Yesterday The Document Foundation (TDF) announced the release of LibreOffice 5.3.3, the latest release of the “fresh” series, which is aimed at early adopters, power users and technology enthusiasts.
For more conservative users and enterprise deployments, TDF suggests LibreOffice 5.2.7, the latest “still” series release, with the backing of professional support by certified professionals.
Compared with its predecessor, LibreOffice 5.3.3 incorporates more than 70 patches, including an update of the Sifr monochrome icon set and several fixes for interoperability with Microsoft Office file formats.
LibreOffice 5.3.3 running on the author’s Debian GNU/Linux laptop
As regards those 70 patches mentioned above, users can see which bugs they’ve help to fix in both release candidates, RC1 and RC2 respectively.
Download LibreOffice
LibreOffice 5.3.3 is immediately available for download for all major platforms – GNU/Linux, Mac OSX and Windows. If your GNU/Linux system can handle Flatpak format, there’s a special link for that.
Support LibreOffice with a donation
As with every release, LibreOffice users, free software advocates and community members are invited to support TDF’s work with a donation.
Debian is a mature Linux distribution that serves as the basis for many other distros, such as the Ubuntu family.
Your ‘umble scribe has been a loyal Debian user for at least a decade and has always found it to be secure, stable and reliable operating system.
Since its inception, Debian has offered downloads of its disk images by both the FTP and HTTP network protocols.
However, Debian news has now announced that its public FTP service will be closed down in November 2017.
The relevant text of the announcement is reproduced below.
After many years of serving the needs of our users, and some more of declining usage in favor of better options, all public-facing debian.org FTP services will be shut down on November 1, 2017. These are:
ftp://ftp.debian.org
ftp://security.debian.org
This decision is driven by the following considerations:
FTP servers have no support for caching or acceleration.
Most software implementations have stagnated
and are awkward to use and configure.
Usage of the FTP servers is pretty low as our own installer has not offered FTP as a way to access mirrors for over ten years.
The protocol is inefficient and requires adding awkward kludges to firewalls and load-balancing daemons.
Information for users
The DNS names ftp.debian.org and ftp.<CC>.debian.org will remain the same. The mirrors should just be accessed using HTTP instead:
http://ftp.debian.org
http://security.debian.org
Information for developers
Our developer services will not be affected. These are the upload queues for both the main and the security archive:
The first bug hunting session for LibreOffice 5.4 – the next major release of this popular free and open source office suite – has been announced on The Document Foundation blog.
LibreOffice 5.4 is due to be released at the end of July with many new features: those already implemented are summarised on the release notes wiki page; and there are still more new features to be disclosed.
The LibreOffice QA team is organizing the first Bug Hunting Session on Friday 28th April to find, report and triage bugs. Testing will be carried out on the first alpha release of LibreOffice 5.4, which will be made available (for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows) on the pre-releases server shortly before the session.
Mentors to help testers report and confirm bugs will be available on 28th April from 8.00 a.m. UTC to 10.00 p.m. UTC. Moreover, as this this particular Alpha release (LibreOffice 5.4.0 Alpha1) will be available until the middle of May, hunting bugs will also be possible on other days.
During the day there will be two dedicated sessions: the first to chase bugs on the main LibreOffice modules between 3.00 p.m. UTC and 5.00 p.m. UTC; and the second to test a set of the top 7 features between 5.00 p.m. UTC and 7.00 p.m. UTC.
The Bristol Post, the city’s newspaper of warped record, has recently revamped its website, which now uses the standard template for Mirror Group titles.
In addition, the standard of what passed in recent decades for journalism from the title seems to have taken a dive too. Whether this is related to the change of template cannot be corroborated.
One thing that has not changed is the inability of the Post’s reporters to concentrate on the most relevant facts of a story.
An example from today is shown in the screenshot below.
The story itself relates that the Bristol Royal Infirmary (BRI) suffered 3 cyber attacks involving ransomware last year.
This is only to be expected if major organisations continue to base their IT infrastructure on Microsoft’s insecure operating systems.
For me, the important point was on the front page as shown in the screenshot, according which the BRI now comes under the aegis of the National Health Service, although for some unfathomable reason, there is no mention whatsoever in the article itself of the British Broadcasting Corporation.
To echo the purported words of a proper, old-school journalist, the late Bill Deedes, “Shome mishtake shurely?” 🙂
Readers may not be aware of it, but the free and open source LibreOffice productivity suite comes in two versions, codenamed “still” and “fresh“; and it’s the “still” branch that concerns us today, with the announcement by The Document Foundation (TDF) of the release of LibreOffice 5.2.6.
