Our LibreOffice and Open Source Conference 2024 is taking place in a few weeks in Luxembourg, and the country’s Ministry for Digitalisation wrote to tell us:

We are pleased to contribute to the LibreOffice and Open Source Conference with a speech by Luxembourg’s Minister for Digitalisation and Minister for Research and Higher Education, Stéphanie Obertin and a presentation of Luxchat4Gov by project manager, Patrick Weber.

The secure and interoperable instant messaging dedicated to the public sector, Luxchat4Gov was developed by the Ministry for Digitalisation in collaboration with LU-CIX and leverages the Matrix protocol to ensure seamless interoperability between systems, while maintaining stringent data security. In parallel, LU-CIX and its partners build LuxChat, the public version of LuxChat4Gov to offer the same level of security and digital autonomy.

By adopting this platform, Luxembourg sets a precedent for achieving digital autonomy while fostering an interconnected and secure communication environment across government entities, and the national Luxchat ecosystem. This is just the first effort to assert Luxembourg’s Digital Sovereignty, through using open-source software which has been tailored to fit the country’s specific needs and that is now operating under Luxembourgish jurisdiction. It’s only by having full control on the open-source software and by hosting it in national data centers that a high level of security and confidentiality of the data can ensured.

We’re very happy to have their participation!

Click here to register for the conference

Hossein Nourikhah, our Developer Community Architect, writes:

Learn LibreOffice development and boost your software skills including bug management, coding, version management using Git, code review using Gerrit and much more! Our workshop titled “Introduction to LibreOffice development” at the LibreOffice Conference 2024 is a great opportunity for all those who love getting involved with a world wide open source community.

Please register soon!

This year, the LibreOffice Conference 2024 will be held in Luxembourg. Alongside the main conference tracks, a development workshop will be held to give the people hands-on experience to LibreOffice development.

The workshop will be held on 11 and 12 October 2024, at the same place as the LibreOffice Conference in Luxembourg. If you like to be with us, please register here:

• Register to attend LibreOffice 2024 Conference workshop

Learn From Experienced LibreOffice Contributors

Many people from The Document Foundation (TDF), the charity behind LibreOffice will present different topics in the workshop. Also, other contributors and also experienced developers from the ecosystem companies will participate.

We are excited to be able to see you in person in Luxembourg to share practical knowledge about LibreOffice and open source development model with you.

Workshop Topics

These are the topics of the workshop. For more information, please refer to the workshop page at the conference website:

• LibreOffice Conference 2024 Workshop: Introduction to LibreOffice Development

Day One: 11 October 2024

Morning:

1. Bug reporting and triaging (1 hour)
Presenter: Xisco Faulí

2. Git Basics (1 hour)
Presenter: Michael Weghorn

3. Gerrit for code reviews (1 hour)
Presenter: Xisco Faulí

4. Introduction to problem solving techniques (30 minutes)
Presenter: Michael Meeks, Collabora Productivity

Afternoon:

5. Building LibreOffice from source code (3 hours)
Presenter: Christian Lohmaier

6. Introduction to LibreOffice Writer Development (1 hour)
Presenter: Miklos Vajna, Collabora Productivity

Day Two: 12 October 2024

Morning:

7. LibreOffice Documentation (1 hour)
Presenter: Olivier Hallot

8. LibreOffice automation via scripting (BASIC, Python) (3 hours)
Presenter: Rafael Lima / Alain Romedenne / Jean-Pierre Ledure

Requirements

The workshop is based on “bring your own device”. For the scripting, you will need a working LibreOffice installation. You will need to install some development tools and libraries to be able to compile LibreOffice from source code.

But, we will be there in-person at the workshop to help you install the requirements step by step!

What Can You Expect?

After successful participation in the workshop, you can gain better understanding the open source development model, bug reporting and triaging, get started with Git and Gerrit, and also build and run your modified LibreOffice from source code. You will also understand the basic structure of the LibreOffice source code, which will help you to start LibreOffice development.

Click here to register

Free Software (like LibreOffice) is about far more than just zero-cost. It’s about the freedom to use, share and modify the software that we all rely on. Our friends over at the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) write:

The European Commission has cut important funds for Free Software. The non-transparent decision shows the need for sustainable long-term funding to allow the EU to control its own technology. Raise your voice and take part in an ongoing consultation to ask for sustainable long-term funds for software freedom.

They provide information on how to participate in the consultation (which closes on 20 September!) so give them a hand.

Click here to learn more and participate

The LibreOffice 24.8 family is optimised for the privacy-conscious office suite user who wants full control over the information they share

Berlin, 12 September 2024 – LibreOffice 24.8.1, the first minor release of the LibreOffice 24.8 family of the free, volunteer-supported office suite for Windows (Intel, AMD and ARM), macOS (Apple and Intel) and Linux, is available at www.libreoffice.org/download. For users who don’t need the latest features and prefer a more tested version, TDF maintains the previous LibreOffice 24.2 family, with several months of back-ported fixes. The current version is LibreOffice 24.2.6.

