Open Standards | Steve Woods

LibreOffice 4.4.3 released

08/05/2015 Steve WoodsOpen Source, Open Standards, Tech

Yesterday The Document Foundation announced the release of LibreOffice 4.4.3, the third minor release of the LibreOffice 4.4 “fresh” family, with over 80 fixes compared with the previous version, LibreOffice 4.4.2. The new features in LibreOffice 4.4.3 are listed on The Document Foundation wiki.

People interested in technical details about the release can access the change logs for RC1 fixes and RC2 fixes respectively.

Download LibreOffice 4.4.3

LibreOffice 4.4.3 is available for immediate download. By following the download link, more conservative users can find the more tested LibreOffice 4.3.7. The document Foundation recommends all users update their installations to one of these two LibreOffice releases for security reasons.

Get involved: LibreOffice 5.0 and LibreOffice Conference

The LibreOffice community is actively working at next major release, LibreOffice 5.0, expected in late July 2015 and your correspondent is already using a development release, LibreOffice 5.0.0.0 alpha1. Pre-release versions such as this are available from http://dev-builds.libreoffice.org/pre-releases/.

The first bug hunting session on the 5.0 beta release is scheduled from 22nd to 24th May. Details of this session are on The Document Foundation wiki.

Furthermore, the Call for Papers for LibreOffice Conference 2015 is open 15th July. The conference itself will be hosted by the Danish city of Aarhus from 23rd to 25th September.

The LibreOffice community is growing, and the bug hunting session and conference represent exceptional opportunities to join the fun together with over 900 developers who have contributed to the code and over 3,000 volunteers who have localised the software, squashed bugs, written the manuals, spoken at conferences and acted as advocates for LibreOffice both at global and local levels.
Hungarian universities adopt ODF

16/04/2015 Steve WoodsOpen Source, Open Standards, Tech

Joinup, the EU’s public sector open source news site, reports that Eötvös University and Szeged University in Hungary are increasing their use of Open Document Format (ODF).

Between them the 2 universities have some 45,000 students.

In addition, both universities have also signed licences with MultiRáció of Budapest for the deployment and support of 34,000 copies of EuroOffice, a free and open source office suite developed especially for the Hungarian market, but based on both major free and open source suites, LibreOffice and OpenOffice. EuroOffice is available in 2 versions – free and professional – for both Windows and Linux. It can also be installed in 7 languages – English (US variant), German, French, Italian, Spanish, Polish and Hungarian – which MultiRáció claims are the native languages of 85% of the EU’s population.

The Hungarian government decided to promote the use of both EuroOffice and ODF in schools and universities in 2014. MultiRáció’s senior software developer Kázmér Koleszár described these initiatives as “an important policy change”, given that the country’s public sector had been reliant on MS Office for the preceding 15 years.

MultiRáció is actively involved in the ODF specification, being a member of OASIS, a non-profit consortium promoting the development, convergence and adoption of open standards for the global information society.
LibreOffice native language projects

08/04/2015 Steve WoodsLanguage, Open Source, Open Standards, Tech

Although the majority of the development for LibreOffice, the world’s most popular free and open source office productivity suite, takes place in English, this doesn’t preclude non-English speakers from being involved.

There’s always help needed on the localisation project, which relies on the work of the Native Language projects.

Native Language projects are worldwide communities of LibreOffice volunteers contributing to the project in their own, native language. The Native Language projects contribute everything from localisation, testing of the localised versions of LibreOffice, users support, local promotion, documentation and much more.

A list of available Native Language projects is posted on the Native Language projects home page and visitors are also encouraged to establish new Native Language communities.
LibreOffice to take to the cloud

25/03/2015 Steve WoodsOpen Source, Open Standards, Tech

LibreOffice, the best free and open source office suite produced, is set to become the cornerstone of the world’s first global personal productivity solution – LibreOffice Online – following an announcement by IceWarp and Collabora of a joint development effort, The Document Foundation blog reports today. LibreOffice is available as a native application for every desktop operating system and is currently under development for Android. Furthermore, it is available on virtual platforms for Chrome OS, Firefox OS and iOS.

“LibreOffice was born with the objective of leveraging the OpenOffice historic heritage to build a solid ecosystem capable of attracting those investments which are key for the further development of free software,” says Eliane Domingos de Sousa, Director of The Document Foundation. “Thanks to the increasing number of companies which are investing on the development of LibreOffice, we are on track to make it available on every platform, including the cloud. We are grateful to IceWarp for providing the resources for a further development of LibreOffice Online.”

