.0 was announced on 5 August 2020. Since then three minor releases have appeared. Significant new features include support for OpenDocument Format (ODF) 1.3; better performance; and improved compatibility with DOCX, XLSX and PPTX files. For details, see the blog post linked above.

LibreOffice produced a visual timeline of derivatives from OpenOffice.org, as shown below. (Click for a larger image.)
Timeline of OO/AOO/LO major releases

by Jean at November 21, 2020 02:55 AM

November 20, 2020

Official TDF Blog

What to do with a document “created by a newer version of OpenOffice”

Are you using Apache OpenOffice? Have you recently tried to open a .odt, .ods or .odp file and received this error message? “This document was created by a newer version of OpenOffice. It may contain features not supported by your current version.”

In this case, the document probably wasn’t created in OpenOffice, but in LibreOffice, a successor project. LibreOffice 7.0 introduced support for OpenDocument Format (ODF) 1.3, which includes many new features and benefits.

LibreOffice and Apache OpenOffice share the same roots, and while Apache OpenOffice’s last major release (4.1) was back in 2014, LibreOffice has since been developed much further with extra features and updates.

LibreOffice is still free and open source software, of course, so to get the most out of newer documents, download LibreOffice and give it a try!

by Mike Saunders at November 20, 2020 12:47 PM

November 19, 2020

Official TDF Blog

New Beginner LibreOffice Tutorials and Videos from Paul Sutton

LibreOffice’s documentation community creates handbooks, guides, tutorials and other resources to help users get the most out of the software. Everyone is welcome to join the team and help out – it’s a great way to build up experience for a possible career in technical writing!

Paul Sutton is producing a series of blog posts and videos aimed at newcomers to LibreOffice, explaining some of the basics. He also has some extra videos here – check them out.

A big thanks to Paul for his work, and making his content available under a Creative Commons license, for everyone to share! Follow him on Twitter and Mastodon.

by Mike Saunders at November 19, 2020 01:46 PM

November 17, 2020

Official TDF Blog

The Month of LibreOffice, November 2020 – Half-way through

We’re just over half-way through the Month of LibreOffice, November 2020, in which we award sticker packs to all contributors in our projects and community! (Plus, a bonus chance to win extra merchandise: a mug, T-shirt or hoodie.)

So how’s it going? Well, we’ve already awarded 262 sticker packs:

Is your name/username not on that page yet? Do something about it! There are many ways to help out – you don’t need to be a programmer. Let’s see…

How to get your stickers

There are many ways you can help out – and you don’t need to be a developer. For instance, you can be a…

  • Handy Helper, answering questions from users on Ask LibreOffice. We’re keeping an eye on that site so if you give someone useful advice, you can claim your shiny stickers.
  • First Responder, helping to confirm new bug reports: go to our Bugzilla page and look for new bugs. If you can recreate one, add a comment like “CONFIRMED on Windows 10 and LibreOffice 7.0.3”.
  • Drum Beater, spreading the word: tell everyone about LibreOffice on Twitter or Mastodon! Just say why you love it or what you’re using it for, add the #libreoffice hashtag, and at the end of the month you can claim your stickers.
  • Globetrotter, translating the user interface: LibreOffice is available in a wide range of languages, but its interface translations need to be kept up-to-date. Or maybe you want to translate the suite to a whole new language? Get involved here.
  • Docs Doctor, writing documentation: Whether you want to update the online help or add chapters to the handbooks, here’s where to start.

Join in! We’ll be posting regular updates on this blog and our Mastodon and Twitter accounts until the end of the month…

by Mike Saunders at November 17, 2020 02:28 PM

Collabora Community

Update on LibreOffice support for ARM-Based Macs

It is always an exciting time to see freshly minted ARM based silicon arriving in the form of Apple’s massive shift to the ARM based M1. This of course means work for Collabora’s LibreOffice team too. The code needs to be prepared for M1, step by step. Here we update you on the status of the work, and what needs to be done.

With the launch of the new Apple devices nearing, it is important that suitable software arrives around the same time as new hardware. Apple ensures this by a translation layer, so that software for Intel Macs can be used, using Rosetta translation.