LibreOffice 5.2.6 is the sixth minor release of the LibreOffice 5.2 family and is targeted at businesses and individual users in production environments.
As usual, TDF recommends professional support for large-scale deployments of LibreOffice in major companies and public sector organisations.
LibreOffice 5.2.6 is immediately available for download, whilst the change logs and technical details for both Release Candidate (RC) 1 and RC2 are likewise available.
Users who wish to assist in LibreOffice development can also download pre-release versions from the pre-release server or nightly builds from the dedicated nightly builds server.
Several companies sitting in TDF Advisory Board provide either value-added versions of LibreOffice with Long Term Support or training and migration consultancy services.
Finally, LibreOffice users, free software advocates and community members are invited to support The Document Foundation with a donation.
The Document Foundation’s Documentation Team has announced the release of the new Getting Started with LibreOffice guide version 5.2.
The guide has been updated to include developments in LibreOffice 5.2 and previous releases.
The guide is an introductory text for end users using the LibreOffice office suite. It is written for both individuals and organisations using LibreOffice as their preferred office suite. The text allows users to become conversant with the features and resources of LibreOffice.
The guide was produced in LibreOffice Writer in Open Document Format (ODF). The team worked to not only update the contents, but also to tidy up the formatting. This had two objectives: firstly to make the text suitable for computer-aided translation (CAT) tools and secondly to generate an online version (XHTML) of the guide.
The Getting Started with LibreOffice guide, its PDF and ODT versions, can be downloaded or read online by visiting this page, where plenty more documentation on LibreOffice is available.
Bing, Microsoft’s alternative to Google Translate, is used by Twitter to provide instant translation for users.
However, it isn’t very good, as this blog has repeatedly pointed out.
And it doesn’t look as if any improvements will be forthcoming soon, if the evidence below from your correspondent’s Twitter feed today is to be believed, where Bing mistook English for Estonian, a language belonging to the Finnic branch of the Uralic language family.
If Bing cannot even identify the language correctly, one has to question the quality of any translation it produces.
Yesterday The Document Foundation announced the release of LibreOffice 5.3 for Windows, macOS and Linux, as well as for the private cloud for the first time.
LibreOffice 5.3 represents a significant step forward in the evolution of this free and open source office suite: it introduces new features such as online collaborative editing and at the same time provides incremental improvements to make the program more reliable, interoperable and user-friendly.
New features
LibreOffice 5.3 offers a number of interesting new features in every area including:
a new cross-platform text layout engine that uses HarfBuzz for consistent text layout on all platforms, with significant advantages across languages and alphabets;
a revised Help menu, with new quick links to user guides and community support forums; and
better import/export filters for new and legacy MS Office documents.
New features in Writer include:
Table Styles, for applying formatting to a table which is preserved when edited; and
new Go to Page Box (activated by keystrokes Ctrl+G) makes it possible to jump to another page in the document with fewer keystrokes.
LibreOffice 5.3 Writer in action
Turning to spreadsheets, Calc provides a new set of default cell styles, with greater variety and better names than in previous releases, whilst in fresh installations, “Enable wildcards in formulas” is now the default option, rather than regular expressions, to improve compatibility with other spreadsheet software.
Impress, LibreOffice’s presentation package, now opens with a template selector to get the user off to a quick start. In addition, a new Slide Properties Deck is now available in the sidebar while in slide master mode.
As of this release, the LibreOffice UI has been extended with the addition of an experimental Notebookbar, which offers another UI option in addition to the Default UI (with two toolbars), the Single Toolbar UI and the Sidebar with a Single Toolbar. Each UI layout has been thought to serve a different cluster of LibreOffice users.
LibreOffice Online
LibreOffice 5.3 features the first source release of LibreOffice Online, a cloud office suite enabling basic collaborative editing of documents in a browser by re-using the LibreOffice “core engine”.
LibreOffice Online is fundamentally a server service and should be installed and configured by adding a cloud storage and a SSL certificate, which are not included in the package.
Builds of the latest LibreOffice Online source code are available as Docker images.
Availability
LibreOffice 5.3 is available for immediate download (your correspondent has already moved onto an as yet unreleased development version. Ed.).
However, for large scale and commercial deployments, The Document Foundation recommends the more mature 5.2.5 version (posts passim), preferably with professional support.
Monies raised will be used to fund the Centre’s “EasyPC” IT classes for older people, which play an invaluable role locally, by introducing my fellow silver-haired citizens to the benefits of modern technology.
Details of the event and where to get tickets are on the publicity poster below.
Debian is a mature Linux distribution that serves as the basis for many other distros, such as the 
The Document Foundation’s Documentation Team 
