By helping to translate and market LibreOffice around the world, native language projects bring enthusiasm and passion to the global community. Here’s what they did in 2020…

(This is part of The Document Foundation’s Annual Report for 2020 – the full version will be posted here on the blog soon.)

Central Kurdish

Support for the Central Kurdish language was added to LibreOffice in 2021, and Jwtiyar Ali helped to drive the translation of the suite’s user interface. In addition, a Telegram group was created for community members to talk about upcoming translation projects, and bring new translators on board. Throughout the year, the Central Kurdish team worked on translating strings, with the goal in 2021 being to complete all translations, and also provide a dictionary for the language.

For more on this project, see our interview with Jwtiyar here.

Czech

InstallFest, which took place in Prague on 29 February and 1 March 2020, was an event focused on GNU/Linux, helping new users to install the operating system. But it also had lectures and stands for many other free and open source software projects, and the Czech LibreOffice community was there with a booth.

The vast majority of visitors were from younger generations – often high school or even elementary school pupils. The new mobile application from Collabora, which was released just a few days before the event, aroused great interest, as did LibreOffice Online. Other visitors to the booth asked questions was about handling ODF files with embedded fonts, and the status of various bug reports.

Later in the year, the Czech community gave a talk at the OpenAlt conference (online) about maintaining an experimental Czech spellcheck dictionary in LibreOffice.

Outside of events, community members worked on maintaining and updating the Czech language LibreOffice website, supported users by answering questions on the CZ Ask LibreOffice website, and kept social media updated with 600 tweets on the Twitter account (and regular activity on the Facebook page).

On other websites, Czech contributors published articles and news on Czech FOSS portals (openoffice.cz, root.cz, abclinuxu.cz), and ran a small survey (with 20 responses) to collect examples of how LibreOffice is being used in schools, organizations and small companies.

In terms of translations, the Czech community announced their work using platforms for volunteers – which turned out to be a great way to involve of new contributors. Tens of volunteers participated during 2020. Together with long-time community members, they worked on translations for LibreOffice’s user interface and help content (both at 100%), subtitles for videos, FAQ articles and other pages on the wiki.

The Online guide for LibreOffice 6.3 translated and published in March 2020, followed by the Math guide for LibreOffice 6.4 in June, and the Getting Started Guide for LibreOffice 6.4 in July.

Dutch

Throughout 2020, the Dutch-speaking LibreOffice community was involved in various projects and activities. For instance, community members helped to support LibreOffice users by answering questions on the Ask LibreOffice website and …

(This image shows some LibreOffice community members from our map. If you’re not there, or want to get your location on the map, let us know!)

Today we’re talking to Dante Doménech, who’s helping to improve LibreOffice Math…

Hi Dante – tell us a bit about yourself!

I’m from Spain – the biggest city in the area is Valencia. I’m a physics student, and my hobbies are coding and reading about other scientific fields.

What are you doing in the LibreOffice project right now?

I’m working on updating the suite’s formula editor to be fully compatible with MathML. This would increase the strength of our formula editor, by backing it with a solid standard.

Additionally, I’m working on adding support for Kahan summation, for handling sums in LibreOffice Calc. This would increase the accuracy of statistical operations – in particular sum, average, standard deviation …

How did you originally get involved, and what was the experience like?

There was no way of using custom RGB colors in Math formulas – so I added the feature myself. It was easier than expected, because the people in the community directly pointed me to the code I was looking for.

Is there anything else you’d like to work on?

Once I’m finished with the formula editor, I may improve the collection of numerical calculus functions in Calc. I also may help with making a new Math guide.

Many thanks to Dante for all his contributions! Some of them will arrive in LibreOffice 7.2, due this summer. Stay tuned to the blog for more updates…

LibreOffice’s native file format is OpenDocument, a fully open and standardised format that’s great for sharing documents and long-term data storage. Of course, LibreOffice does its best to open files made by other office software as well, even if they’re stored in pseudo-“standards” with cryptic and obfuscated contents. Compatibility with PowerPoint PPT(X) presentations is therefore a challenge, but developers are working hard on improvements…

In September 2019, we announced an initiative to improve the support of PPT and PPTX files in LibreOffice. A year has passed since the last review and it is time to summarise achievements again.