Nevertheless, given the code size of LibreOffice, for the best performance it makes most sense to have a pre-optimized native binary. As such Collabora joined the Universal App Quickstart Programme back in July and has been doing work on enabling LibreOffice for M1 since then.

This effort is made possible by the kind support of those who buy LibreOffice Vanilla in the Mac app store. Thank you! And thanks too to Tor Lillqvist for his patience and hard work here.

The status of the work

All of these changes are in master, or in the gerrit queue getting past our CI automation:

  • Configuration changes (mostly there). It should now possible to configure and build a native LibreOffice on a Apple Silicon, as well as cross-compiling to x86_64.
  • Patching and fixing of lots of bundled libraries to make them build cleanly.
  • Then there is a first attempt at a new C++/UNO ABI bridge – we need to match Apple’s ABI by tweaking Linux’s ARM64 support to match. This allows UNO scripting to work (in theory).
  • We still have some failing unit tests, that need investigation, as well as some other bits, described below.
All of this means that LibreOffice should start and work on M1! So far it has had only very basic Writer & Calc testing. The more exciting, complex features are not yet tested.

What’s next .. want to get involved?

Post-launch, if you can get an M1 Mac, then help is always most welcome! We have several missing pieces that will require further work, with some unusual low-level bits.

  • The new C++/UNO ABI bridge requires more testing, to ensure the UNO scripting support works smoothly.
  • Enabling bits we didn’t compile in yet: Firebird, Java (when there is a JDK).
  • Scripts to combine builds for arm64 and x86_64 into one universal app (i.e. one where binaries are “fat,” consisting of separate parts for each architecture)
  • Adaptation to whatever new checks are added for universal apps in the App Store. This is an ongoing unpredictable part of our work: adapting 8 million lines of code to the latest updated rules, keeping our builds compiling and signing with the latest tool chains.
Of course we’ll continue to work to bring the best LibreOffice possible to Apple Silicon as time permits, and we are confident that even if we don’t make it in the next month or two, Rosetta 2 will fill the gap using dynamic instruction set translation. And when all is done, our open source desktop productivity tools will benefit the full power of the new Macs!

The post Update on LibreOffice support for ARM-Based Macs appeared first on Collabora Productivity.

by Cor Nouws at November 17, 2020 01:03 PM

November 14, 2020

Roman Kuznetsov

If you updated your mac to macOS Big Sur then you have problems with LibreOffice

First problem - only LibreOffice 7.0 and newer works on macOS 11 Big Sur. Nobody knows why. So if you use older version you should update your LibreOffice to 7.0.3

Second problem - if you have a Retina screen (HiDPI), then you can't use LibreOffice, because all text will be blured. There is a bug 138122

So, Apple, thank you!

by Roman Kuznetsov (noreply@blogger.com) at November 14, 2020 10:30 PM

November 13, 2020

Miklos Vajna

Detecting 0-byte files based on extension in Impress and elsewhere

Impress (and Writer and Calc) now has support for detecting 0-byte files on open/import based on their extension. This builds on top of the previous language-independent template improvements. This means that e.g. a 0-byte PPTX file will open as an empty Impress presentation, not in Writer.

Motivation

We regularly see customers wanting minimal templates, which are language independent and have no content. Such files are handy if your workflow is to first name an empty document (create it) and only then edit it (and not the other way around: first create the document, then save it by giving it a name). This is easy for .txt files: if it’s zero bytes, it’s empty. But then this approach is also expected to work for other file formats as well, where our original approach was more technical: if it’s an empty file, that that can be only plain text, so we (almost) always opened it in Writer, not matching the user expectations.

Instead of explaining the problem to people again and again (that a literally empty PPTX file is not a PPTX template), there is value in just adapting the code instead to "do what I mean".

