ODF

  • LibreOffice 4.3.4 released

    Steve WoodsOpen Source, Open Standards, Tech

    The Document Foundation blog has announced the release of LibreOffice 4.3.4. This is the fourth minor release of LibreOffice 4.3 “Fresh” family, which is a stable release of the more advanced version of the software, and is targeted to users focusing on features. The new release contains over 60 bug fixes.

    LibreOffice banner

    For technical details of LibreOffice 4.3.4, consult the change log.

    LibreOffice 4.3.4 “Fresh” can be downloaded for free from http://www.libreoffice.org/download/, although The Document Foundation would welcome donations to support its work from LibreOffice users, free software advocates and community members.

  • Target for signed PDFs in LibreOffice reached in 3 days

    Steve WoodsOpen Source, Open Standards, Tech

    Wilhelm Tux logoEU open source news site Joinup reports that the crowdfunding appeal launched by Wilhelm Tux for the incorporation of signed PDF functionality in LibreOffice (posts passim) has reached its target of CHF8,000 (about €10,000) in just three days.

    To date 90 organisations, companies and individuals have contributed to the Wilhelm Tux crowdfunding campaign, including Swiss Post Solutions, a division of the Swiss Post Office (isn’t it great to see the public sector supporting free and open source? Ed.).

    Once implemented, LibreOffice will be able to:

    • Create PDF documents with legally accepted digital signatures accompanied by a timestamp;
    • Conform to PDF/A signature standards;
    • Use either Mozilla Firefox or Thunderbird to manage certificates using a simple interface.

    Implementation of the project has been awarded to Collabora, an open source IT service provider, and the work is expected to be completed by April 2015.

    Collabora, which is based in Cambridge, has issued a statement in connection with the Wilhelm Tux crowdfunding campaign, which declares:

    The success of their campaign shows that Swiss businesses want LibreOffice, want digital signing, and, given the opportunity, are happy to pay for it. It also demonstrates the freedom that the LibreOffice ecosystem provides to businesses. Independently of The Document Foundation who steward and steer LibreOffice development, and independently of the many businesses who have stakes in the future of the application, organisations of any size can organise the addition of new features. When their needs are shared, they need not even bear the exclusive burden of cost.

    Work on adding digital signature functionality to this popular free and open source office suite was initially started in 2012, but then stagnated.

  • Swiss raise funds for LibreOffice development

    Steve WoodsOpen Source, Open Standards

    Wilhelm Tux logoWilhelm Tux, a Swiss organisation promoting the use of free software, has launched a fundraising campaign to improve LibreOffice, with the target of raising €8,000 to implement the signing of PDF documents in LibreOffice, German IT news site heise reported yesterday.

    LibreOffice can already digitally sign ODF files, its native file format. However, it has no equivalent function as yet for PDF files; the relevant code is still regarded as experimental and not mature yet. Collabara, a software company specialising in free software, will use the money raised to bring the code up to the stage of production application.

  • Happy birthday TDF and LibreOffice

    Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Open Standards, Tech

    On 28th September 2014 The Document Foundation and the LibreOffice productivity suite will both turn four. In that time LibreOffice has had eight major releases, close to 100 million downloads, attracted over 800 new developers, a large number of active volunteers in every corner of the planet and millions of desktops “migrating” from proprietary to free office suites.

    LibreOffice is the fastest growing free software project of this decade: for 48 months in a row, it has been able to attract at least three new code contributors per month and an even higher number of volunteers active in localisation, quality assurance, marketing, communications and the development of local communities.

    Happy birthday LibreOffice

    Earlier today (25th September) The Document Foundation announced the release of LibreOffice 4.3.2; this is the second minor release of the LibreOffice 4.3 family, further improving the quality of the most advanced and feature-rich free office suite for Linux, Mac OSX and Windows. Further details of the release of LibreOffice 4.3.2 are available on The Document Foundation’s blog.

  • Introducing FixMyDocuments.eu

    Steve WoodsOpen Source, Open Standards, Politics, Tech

    FixMyDocuments.eu logoFixmydocuments.eu is a campaign aimed at helping European public sector organisations make better use of open document formats, such as ODF.