Everyone is invited to participate in the PowerPoint support initiative, either in development or testing. If you are interested in joining, please send an email to ilmari.lauhakangas@libreoffice.org.

Audio

Miklos Vajna (Collabora):
Added import and export support for slide narrations and their icons

Borders and fills

Miklos Vajna (Collabora):
Handle stroke properties of image shapes
Improve import of transparency in multi-step gradients

Slide before Miklos’s fix

Slide after Miklos’s fix

Regina Henschel:
PPTX: transparency gradient on solid fill is not considered in export
Add fill to fontwork in export to PPTX

Charts

Zhenhua Fong (PPT/X team):
Chart background is white instead of Automatic/No fill plot area

Custom shapes

Gülşah Köse (Collabora):
Handle greyscale effect on bitmap filled custom shapes (blog post)
Apply mirror property to custom cropped graphic (blog post)
Import support for custom stretch values (blog post)
Import crop position of bitmap filled shape (blog post)
Import graphics cropped into custom geometry as custom shapes (blog post)

Mark Hung (PPT/X team):
Export names of custom shapes

Miklos Vajna (Collabora):
Handle adjust values from both the custom shape and its placeholder

Tünde Tóth (NISZ):
Fix lost arcTo shape

Xisco Faulí (TDF):
PPT: export custom shapes as Bitmap

Hyperlinks

Tibor Nagy (NISZ):
Fix internal hyperlink to slide in PPTX
Fix lost direct hyperlink colors
Fix internal hyperlinks with PPTX export

Zhenhua Fong (PPT/X team):
Import hyperlinks from PPT

Tables

Gülşah Köse (Collabora):
Table row height improvement in Impress (blog post)

Miklos Vajna (Collabora):
Shadow for tables from PPTX in Impress (blog post)

Tibor Nagy (NISZ):
Fix vertical alignment in exported table

Text boxes

Attila Bakos (NISZ):
Fix exporting of placeholders

Gülşah Köse (Collabora):
Fix the placeholders priority order
Text box gets displaced by text coming from master page

Text in shapes

Gülşah Köse (Collabora):
Camera Rotation Improvement (blog post)

Miklos Vajna (Collabora):
SmartArt improvements in Impress, part 5 (blog post)
SmartArt improvements in Impress, part 6 (blog post)

Regina Henschel:
Text transformation “Deflate” is wrongly imported as “Inflate”
Wordart 3D is lost on round trip

Serge Krot (CIB):
Top-aligned text in imported PPTX becomes bottom-aligned

Various

Ahmad Ganzouri:
OOXML support for shadow blur

Bartosz Kosiorek (PPT/X team):
OOXML Fix storage of date in Custom Properties

Dániel Arató (NISZ):
Fix missing chart in exported PPTX …

Berlin, May 6, 2021 – LibreOffice 7.1.3 Community, the third minor release of the LibreOffice 7.1 family, targeted at technology enthusiasts and power users, is available for download from https://www.libreoffice.org/download/. LibreOffice 7.1.3 includes over 100 bug fixes, with 25% focused on Microsoft Office file compatibility (DOCX, XLSX and PPTX).

For enterprise-class deployments, TDF strongly recommends the LibreOffice Enterprise family of applications from ecosystem partners, with long-term support options, professional assistance, custom features and Service Level Agreements: https://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-in-business/.

LibreOffice Community and the LibreOffice Enterprise family of products are based on the LibreOffice Technology platform, the result of years of development efforts with the objective of providing a state of the art office suite not only for the desktop but also for mobile and the cloud.

Products based on LibreOffice Technology are available for major desktop operating systems (Windows, macOS, Linux and Chrome OS), mobile platforms (Android and iOS) and the cloud. They may have a different name, according to each company brand, but they share the same LibreOffice unique advantages, robustness and flexibility.