Results so far

An empty PPTX file is now handled like this:

https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/zk3b0f2Rx3t5vFVuKiimujSJWYwPNH05PCf5Indih3OwMDeBrOUH1X7N22PO46kIbxTVzI0V3IV-bE0sMycTHGj2eRqKT6K7eQkZ0Py9QVCPIhV0pdKdGPLGH08xpw72wFQ-3eGyX4k=w1920
Figure 1. Empty PPTX file opening in Impress

You can see this is no longer opening in Writer as plain text but in Impress, which is clearly a less surprising behavior.

Here is what happens if you open an empty DOTX (template):

https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/cVB_kK2wDyNIJjLt9v9UcNS4AagRCifwBofp70mHfNVzopvrN1cxcsVLhWfEArhab_PwSFkAvLlMUS1witevRcKeEn9UXYtw5o4VeGSztvnNUi6YMtR3t2DUIu1k2LLOUhnpckAnrwQ=w1920
Figure 2. Empty DOTX file creates a new Writer document

You can see that it is even recognized that this is a template format, so a new document is created, not the template itself is opened for editing.

How is this implemented?

If you would like to know a bit more about how this works, continue reading… :-)

You can see the code change in this commit. First, we restrict this trick to file URLs, and also to empty files.

Second, we look at the extension of the file and try to match an import filter that usually handles that extension. This helps, because then nominally the correct filter will be used for the import, so save will not ask for a filename (as it happens for new documents), but it will know what target filename and export filter to use.

Finally we need to avoid actually invoking the import filter, because no file content is not something an import filter has to handle if its filter detection would reject the file. (E.g. PPTX is expected to be a valid ZIP file.) This is important, because we want to avoid touching each & every file filter to not fail for empty file content — instead we want to handle this centrally, at a single place.

Want to start using this?

You can get a snapshot / demo of Collabora Office and try it out yourself right now: try unstable snapshot. Collabora intends to continue supporting and contributing to LibreOffice, the code is merged so we expect all of this work will be available in TDF’s next release too (7.1).

by Miklos Vajna at November 13, 2020 07:50 AM

November 09, 2020

Gülşah Köse

Table row height improvement in Impress - LibreOffice / Collabora Office

In Impress while importing a table, there could be some situation that we have to shrink or scale table to fit in area. We have to decide how to change row heights while fitting in area. There were a problematic case that when we have text in row. Bug report is here:

How it should look: Row heights are equal and images seems in their cell

 

How was it looking before the fix: First two rows are smaller and empty rows seems bigger than actual. Total table height is bigger tan actual.

 



 

 

 

How it looks after the fix:


 




Patch link is here: https://git.libreoffice.org/core/+/b7b05dd36403af50b20fe06cbf8a10d8defb28a9%5E%21


Want to start using this?

You can get a snapshot / demo of Collabora Office and try it out yourself right now: try unstable snapshot. Collabora intends to continue supporting and contributing to LibreOffice, the code is merged so we expect all of this work will be available in TDF’s next release too (7.1).