LibreOffice is the only software for creating documents that contain personal or confidential information that respects the privacy of the user – ensuring that the user is able to decide if and with whom to share the content they create. As such, LibreOffice is the best option for the privacy-conscious office suite user, and offers a feature set comparable to the leading product on the market.

In addition, LibreOffice offers a range of interface options to suit different user habits, from traditional to modern, and makes the most of different screen sizes by optimising the space available on the desktop to put the maximum number of features just a click or two away.

The biggest advantage over competing products is the LibreOffice Technology Engine, the single software platform on which desktop, mobile and cloud versions of LibreOffice – including those from ecosystem companies – are based. This allows LibreOffice to provide a better user experience and to produce identical and fully interoperable documents based on the two available ISO standards: the Open Document Format (ODT, ODS and ODP) and the proprietary Microsoft OOXML (DOCX, XLSX and PPTX). The latter hides a great deal of artificial complexity, which can cause problems for users who are confident that they are using a true open standard.

End users looking for support will be helped by the immediate availability of the LibreOffice 24.8 Getting Started Guide, which can be downloaded from the following link: books.libreoffice.org. In addition, they will be able to get first-level technical support from volunteers on the user mailing lists and the Ask LibreOffice website: ask.libreoffice.org.

A short video highlighting the main new features is available on YouTube and PeerTube peertube.opencloud.lu/w/ibmZUeRgnx9bPXQeYUyXTV.

LibreOffice for Enterprise

For enterprise-class deployments, TDF strongly recommends the LibreOffice Enterprise family of applications from ecosystem partners – for desktop, mobile and cloud – with a wide range of dedicated value-added features and other benefits such as SLAs: www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-in-business/.

Every line of code developed by ecosystem companies for enterprise customers is shared with the community on the master code repository and …

Our community in the region writes:

After successful previous events in Paraguay, Brazil and Mexico, the largest event of the LibreOffice project in Latin America arrives in Uruguay.

With the aim of bringing together users and collaborators to promote the dissemination of knowledge and experiences related to LibreOffice, the 2024 edition of the Latin American Congress will be held on December 5 and 6, at Espacio Colabora, in Montevideo.

For the realization of the event, the LibreOffice Project has the support of several local Free Software collectives: Resistencia Programada, Impulso Libre, GNLUG and Undernet.

Guest speakers from Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Spain, Italy and France will present tutorials on the use of the applications and ways to collaborate with the project. The schedule and registration link will be released shortly on the event’s official website.

Berlin, 5 September 2024 – LibreOffice 24.2.6, the sixth minor release of the free, volunteer-supported office productivity suite for office environments and individuals, the best choice for privacy-conscious users and digital sovereignty, is available at https://www.libreoffice.org/download for Windows, macOS and Linux.

The release includes over 40 bug and regression fixes over LibreOffice 24.2.5 [1] to improve the stability and robustness of the software, as well as interoperability with legacy and proprietary document formats. LibreOffice 24.2.6 is aimed at mainstream users and enterprise production environments.

LibreOffice is the only office suite with a feature set comparable to the market leader, and offers a range of user interface options to suit all users, from traditional to modern Microsoft Office-style. The UI has been developed to make the most of different screen form factors by optimizing the space available on the desktop to put the maximum number of features just a click or two away.

LibreOffice for Enterprises

For enterprise-class deployments, TDF strongly recommends the LibreOffice Enterprise family of applications from ecosystem partners – for desktop, mobile and cloud – with a range of dedicated value-added features, long term support and other benefits such as SLAs: https://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-in-business/.

Every line of code developed by ecosystem companies for enterprise customers is shared with the community on the master code repository and contributes to the improvement of the LibreOffice Technology platform.

Availability of LibreOffice 24.2.6

LibreOffice 24.2.6 is available at https://www.libreoffice.org/download/. Minimum requirements for proprietary operating systems are Windows 7 SP1 and macOS 10.15. Products based on LibreOffice Technology for Android and iOS are listed here: https://www.libreoffice.org/download/android-and-ios/.

Next week, power users and technology enthusiasts will be able to download LibreOffice 24.8.1, the first minor release of the recently announced new version with many bug and regression fixes. A summary of the new features of the LibreOffice 24.8 ifamily s available on this blog post: https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2024/08/22/libreoffice-248/.

End users looking for support will be helped by the immediate availability of the LibreOffice 24.8 Getting Started Guide, which is available for download from the following link: https://books.libreoffice.org/. In addition, they will be able to get first-level technical support from volunteers on user mailing lists and the Ask LibreOffice website: https://ask.libreoffice.org.

LibreOffice users, free software advocates and community members can support the Document Foundation by making a donation at https://www.libreoffice.org/donate.

[1] Fixes in RC1: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/24.2.6/RC1. Fixes in RC2: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/24.2.6/RC2.

Recently, Linux New Media released an updated version of its “LibreOffice Expert” magazine, which contains tutorials, tips and tricks about the office suite. And some articles were contributed by members of the LibreOffice community! The magazines come with DVDs that include LibreOffice for Linux, Windows and macOS, alongside extra templates, extensions, videos and guidebooks.