Migrations to LibreOffice

The Document Foundation has developed a Migration Protocol to support enterprises moving from proprietary office suites to LibreOffice, which is based on the deployment of a LTS version from the LibreOffice Enterprise family, plus migration consultancy and training sourced from certified professionals who offer CIOs and IT managers value-added solutions in line with proprietary offerings. Reference: https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/professional-support/.

Availability of LibreOffice 7.1.3 Community

LibreOffice 7.1.3 Community represents the bleeding edge in term of features for open source office suites. For users whose main objective is personal productivity and therefore prefer a release that has undergone more testing and bug fixing over the new features, The Document Foundation provides LibreOffice 7.0.5.

LibreOffice 7.1.3 change log pages are available on TDF’s wiki: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/7.1.3/RC1 (changed in RC1) and https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/7.1.3/RC2 (changed in RC2).

LibreOffice Technology based products for Android and iOS are listed here: https://www.libreoffice.org/download/android-and-ios/, while for App Stores and ChromeOS are listed here: https://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-from-microsoft-and-mac-app-stores/

LibreOffice individual users are assisted by a global community of volunteers: https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/community-support/. On the website and the wiki there are guides, manuals, tutorials and HowTos. Donations help us to make all of these resources available.

LibreOffice users are invited to join the community at https://ask.libreoffice.org, where they can get and provide user-to-user support. People willing to contribute their time and professional skills to the project can visit the dedicated website at https://whatcanidoforlibreoffice.org.

LibreOffice users, free software advocates and community members can provide financial support to The Document Foundation with a donation via PayPal, credit card or other tools at https://www.libreoffice.org/donate.

LibreOffice 7.1.3 is built with document …

Regina Henschel shows you how to do some nifty 3D tricks in LibreOffice…

First, you need a world map in “Miller projection”. You find a suitable one on Wikipedia – download the full-size version. Here’s a thumbnail of it (CC-BY-SA, Daniel R. Strebe, August 2011):

Next, start LibreOffice Draw, and create a sphere from the “3D-Objects” toolbar.

Click the sphere to select it, right-click to bring up the context menu, and choose “Area”.

In the dialog box that appears, click on “Bitmap” and then on “Add/Import”. Select the downloaded map, and enter a name for it, that you will use in your collection of bitmaps. The image should be applied to the sphere. If not, select the map from the collection.

Then, in the “Options” part of the dialog box, select the item “Stretched” from the drop-down list “Style”. Click OK. Your globe is finished!

Now you can rotate the globe to the part of the earth you want to see – click on it once to show red corner controls, then once again to show orange; the latter can be used for rotation.

If you want to change the position of the “sun”, open the “3D Effects” dialog from the context menu. Select the tab “Illumination”. In the lower part drag the ball to the desired direction. And finally, apply it with the “Assign” icon top right.

Thanks to Regina for the tips! More guides for LibreOffice Draw, written by our documentation community, are available on this page. Check out the Draw Guide 6.4 for lots more info!

The LibreOffice Conference is the annual gathering of the community, our end-users, developers, and everyone interested in free office software. Last year, it took place online – and was co-organised with the openSUSE project

(This is part of The Document Foundation’s Annual Report for 2020 – the full version will be posted here on the blog soon.)

Normally the conference takes place at a different venue each year, to reflect the international and diverse LibreOffice community. For instance, in 2019 we were in Almeria; in 2018 in Tirana; and in 2017 in Rome. Due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, though, we decided to move the conference online in 2020. This wasn’t an easy decision, as face-to-face meetups are important for free and open source software projects, but we focused on making it work.

We did so with the help of openSUSE, a GNU/Linux distribution project, which also has yearly conferences. There’s a lot of overlap between the openSUSE and LibreOffice projects – both produce free software for end users, and many people are active in both communities – so we decided to join forces and bring as many people together as possible.

The conference took place from 15 – 17 October, with sessions usually running from 10:00 to 21:00 (UTC). We created multiple Jitsi “rooms” for the various talks and presentations, along with extra rooms for social interaction and general chit-chat.