by Gülşah Köse (noreply@blogger.com) at November 09, 2020 02:58 PM

November 06, 2020

LibreOffice QA Blog

QA/Dev Report: October 2020

General Activities

  1. LibreOffice 7.0.2.1 was released on October 8 and LibreOffice 7.0.3.1 on October 29
  2. Meanwhile, LibreOffice 7.1 Alpha 1 was released on October 30, being the first pre-release of LibreOffice 7.1
  3. The openSuse + LibreOffice Conference was run from October 15 – 17. You can find many interesting talks about QA and Development here
  4. Thorsten Behrens (CIB) made tab pages scrollable and fixed a couple of build issues
  5. Miklos Vajna (Collabora) improved handling of direct formatting with pasted ODT & RTF content, fixed an indentation issue with bulleted lists in RTF documents, did internal pdfium-related improvements, fixed a problem with accidentally opening a file twice, improved handling of page breaks with DOCX import
  6. Luboš Luňák (Collabora) continued polishing the Skia graphics engine integration, improved graphics handling in many areas and reduced CPU load during slideshow animations
  7. Stephan Bergmann (Red Hat) made many cleanups as well as build and test fixes
  8. Ayhan Yalçınsoy fixed misplaced master password dialog and made some UI tweaks
  9. Noel Grandin (Collabora) improved the UI linter script, made XML parsing faster in various areas, fixed printing of very large font sizes and made many code cleanups
  10. Caolán McNamara (Red Hat) fixed inputting Japanese characters in Header and Footer dialog, bumped the minimum version of gtk to 3.20.0, made it so Impress transition duration time is set in seconds instead of milliseconds, allowed inserting page breaks to page numbers beyond 9999, made mouse cursors more precise with gtk3 backend. He also continued the crucial user interface backend work and did many cleanups and crash fixes
  11. Xisco Faulí (TDF) added dozens of UI and cppunit tests and improved existing tests
  12. Jan-Marek Glogowski improved Windows Arm64 support, Linux dark theme support and added a focus indicator for flat buttons in KDE
  13. Andreas Kainz improved the alignment and positioning of Sidebar and Notebookbar elements
  14. Jim Raykowski made it so Draw/Impress slide/page previews update immediately after a renaming operation, made Sidebar treeviews actually display their tree lines with non-gtk3 backends and improved Navigator expanding behaviour
  15. Tomaž Vajngerl (Collabora) improved PDF annotation import support
  16. László Németh (NISZ) made many change tracking fixes
  17. Balázs Varga and Tünde Tóth (NISZ) fixed many OOXML chart issues
  18. Mark Hung fixed problems with converting between traditional and simplified Chinese in Calc
  19. Eike Rathke (Red Hat) fixed Calc number format comment handling and made it so Calc inline arrays and functions returning array/matrix propagate array mode to functions calling them, fixed generation of references depending on Calc formula syntax used, fixed displaying of numbers formatted as fraction, added the ability to refer to local names in another worksheet to Calc INDIRECT function and fixed missing sheet prefix for local-scoped sheets upon inserting named ranges
  20. Mike Kaganski (Collabora) made code cleanups and optimisations
  21. Tor Lillqvist (Collabora) worked on the iOS app, did code cleanups and added initial support for building LibreOffice on Windows Subsystem for Linux
  22. Leo Wang improved graphics rendering performance on macOS
  23. Tomofumi Yagi added a “Select all columns” checkbox to the Calc subtotals group page
  24. Björn Michaelsen continued internal improvements to Writer
  25. Attila Szűcs and Tibor Nagy (NISZ) continued fixing Calc autofill issues, made it so external links in imported XLSX files are preserved, implemented selecting Calc autofilter items by clicking on their names and fixed data validation issues mostly in the context of XLSX files
  26. Heiko Tietze (TDF) added a dialog to show UI options and improved the Additions dialog
  27. Michael Stahl (CIB) fixed several Writer undo issues
  28. Gülşah Köse (Collabora) improved how Impress handles camera rotation
  29. Julien Nabet fixed accessing a MySQL database using native connector, a couple of Firebird bugs and made code cleanups
  30. Rizal Muttaqin made many updates to the Colibre icon theme
  31. Samuel Mehrbrodt (CIB) reduced the performance impact of generating print previews
  32. Attila Bakos (NISZ) fixed some Writer text box issues
  33. Szabolcs Tóth and Balázs Regényi (NISZ) fixed many OOXML shape import/export issues and improved the handling of relative positioning of shapes
  34. Szymon Kłos (Collabora) made it so chart editing does not interfere with file saving and improved the Chart deck of the Sidebar
  35. Daniel Arato (NISZ) fixed issues with ODF and OOXML shapes and OOXML frames
  36. Gleb Popov upstreamed many FreeBSD build patches
  37. Danie Truter added percentage value display into the image compression dialog
  38. Kevin Suo improved Python examples
  39. Serge Krot (CIB) fixed missing number formatting when inserting an ODT file and added a minimum line width for Calc line styles
  40. DaeHyun Sung improved Korean font handling
  41. Ahmed ElShreif improved the UI logger
  42. Regina Henschel improved several areas of handling “resize with cell” in Calc
  43. Áron Budea (Collabora) fixed a Style Inspector crash
  44. Bartosz Kosiorek fixed some OOXML custom properties issues
  45. Muhammet Kara (Collabora) fixed a crash in the Additions dialog and made code cleanups
  46. Arnaud Versini made internal improvements to accessibility code
  47. Michael Meeks (Collabora) fixed spellchecking in Calc split window view
  48. Dennis Francis (Collabora) improved spellchecking performance in Calc
  49. Chris Mayo optimised icon installation
  50. Bryan Gazali added a wiki link to the missing Java JRE warning dialog
  51. Justin Luth (Collabora) made it so huge paragraphs do not cause data loss with DOCX export
  52. Michael Weghorn improved the displaying of Java options
  53. Travis Stewart fixed a LibreLogo code example in Help
  54. Triveni Remany added a note in Help about shortcut for editing a comment
  55. Stanislav Horacek clarified the UI location of Hidden Paragraphs option in Help
  56. Olivier Hallot (TDF) updated Help on Distribute objects and made cleanups in Help
  57. Seth Chaiklin made over 50 improvements and additions to Help, touching topics such as Position and Size, menu item locations, Customize, fields, Bullets and Numbering, PDF export, Navigator, Similarity search and Status Bar. He also improved LibreOffice UI, renaming “register-true” to “Page line-spacing”, made menu item display more consistent and added tooltips and accelerator keys