Development of LibreOffice Online started back in 2011 with the availability of a proof of concept of the client front end, based on HTML5 technology. That proof of concept will be developed into a state of the art cloud application, which will become the free alternative to proprietary solutions such as Google Docs and Office 365. It will also be the first to offer native support for the Open Document Format (ODF) standard.

“It is wonderful to marry IceWarp’s vision and investment with our passion and skills for LibreOffice development. It is always satisfying to work on something that, as a company, we have a need for ourselves,” says Michael Meeks, Vice-President of Collabora Productivity, who developed the proof of concept back in 2011 and will oversee the development of LibreOffice Online.

The launch of LibreOffice Online will be announced at a future date.
Document Freedom Day: why open standards matter

25/03/2015 Steve WoodsOpen Source, Open Standards, Social Media, Tech
Today is Document Freedom Day, an annual international celebration of open formats and open standards and an opportunity to promote their use.

The use of open standards is definitely gaining ground, particularly where it matters, such as in dealings with government bodies. This was amply illustrated last year by the UK Cabinet Office’s announcement of the adoption of open standards for collaborating on government documents.

Why do open standards matter?

Open standards are vital for interoperability and freedom of choice. They provide freedom from data lock-in and the accompanying vendor lock-in. This makes open standards essential for governments, companies, organisations and individual users of information technology.

What is an open standard?

An open standard refers to a format or protocol that is:
- Subject to full public assessment and use without constraints in a manner equally available to all parties;
- Without any components or extensions that have dependencies on formats or protocols that do not meet the definition of an open standard themselves;
- Free from legal or technical clauses that limit its use by any party or in any business model;
- Managed and further developed independently of any single supplier in a process open to the equal participation of competitors and third parties;
- Available in multiple complete implementations by competing suppliers, or as a complete implementation equally available to all parties.
How do open standards affect you?

April, the French open source advocacy organisation, has produced a handy graphic in English to illustrate the difference between open and closed formats. Click on the image below for the full-sized version.

Examples of open standards

Many open standards are in wide use. Here are 3 examples:
- Plain text (.txt);
- HTML, the language of the web;
- ODF, the default file format of free and open source office suites such as LibreOffice and OpenOffice. ODF can also be handled by Microsoft Office versions from Office 2007 onwards.
Document Freedom Day is being promoted on social media by the use of the #DFD2015 hashtag.
Bristol City Council & open standards – more

16/03/2015 Steve WoodsBristol, Open Source, Open Standards, Social Media, Tech

Following the post on Friday on Bristol City Council‘s response to my open standards FoI request (posts passim), more information has come to light.

It was all sparked by a discussion on Twitter between myself and Alex, a leading member of the Bristol & Bath Linux Users’ Group (BBLUG).

It all revolved around what was really meant by the phrase “not fully digital” in respect of PDF files.

My speculation was that if text documents are scanned, these are usually converted to image-based PDFs with which the screen readers used by blind and visually impaired people can have problems.

It turned out this was a good point, but not the real reason.

The latter was supplied by Gavin Beckett, BCC’s Chief Enterprise Architect, who actually responded to my FoI request. It seems Gavin’s main reason for describing PDFs as “not fully digital” is that PDF is basically an attempt to make electronic files emulate paper. The move by the council away from PDF to HTML when responding to citizens is that more mobile devices (tablets and smartphones) are now being used by the public to communicate with the local authority and the latter wishes to provide the same – i.e. “fully digital” experience to all.

Finally Gavin promised to follow up with his colleagues my gripe about using MS formats for responding to FOI requests. He conceded this was one example where PDF would be better.
Recommended LibreOffice extension: MultiFormatSave

14/03/2015 Steve WoodsOpen Source, Open Standards, Tech

One of the great things about LibreOffice is the ability to customise and extend the software’s functionality by the use of extensions, for which there’s a dedicated website.

If you use LibreOffice and need to save files in formats other than its native Open Document Formats (in my case, I work in Open Document format, but return work in MS Office formats and send out invoices as PDFs), then the MultiFormatSave extension is a really useful addition to your install since it can simultaneously save your file Open Document, MS Office and/or PDF formats as you choose.

At the moment Open Document, MS Office 97 (.doc, .xls, etc.), MS Office 2007 XML (.docx, .xlsx, etc.) and PDF formats are supported.

Once installed via LibreOffice’s extension manager, MultiFormatSave adds a small icon – shown on the right – to the toolbars of your office suite’s component programs.

Clicking on the icon will bring up the dialogue box shown below.

