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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…
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!
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 …
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:
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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 …
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:
…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.
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:
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.
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.
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 …
This continues a series of items on Vendor Neutral FLOSS projects and how they do marketing which you can read here.
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:
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.
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 …
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
I recently dived into the SmartArt support of LibreOffice, which is the component responsible for displaying complex diagrams from PPTX. I focus on the case when only the document model and the layout constraints are given, not a pre-rendered result.
In this post I would like to present the progress done last month regarding the above mentioned diagram types — these are used in many documents.
The improvement (as always) come in small incremental steps:
Continuous Block Process now reads space width from constraints.
Accent Process now has the missing bullets and fixes an incorrect large paragraph-level indent.
Organization Chart now has an initial implementation of the hierRoot and
hierChild algorithms.
Organization Chart now handles multiple employees for a manager.
With all these fixed, we reach a much better state for the mentioned diagram types.
The SmartArt test documents from sd/qa/unit/data/pptx/ is what I used for testing this work.
Here is how the baseline, the current and the reference rendering of Accent Process looks like:
smartart-accent-process.pptx, baseline
smartart-accent-process.pptx, current
smartart-accent-process.pptx, reference
And here is how the baseline, the current and the reference rendering of Organization Chart looks like:
smartart-org-chart.pptx, baseline
smartart-org-chart.pptx, current
smartart-org-chart.pptx, reference
This is not not perfect yet, but it’s clearly a large improvement, all text is now readable from the diagrams and bullets are no longer missing!
All this is available in master (towards LibreOffice 6.3), so you can grab a daily build and try it out right now. :-)
This continues a series of items on Vendor Neutral FLOSS projects and how they do marketing which you can read here.
In order to understand how we can best shape the ecosystem to drive LibreOffice’s success – it is helpful to understand first what products and services companies currently sell, and then consider how we want to shape the environment that they adapt to to encourage behaviors that we want.
Perhaps the most obvious contribution to LibreOffice is that of consultancy. A user has a problem, a budget, finds someone to fix it for them, contracts with them to address this issue, and then to contribute this back to LibreOffice.
A consultancy model at first glance appears to fit well with FLOSS development, and indeed there are several successful FLOSS consultancies in the market (of which Collabora is one). However there are a number of significant problems with the consultancy business model:
560 bugs have been reported by 347 people.
Top 10 Reporters
570 bugs have been triaged by 77 people.
Top 10 Triagers
208 bugs have been fixed by 49 people.
Top 10 Fixers
List of critical bugs fixed
Against the backdrop of a number of companies getting ‘cute’ with licensing, to attempt to encourage companies who use their software to re-invest into the product; vendor neutral non-profits that steward the project, trademark and other assets while allowing many parties to invest - seem increasingly attractive to sustain software beyond its (often) VC fuelled birth. LibreOffice is hosted by just such a project The Document Foundation (TDF) – and this is a huge strength.
Unfortunately, there are also very significant impacts on how a commercial ecosystem can be grown and sustained around such vendor neutral projects – particularly as relates to encouraging ongoing corporate investment into such projects. This paper (which I will serialize into several sections and re-aggregate here) – examines this space and I’ll try to keep it somewhat alive by incorporating feedback. This also exists to inform a wider discussion in the LibreOffice community along these lines.
Let me start with a quote from “Open Sources”: from a section by Bob Young (founder of RedHat) entitled “How Do You Make Money in Free Software”:
"No one expects it to be easy to make money in free software. While making money with free software is a challenge, the challenge is not necessarily greater than with proprietary software. In fact you make money in free software exactly the same way you do it in proprietary software: by building a great product, marketing it with skill and imagination, looking after your customers, and thereby building a brand that stands for quality and customer service."
It is hard not to subscribe to this view, seeing RedHat’s extraordinary success over many years. Unfortunately – when this is applied to a vendor neutral project such as LibreOffice – encouraging companies to invest in TDF’s brand and project, if marketed unhelpfully, can achieve the opposite – of obscuring the brand of those investing into the project - damaging everyone involved.
This paper is written from my perspective both from running Collabora Productivity (whereby I have a clear interest in growing our piece of the ecosystem) and also as a long standing Director of The Document Foundation (with an interest in growing the whole ecosystem), and as a long term FLOSS contributor (with an interest in nurturing a sustainable ecosystem around all Free Software). With lots of hats - things can become unclear; I try to talk here with my TDF hat on here; so 'our' means 'TDF & the LibreOffice project'. Of course, I speak only for myself – not for TDF.
While this may have wider application, and is presented in the hope that it will be more generally useful, this paper will argue that the way LibreOffice is positioned by The Document Foundation (TDF) is at times counter-productive to its mission, and that its focus needs to change. A new focus should be to give significantly more emphasis to growing and crediting the community and ecosystem – both volunteer and commercial, and away from product marketing.
One of the exciting …
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.
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