Kudos to Ilmari Lauhakangas for helping to elaborate the list above.

Reported Bugs

709 bugs, 85 of which are enhancements, have been reported by 376 people.

Top 10 Reporters

  1. Telesto ( 65 )
  2. NISZ LibreOffice Team ( 37 )
  3. Heiko Tietze ( 17 )
  4. Xisco Faulí ( 16 )
  5. sdc.blanco ( 14 )
  6. andreas_k ( 8 )
  7. Mike Kaganski ( 8 )
  8. Eyal Rozenberg ( 8 )
  9. Timur ( 8 )
  10. Roman Kuznetsov ( 8 )

Triaged Bugs

705 bugs have been triaged by 98 people.

Top 10 Triagers

  1. Buovjaga ( 81 )
  2. Xisco Faulí ( 75 )
  3. Heiko Tietze ( 71 )
  4. Timur ( 67 )
  5. Dieter ( 48 )
  6. V Stuart Foote ( 33 )
  7. Mike Kaganski ( 31 )
  8. Telesto ( 24 )
  9. m.a.riosv ( 19 )
  10. Aron Budea ( 16 )

Resolution of resolved bugs

654 bugs have been set to RESOLVED.

Check the following sections for more information about bugs resolved as FIXED, WORKSFORME and DUPLICATE.

Fixed Bugs

220 bugs have been fixed by 42 people.

Top 10 Fixers

  1. Caolán McNamara ( 26 )
  2. Seth Chaiklin ( 17 )
  3. Heiko Tietze ( 12 )
  4. Tünde Tóth ( 8 )
  5. Michael Stahl ( 8 )
  6. Jan-Marek Glogowski ( 8 )
  7. Eike Rathke ( 7 )
  8. Regényi Balázs ( 6 )
  9. László Németh ( 6 )
  10. Ayhan Yalçınsoy ( 5 )

List of critical bugs fixed

  1. tdf#133771 When saving an encrypted document, unchecking ‘Save with password’ has no effect, encryption is kept ( Thanks to Vasily Melenchuk )