    A number of public sector organisations throughout Europe have decided to support open document formats when communicating with the public and FixMyDocuments.eu is a campaign to help them implement their decision effectively. One of the largest of these is the UK government, which recently opted for open standards for communicating and working with anyone outside Whitehall (posts passim).

    Inspired by the FixMyStreet project, FixMyDocuments.eu aims to help European public sector organisations that have decided to support ODF to implement their decision by documenting, tracking and reporting their compliance online. Anybody can report public web pages which are not compliant with the decision, which are then checked and added to a central listing which is updated weekly.

    One of the first supporters of FixMyDocuments.eu was European Commission Vice-President Neelie Kroes. In her statement of support (no. 6 on the list. Ed.) Neelie Kroes says:

    When open alternatives are available, no citizen or company should be forced or encouraged to use a particular company’s technology to access government information. No citizen or company should be forced or encouraged to choose a closed technology over an open one, through a government having made that choice first. I know a smart business decision when I see one – choosing open standards is a very smart business decision indeed.

    Well said, Neelie!

  • Welcome LibreItalia!

    Steve WoodsOpen Source, Open Standards, Tech

    Earlier today the birth was announced of LibreItalia, which has been founded by Italian members of The Document Foundation and has the objective of bringing together all the Italian users of the free and open source LibreOffice productivity suite to speed up the adoption and promotion of the suite that is designed as a free individual productivity and office automation tool capable of closing the digital divide and breaking down the barriers to information technology for the poorest in society.

    LibreItalia logo

    In addition, LibreItalia will promote the ODF/Open Document Format (ISO/IEC 26300) standard for official documents, which was recently adopted by the UK government (posts passim) as a template for all content, together with PDF/A.

    The initial Board of Directors, which will be in post for two years, consists of seven members, five of whom are directly involved in the LibreUmbria project (which was originally established to promote the use of LibreOffice in public sector organisations in the Umbria region. Ed.): Sonia Montegiove, Chair; Marina Latini, Vice-Chair and Chief Technical Officer; Giordano Alborghetti, Treasurer; and Andrea Castellani, Alfredo Parisi, Gabriele Ponzo and Italo Vignoli, directors.

    All the new association’s news about LibreOffice is featured on the LibreItalia website. To become a member of LibreItalia, you’ll need to fill in an application using the relevant form after reading the site’s About us and Articles of Association pages. The membership fee for ordinary members is a mere €10.00 (reduced to €5.00 for students) and entitles members to a libreitalia.it mailbox.

    Becoming a member of LibreItalia means supporting the values of transparency, sharing and working together, the same values which characterise the original LibreUmbria project.

    For more information, email info (at) libreitalia.it.

  • LibreOffice 4.3 ready for download

    Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Open Standards, Tech

    Via its blog, The Document Foundation has announced the release of LibreOffice 4.3; this is the 8th major release of the free and open source office suite since the birth of the project in September 2010.

    image of LibreOffice Mime type icons
    LibreOffice for all your office suite needs: word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, database, drawing and formulas

    LibreOffice 4.3 offers a large number of improvements and new features, including:

    • Document interoperability: support for MS’ OOXML Strict, OOXML graphics improvements (DrawingML, theme fonts, preservation of drawing styles and attributes), embedding OOXML files inside another OOXML file, support for 30 new Excel formulas, support for MS Works spreadsheets and databases, as well as Mac legacy file formats such as ClarisWorks, ClarisResolve, MacWorks, SuperPaint and more.
    • Comment management: comments can now be printed in the document margin, formatted in a better way, and imported and exported – including nested comments – in ODF, DOC, OOXML and RTF documents, for improved productivity and better collaboration.
    • Intuitive spreadsheet handling: Calc now allows several tasks to be carried out more intuitively, thanks to the smarter highlighting of formulas in cells, the display of the number of selected rows and columns in the status bar, the ability to start editing a cell with the content of the cell above it and the user being fully able to select text conversion models.
    • 3D models in Impress: support of animated 3D models in the new open glTF format, plus initial support for Collada and kmz files that are found in Google Warehouse, in order to add a fresh new look and animations to keynotes (support for this feature is currently on Windows and Linux versions only).

    LibreOffice 4.3 also supports “monster” paragraphs exceeding 65,000 characters in length. This is an example of an 11 years old bug solved thanks to the modernization of the old OpenOffice source code. In addition, the accessibility technology on Windows has become a standard feature, thanks to the improvements based on IBM’s IAccessible2 framework.