Conference Tracks

Following the opening session, presentations and talks were given across various “tracks” or categories: Development, Advocacy, Marketing, Design, Accessibility, Localisation, Documentation and more. There were highly technical talks focused on specific areas, along with more open discussions about community building and recent updates from The Document Foundation.

On the final day, the conference wrapped up with a closing session, headed by TDF’s Chairman, Lothar Becker. He thanked the presenters and all attendees for their support, especially given that it was the first time we’ve run such a large event online.

Hackfest and Workshops

Outside of the conference tracks, there were several workshops covering certification, new tools to onboard contributors, strategic marketing, and the Google Summer of Code. On the final day of the conference, Ilmari Lauhakangas organised a Virtual Hackfest – an opportunity for developers to work together on features and bugs.

Full Programme

Full details about the event are available on openSUSE’s events page. For a quick overview of all the talks, including links to PDF versions of the presentations, see here. Videos of many of the talks are available as a playlist on our YouTube channel (or click here to watch them on PeerTube):

Like what we do? Support the LibreOffice project and The Document Foundation – get involved and help our volunteers, or consider …

Check out our summary of what happened in the LibreOffice community last month…

• We started off by releasing LibreOffice 7.1.2, an update with over 60 bug fixes and improvements to document compatibility.

• Meanwhile, the Council of the German city of Dortmund announced that it’s moving to free and open source software, where possible. This is great news: in the future, the city administration will have to justify why open source software cannot be used for every proprietary software application.

• There were several documentation updates in April, thanks to our busy community: the Brazilian Community launched the LibreOffice 7.0 Getting Started Guide in Portuguese, while the Writer Guide 7.1 also arrived. Great work, everyone!

• Gökçe Kuler from the Turkish LibreOffice community is helping to fix bugs in the software. She told us about her experiences joining the project, and her tips for others who want to get involved.

• In the middle of the month, we announced the dates for the (online) LibreOffice Conference 2021. It will be a fully virtual event for the second consecutive year, from September 23 (Thursday) to September 25 (Saturday). We also announced the Call for Papers – join in and submit a talk!

• Next up: the Czech community’s translation of the Writer Guide 6.4. Thanks to Petr Kuběj, Zdeněk Crhonek, Petr Valach, Vendula Crhonková, Radomír Strnad, Ludmila Chládková and Zuzana Pitříková for their contributions!

• Throughout the month, we posted sections from our Annual Report 2020: TDF and the Pandemic, The Document Foundation in 2020, and LibreOffice in 2020. Check them out to learn more about how the non-profit foundation behind LibreOffice works.

• Our New Generation project, aimed at bringing new (and especially younger) contributors into the community, announced its first work: flyers to hand out in schools and universities. They’re available in many languages, and encourage younger people to not just use LibreOffice, but also get involved with it too.

• Later in the month, we chatted with Necdet Yücel, who has been mentoring students and helping them to get involved with LibreOffice.

• LibreOffice’s Macro Team wrote a progress report, listing documentation updates and code contributions from many community members. A big thanks to everyone who’s helping to improve LibreOffice’s macro support.

• Our French community has been working on translations for LibreOffice user guides, so we thanked them with special Open Badges, containing custom metadata, recognising their achievements!

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!

If you’ve been using LibreOffice for a while, you may be wondering: who makes it? Well, the answer is: people like you! LibreOffice is a worldwide, community open source project – and many people who help to improve it, actually started out as regular users of the software.

So in May, we want to encourage you to get involved, join our community, and have fun. You can build up valuable skills for a future career – and you don’t need to be a programmer. There are many ways to help make LibreOffice awesome, as we’ll see in a moment.

And best of all: everyone who contributes to LibreOffice in May 2021 can claim a cool sticker pack, and has the chance to win extra LibreOffice merchandise such as mugs, hoodies, T-shirts, rucksacks and more (we’ll choose 10 participants at random at the end):

How to take part

So, let’s get started! There are many ways you can help out – and as mentioned, 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 7.1.2”.

• 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.