List of high severity bugs fixed

  1. tdf#121553 Editing: Firebird: Table editor erroneously prompts to change CLOB field to a BLOB field during alter table ( Thanks to Julien Nabet )
  2. tdf#130314 Writer busy-locks in layouting CJK fonts (was: hangs while converting to pdf) – see comment #9 / #8 ( Thanks to Mark Hung )
  3. tdf#132536 Memory usage increases after every file-reload ( Thanks to Jan-Marek Glogowski )
  4. tdf#135082 Print selection doesn’t print selection but whole page ( Thanks to Srijan Bhatia )
  5. tdf#135260 Backspace has only effect on one character after rejecting all changes ( Thanks to Michael Stahl )
  6. tdf#136728 Crash deleting a table ( Thanks to Xisco Fauli )
  7. tdf#137023 FILEOPEN: PPTX: Text is center aligned instead of left ( Thanks to Miklos Vajna )
  8. tdf#137248 Calc – AutoCalculate malfunction, always F9 (ReCalculate) necessary ( Thanks to Eike Rathke )
  9. tdf#137556 Crash if I try to open the Print dialog in GTK3 3.18 only ( Thanks to Caolán McNamara )
  10. tdf#137643 Can’t select font, no font dropdown list, if open MSO .doc in GTK3 only (gen and Skia OK) ( Thanks to Caolán McNamara )
  11. tdf#137754 Crash when applying styles in a table within Impress ( Thanks to Noel Grandin )
  12. tdf#34355 Option to show track changes in margin is missing ( Thanks to László Németh )
  13. tdf#84874 FILESAVE to .xlsx. MS Excel doesn’t load spreadsheets with promptTitle longer than 256 characters. ( Thanks to Tibor Nagy )
  14. tdf#98868 FILESAVE: crash if try save ODT file with track changes compared ( Thanks to Caolán McNamara )

List of crashes fixed

  1. tdf#131679 Crash cutting a chart ( Thanks to Michael Stahl )
  2. tdf#135733 Crash undo paste & cut (swlo!SwDoc::IsInWriterfilterImport) since 7.0 or 7.1) ( Thanks to Michael Stahl )
  3. tdf#136728 Crash deleting a table ( Thanks to Xisco Fauli )
  4. tdf#137105 Crash after inserting table with Style Inspector tab active ( Thanks to Aron Budea )
  5. tdf#137189 Crash on loading content at the additions dialog with installed extensions ( Thanks to Heiko Tietze )
  6. tdf#137460 Wrong AdditionsTag crashes LibreOffice ( Thanks to Muhammet Kara )
  7. tdf#137508 CRASH: launching ‘adding more icon themes via extensions’ dialog ( GTK3 ) ( Thanks to Caolán McNamara )
  8. tdf#137526 Crash on undo with track changes enabled ( Thanks to László Németh )
  9. tdf#137556 Crash if I try to open the Print dialog in GTK3 3.18 only ( Thanks to Caolán McNamara )
  10. tdf#137615 Crash when opening the effect sidebar panel ( Thanks to andreas kainz )
  11. tdf#137684 ChangesInMargin: Crash on Undo of characters deleted by pressing Delete ( Thanks to László Németh )
  12. tdf#137703 Crash when setting cell background color ( Thanks to Caolán McNamara )
  13. tdf#137713 crash in debug build editing matrix formula ( Thanks to Caolán McNamara )
  14. tdf#137754 Crash when applying styles in a table within Impress ( Thanks to Noel Grandin )
  15. tdf#137804 Qt5 printing (from Writer) crashes LibreOffice ( Thanks to Jan-Marek Glogowski )
  16. tdf#137871 CRASH: applying different styles to different cells in table (GTK3) ( Thanks to Caolán McNamara )
  17. tdf#98868 FILESAVE: crash if try save ODT file with track changes compared ( Thanks to Caolán McNamara )