    The full list of new features and improvements of LibreOffice 4.3 is available on the wiki.

    According to the Coverity Scan service, the quality of LibreOffice source code has improved dramatically during the last two years, with a reduction of the defect density per 1,000 lines of code from an above the average 1.11 to an industry leading 0.08. Read Coverity’s report for more information.

    LibreOffice 4.3 and LibreOffice 4.2.6 – which will be released on Friday – are available for download from the following link: http://www.libreoffice.org/download/. Extensions and templates to enhance the software’s functionality and add specific features can be found at http://extensions.libreoffice.org/.

  • Document Foundation congratulates UK government

    Steve WoodsOpen Source, Open Standards, Politics, Tech

    ODF file iconThe Document Foundation (TDF), the organisation behind the free and open source LibreOffice productivity suite, is congratulating the UK government for choosing Open Document Format (ODF), in addition to Portable Document Format (PDF) to meet user needs (posts passim).

    “TDF has always been a strong supporter of ODF and a believer in open document standards”, says Thorsten Behrens, TDF Chairman. July 22 will be a date to remember as the culmination of a dream inaugurated when ODF become a ISO standard on November 30 2006. By standardising on ODF and PDF, the UK government is showing the world that it is entirely possible to find a way out of proprietary formats to enhance user freedom”.

    LibreOffice supports both ODF – the suite’s native document format – and PDF (including PDF/A). Furthermore, LibreOffice can handle Hybrid PDF files, which combine the advantages of PDF and ODF by embedding a fully editable ODF document into a PDF without breaking any of the standard characteristics of both formats.

  • UK government opts for open standards

    Steve WoodsOpen Source, Open Standards, Politics, Tech

    ODF file iconGreat news for all lovers of open standards! It’s goodbye to the ubiquitous use of MS Office formats in Whitehall; and what’s more, the government has decided not to sanction the use of Microsoft’s OOXML ‘standard’ despite lobbying by the US software giant and its supporters.

    The open standards selected for sharing and viewing government documents have been announced today by the Minister for the Cabinet Office, Francis Maude.

    The standards set out the document file formats that are expected to be used by all government bodies. Central government will begin using open formats to ensure that the general public and civil servants can use the applications that best meet their needs when viewing or collaborating on documents.

    The selected standards, which are compatible with commonly used document applications, are:

    When government departments have adopted these open standards:

    • the general public, businesses and voluntary organisations will no longer need specialist software to open or work with government documents;
    • civil servants will be able to share and work with documents in the same format, reducing problems when shifting between formats;
    • government organisations will be able to choose the most suitable and cost-effective applications, knowing their documents will work for people both within and outside government (does this mean Whitehall will be moving towards using LibreOffice or OpenOffice, both of which are free of charge? Ed.).

    The adoption of open standards comes in the wake of a consultation on open standards (news passim) which attracted over 500 contributions, as well as by talking directly to users.

    The new standards will come into effect straight away for all new procurements subject to the HMG’s Open Standards Principles. The Government Digital Service will work with Whitehall departments to publish guidance and implementation plans.

  • LibreUmbria@Scuola nominated for Egov 2014 prize

    Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Open Standards, Tech

    News arrived via my inbox this morning that LibreUmbria‘s programme in schools (LibreUmbria@Scuola), which took place in recent months in collaboration with Perugia’s third teaching district (posts passim), has been nominated for this year’s Egov Prize. LibreUmbria is the project that is promoting the use of free and open source software amongst public sector organisations in Italy’s Umbria region.

    Egov Prize logo

    The basic idea behind the Egov Prize has always been the fusion and sharing of good practice which other public sector organisations can use as an example and from which they can benefit. This will be the 10th year the prize will have been awarded.

    LibreUmbria@Scuola aims to raise awareness and promote the use of free software in schools, from the primary level upwards by training parents and teachers who will in turn train others by acting as mentors.

    The LibreUmbria@Scuola project has been implemented in arranging free seminars at schools for parents and teachers, on digital culture topics (the relationship between boys and technology, shared knowledge and free software, security, use of social media, cyberbullying). In addition to the seminars, computer courses in using the LibreOffice productivity suite running on Ubuntu Linux were also provided.

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