Saving in up to 3 formats at once is not only convenient, it can in my opinion help reduce one’s chances of falling victim to repetitive strain injury (RSI). 🙂

More information on MultiFormatSave is available on the LibreOffice extensions site.
Response to open standards FoI request

13/03/2015 Steve WoodsBristol, Open Source, Open Standards, Politics, Tech

A response has been received today to my FoI request to Bristol City Council on open standards (posts passim).

The reply was received in a record 10 working days and reads as follows:

Bristol City Council has been a long-term supporter of open standards wherever possible. We have frequently voluntarily adopted national government policy on open standards and open source, recognising the benefits of this approach.

We adopted StarOffice in 2005 and moved to the Open Document Format as our standard for office productivity files at the point it was incorporated in the StarOffice / OpenOffice.org products. We had to move to Microsoft Office in 2010 due to the lack of standards support in the local government applications market, partly due to the fact that national government policy was not mandated at local level and therefore did not have the desired effects on the document standards context. However we retained the ability to create, open and collaborate on ODF by implementing LibreOffice alongside Microsoft Office on all council PCs. Therefore we are already capable of using ODF to collaborate on government documents.

In terms of publishing government documents to citizens, we have historically used PDF, but are now attempting to replace all information, advice and guidance, and application forms with fully digital services. Over time this will replace old PDF documents with HTML. If there are documents that meet a user need to download and read offline, we can produce PDF/A format from the open source PDF Creator software that is also available on every council PC.

I’m very pleased to note that BCC has LibreOffice installed on every council machine. They kept that quiet! Perhaps they’ll use it to send me replies to my FoI requests in future instead of the propensity to use MS Office formats. But just to make sure, I’ll include a plea for a reply in an open format in all my future requests. 🙂

Read the original FoI request and response on WhatDoTheyKnow.
LibreOffice 4.4.1 – a vast improvement

10/03/2015 Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Open Standards, Tech
Yesterday my laptop’s install of LibreOffice was upgraded from version 4.3.3.2 (which is the latest version available for Debian Jessie) to the latest available version – LibreOffice 4.4.1.

As there is no specific Debian repository that I can find for newer versions of LibreOffice, this process had to be done manually.

The first stage was to download the zipped .deb packages required, i.e. the main installer, followed by the British English user interface. These were then unzipped in preparation for installation.

However, before installation could take place, the older version of the suite had to be removed. This was done via the command line by opening a terminal and typing (as root):
```
apt-get remove --purge libreoffice-core libreoffice-common
```
Now the new version could be installed, once again via a terminal opened in the folder to which the main program’s .deb packages had been unzipped. This time the command – once more as root – is again straightforward:
```
 dpkg -i *
```
Once the main program had been installed, the British English user interface could then be installed by running the dpkg command in the folder containing the relevant .deb, substituting the asterisk for the relevant package name.

And that was it: I now had the latest release running.

As regards this release itself, The Document Foundation blog reported that over 100 bugs had been fixed compared with version 4.4.0.

As someone whose days are spent slaving over a word processor and quite often has to use text effects such as subscript and superscript, I’m very pleased to see that these are included as standard on one of LibreOffice Writer’s toolbars.

Putting on my linguist’s hat, another great addition to Writer’s toolbars is the special character menu shown by the capital L bar icon (Ł). This opens up the character selector – in my case kcharselect – for those special characters whose keyboard shortcuts one doesn’t happen to know. 🙂

My overall impression is that LibreOffice 4.4.1 is the best LibreOffice to date. The redesigned toolbars will help make me more productive since I won’t need to go hunting around through menus quite so much, which can slow one down.

My thanks to The Document Foundation and its developers for a great piece of work.
Bristol City Council asked about open standards

27/02/2015 Steve WoodsBristol, Open Source, Open Standards, Tech

Whenever I make a Freedom of Information (FoI) request to Bristol City Council, the response invariably comes back in a proprietary Microsoft Office format (e.g. .docx, .xlsx, etc.), a practice I find less than satisfactory – not to say galling – as an advocate of free and open source software and open standards.

That being so, the following FoI request has been made today to the council:

Dear Bristol City Council,

This is a request for information under the Freedom of Information Act.

In July 2014, the Cabinet Office announced the adoption of open standards for document viewing and collaboration in central government. See https://www.gov.uk/government/news/open-document-formats-selected-to-meet-user-needs for details.

The standards adopted are:

– PDF/A or HTML for viewing government documents;
– Open Document Format (ODF) for sharing or collaborating on government documents.

What plans does Bristol City Council have to emulate central government’s move and when will similar open standards be adopted by the council for communicating and collaborating with citizens.

Yours faithfully,

Steve Woods

Hopefully an answer will be forthcoming by Document Freedom Day 2015 (posts passim).