List of performance issues fixed

List of old bugs ( more than 4 years old ) fixed

  1. tdf#100818 add ability to refer to local names in another worksheet to INDIRECT ( Thanks to Eike Rathke )
  2. tdf#101122 FILESAVE Export of custom shape to pptx sets fill wrongly and looses formulas and handles ( Thanks to Regényi Balázs )
  3. tdf#34355 Option to show track changes in margin is missing ( Thanks to László Németh )
  4. tdf#84874 FILESAVE to .xlsx. MS Excel doesn’t load spreadsheets with promptTitle longer than 256 characters. ( Thanks to Tibor Nagy )
  5. tdf#85371 Redim with function name ( Thanks to Andreas Heinisch )
  6. tdf#88782 EDITING spreadsheet: autofill using fill handle inserts incorrect data when used with merged cells ( Thanks to Attila Szűcs )
  7. tdf#90104 Data validity error when saving decimal number to .xlsx format ( Thanks to Tibor Nagy )
  8. tdf#93739 Clarify ambiguity in help file for adding a control ( Thanks to Seth Chaiklin )
  9. tdf#95096 ibus keyboarding solution – kmfl characters are not “swallowed” for cell in row with “table in table” ( Thanks to Caolán McNamara )
  10. tdf#96446 Error in Help for LibreLogo ( Thanks to Travis Stewart )
  11. tdf#96496 Help describes “Background” tab but this no longer exists ( Thanks to Seth Chaiklin )
  12. tdf#97517 FILEOPEN: DOCX import flips line incorrectly ( Thanks to Regényi Balázs )
  13. tdf#98868 FILESAVE: crash if try save ODT file with track changes compared ( Thanks to Caolán McNamara )
  14. tdf#99810 FILESAVE DOCX: Lines lost when saved as DOCX ( Thanks to Regényi Balázs )

WORKSFORME bugs

82 bugs have been retested by 33 people.

Top 10 testers…

by x1sc0 at November 06, 2020 10:54 AM

October 30, 2020

Andreas Kainz

Layout updates

You know the LibreOffice community work hard on the LibreOffice 7.1 Christmas release. Did you know that LibreOffice has 7 different UI Layouts? With the next release, our uses will be informed after the installation. Thanks to Heiko for the new dialog.

As all users get informed about the different UI layouts don’t forget to write a bug report, that everybody will have the best Office Suite. If you like my work become a

downloads_wordmark_white_on_coral2x.jpg

by kdeonlinux at October 30, 2020 08:23 PM

LibreOffice QA Blog

LibreOffice 7.1 Alpha1 is ready for testing

The LibreOffice Quality Assurance ( QA ) Team is happy to announce LibreOffice 7.1 Alpha1 is ready for testing!

LibreOffice 7.1 will be released as final at the beginning of February, 2021 ( Check the Release Plan ) being LibreOffice 7.1 Alpha1 the first pre-release since the development of version 7.1 started at the end of May, 2020. Since then, 5374 commits have been submitted to the code repository and more than 1100 bugs were set to FIXED in Bugzilla. Check the release notes to find the new features included in this version of LibreOffice.

LibreOffice 7.1 Alpha1 can be downloaded from here for Linux, MacOS and Windows, and it can be installed alongside the standard version.

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 ).

For help, you can contact the QA Team directly in the QA IRC channel or via Telegram.

LibreOffice is a volunteer-driven community project, so please help us to test – we appreciate it!

Happy testing!!

Download it now!…

by x1sc0 at October 30, 2020 10:23 AM

October 29, 2020

Roman Kuznetsov

Your typical errors when creating presentation templates. Part 1

So, let's continue to dissect these nice presentation templates from our Indonesian community. Download the same template as in previous article. Open it in LibreOffice Impress and look at first slide:

 

Try click somewhere on slide in area with rectangles. You can select any from these rectangles include the largest grey rectangle that author used as background for all composition. Its all are just shapes! This is an absolutely wrong way when you create a presentation template!

First, user shouldn't have an opportunity to select any slide background elements. This will interfere with and distract him from creating the presentation. User should understand clear that he can change only heading text on first slide of his future presentation. 

And second problem with these many shapes is its size. Every shape is an different object with own parameters, like position on page/slide, z-order, weight and height, area color/gradient, etc. and therefore every shape has a not small size.

The best way here is to create a background for your slide in another graphic software, like LibreOffice Draw in our case (or GIMP or Inkscape). Note, your image should have the same size as your future presentation template, like 16:9 or 4:3, or A4. Then save that image as PNG with the best quality somewhere on your PC.

A next step is to set up your image as background for a slide. There are several methods for it. Simpliest method is follow: open a Properties section in Sidebar. Press a "Insert image" button. Find and select your image in "Set background image" dialog and press "Open" button there. Voila! You have a slide background (I used another image and I before deleted all these shapes just for visibility):