• Code Cruncher, contributing source code: The codebase is big, but there are lots of places to get involved with small jobs. See our Developers page on the website and this page on the wiki to get started.

• Docs Doctor, writing documentation: Whether you want to update the online help or add chapters to the handbooks, here’s where to start.

We’ll be updating this page every day with usernames across our various services, as people contribute. So dive in, get involved and help make LibreOffice better for millions of people around the world – and enjoy your sticker pack at the end as thanks from us! And who knows, maybe you’ll be lucky enough to win bonus merch as well…

Let’s go! We’ll be posting regular updates on this blog and our Mastodon and Twitter accounts over the next four weeks – stay tuned!

Thanks to localisation volunteers around the world, LibreOffice’s documentation is available in many languages. Today, we want to say thanks to the French community of translators, who localised the guide for LibreOffice Math 7.0 – great work, everyone!

Each translator gets an Open Badge from The Document Foundation, the non-profit behind LibreOffice. These are special, custom images with embedded metadata, confirming the contributions.

So, if you got a badge, feel free to share it on your blog, social media, Git page and other places! And indeed use it as proof of your abilities, when joining another project or looking for work! You can verify your badge here.

The recipients:

• Sango BARKER-GILES
• Maëlle GONZALEZ
• Ornella NGUENANG LOWE
• Célian LIMOUSIN
• Baptiste LECUYER

Enjoy, and thanks again! Stay tuned to this blog for more Open Badges in coming months…

The Document Foundation (TDF) is the charitable entity behind the world’s leading free/libre/open source (FLOSS) office suite LibreOffice.

We are looking for an individual or company to implement Curl based HTTP/WebDAV UCP.

The work has to be developed on LibreOffice master, so that it will be released in the next major version.

The task consists of addressing two problems. All of the mentioned features and requirements are a mandatory part of this tender and therefore have to be part of the bid. This tender does not contain any optional items.

Problem description #1 – Currently we need to bundle crypto libraries

• TDF releases of LibreOffice bundle both OpenSSL and NSS, but both libraries have a high number of security issues.
• On macOS and Windows, neither OpenSSL nor NSS integrate with the crytographic APIs supplied by the operating system, so they will use a bundled hard-coded set of trusted certificate authorities (CAs), that is different from what the operating system itself would trust. This hard-coded set of trusted certificates is also not user-modifiable.
• Additionally, OpenSSL cannot ever be used from the system because it has no application binary interface (ABI).

Problem description #2 – Currently we duplicate and use different HTTP/WebDAV UCPs

• One which is used by everybody, including TDF releases, using a bundled Neon WebDAV library. This requires OpenSSL and cannot be used on a hypothetical Apple iOS port.
• Another (for a hypothetical Apple iOS port) using a bundled Serf library. This requires OpenSSL.
  • Serf does not actually support WebDAV directly, only HTTP, so the UCP itself implements the additional WebDAV protocol features.
  • It is complicated to build, as it drags in two other bundled external libraries.
  • Additionally, this cannot be upgraded to a current version without introducing a new build dependency on the “scons” tool.
• TDF releases also bundle the Curl library.
  • This can can do HTTP, likely similar to Serf.
  • Also, it can use native operating system cryptographic APIs and trusted certificate authorities (CAs) on Windows, macOS and Linux.
  • It can be used on Apple iOS without problems. (iOS deliverables are not part of this tender.)

The solution we seek, and as such the scope of this tender, is to implement a HTTP/WebDAV UCP with Curl, possibly based on code from the Serf UCP, to solve these issues, by getting rid of four bundled external libraries and one hard OpenSSL dependency. Besides addressing the above issues, the new Curl-based implementation needs to be at least as functionally complete as the existing Neon-based one.

All technology standards of relevance, as well as their targeted versions for this tender should be declared or defined in the offer’s description of implementation (e.g. name and version of the cryptographic API on the respective operating systems).

A key item of the deliverables for this tender, and therefore also a decision criteria – besides qualification, references, price, and completeness of fullfilment – is extensive documentation about the approach chosen to implement the above items, covering more than just the pure …