We have some copies to give away, for schools, universities and local communities. Ideally, we’d like to get these magazines out to places where internet connections aren’t always available – so that the users can really benefit from the DVDs.

So, if you can help us to distribute these magazines, drop us a line! Please note that we can only send a maximum of five copies to any one place, to make sure many people get a chance. When you contact us, please include this information (any requests without cannot be fulfilled):

1. What you want to do with the magazines
2. How many you want
3. The address to which we should post them

Include that information in an email to us and let’s see what we can do!

(Note: if you want to buy the magazine directly from the publisher, you can do so here.)

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

• The biggest news in August was the release of LibreOffice 24.8. This is our latest major stable branch – and the second to use the “year.month” version number scheme. It has a ton of new features, improvements and fixes, some of which are shown in this short video (PeerTube version here):

• Then we opened registration for the LibreOffice and Open Source Conference 2024, which will take place in Luxembourg from October 10 – 12. Join us there!

• In other conference news, we announced that the Luxembourg Media & Digital Design Centre is co-organising it. This is an Economic Interest Grouping gathering the Ministry of Education, Children and Youth (MENEJ), and the Ministry of Higher Education and Research (MESR), and the Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology (LIST), created to support national activities related to digital learning and to operate service and innovation platforms.

• Next, we spoke to Khushi Gautam who is currently working on fixing bugs in her LibreOffice Outreachy project, “Sidebar Deck for Quick Find”, alongside Google Summer of Code students to make further progress.

• LibreOffice is always free to download from our website, but it’s also in the Microsoft Store for a small price (to cover the cost of putting it there, and further development). We announced that LibreOffice is part of the 15% “back to school” discount scheme.

• The Document Foundation (TDF) is the non-profit home of LibreOffice, and its Membership Committee (MC) administers membership applications and renewals following the criteria defined in the Foundation’s Statutes. An election for a new MC is coming up, and in August we ran three live “townhall” Q+A sessions with the candidates. Recordings from two of them are online (PeerTube versions here and here):

• Meanwhile, German community members attended the FrOSCon 2024 event near Bonn. They had a stand with information flyers and merchandise, including stickers, pens, beer …

As announced earlier in the month, we’re running live “Q+A” sessions for candidates in The Document Foundation’s upcoming Membership Committee election. Here’s a recording from the second session (PeerTube version here):

Our Taiwanese community reports back from a recent event:

The LibreOffice Asia Conference 2024 was held in Taipei from 2 – 3 August. This conference was suspended for several years due to the pandemic and was relaunched in Indonesia last year.

In addition to the local community, there were many partners from the Japanese and Indonesian communities, as well as experts from Germany and Italy, representing The Documentation Foundation and the Open Document Format Technical Committee, who attended this conference.

The main visual design of the conference was developed by students at the Open Design Club in National Chengchi University. They boldly adopted the theme of “rice” since that’s a common staple food in Asian countries, and created a series of exquisite logos, icons and merchandise.

Staff in Government Day and the main poster

There were two main topics in this conference: Government Day and Community Day.

Government Day

The first day, “Government Day”, focused on Open Document Format (ODF) policy and “Public Money, Public Code” (PMPC). Six scholars and experts along with LibreOffice community members were invited to give talks, which covered topics from policy theory to practical practices when adopting ODF and PMPC in government. The audience was mostly made up of users from central and local government units.

The first speaker was Lothar Becker, co-chairman of TDF’s Certification Committee and also a board member of Open Source Business Alliance in Germany. This talk summarized lessons learned from 25 years of migration experiences to LibreOffice Technology in governmental organizations, from famous ones like the “LiMux” project in Munich, to up-to-date migration projects for 30,000 PCs in the government of the German state Schleswig-Holstein.

The second speaker was Prof. Naiyi Hsiao, the chair of Department of Public Administration, National Chengchi University. This session explored what and why the PMPC practice has encountered legal and administrative concerns among the diverse stakeholders.

The third speaker was Director Cheng Ming Wang, the general director of Department of Digital Service, Ministry of Digital Affairs, which is responsible for the ODF policy in Taiwan. His talk introduced three aspects of Taiwan’s ODF promotion: why Taiwan promotes ODF; the process and current status of ODF promotionl and the next steps.

The fourth speaker was Svante Schubert, co-chairman and co-editor of the ODF Technical Committee. His talk briefly gave an introduction to ODF and provided an update. In addition, he explained how the TDF-hosted ODF Toolkit is facilitating daily ODF usage (like for automated document translation).

The fifth speaker was Italo Vignoli, Board of Directors member of The Document Foundation. His talk discussed the role of open source software and open standards in digital sovereignty. Today, user-created content – and the ability to share it transparently – is in the hands of a few companies that take advantage of users’ limited digital culture. This situation can only be overcome by moving from proprietary to open source software and from proprietary to open standards.

The last session was from Prof. Tyng-Ruey Chuang, the Associate Research Fellow …