librevenge 0.0.0 is out: Document Liberation Project's framework is available to be used

It is not without emotion that the Document Liberation Project announces today the first release of the new framework library, librevenge-0.0.0. This release means that the API of librevenge is now set into a stone (at least until the 0.1.x series) and thus the library can be used by willing filter-writers.

You might be familiar with some aspects of the librevenge framework from this blog or from this FOSDEM 2014 presentation. David Tardon started a nice serie of articles explaining how to use the framework. So, there are no valid excuses remaining not to use it and not to contribute to the world domination that is the ultimate destiny of the Document Liberation Project.

Standing on the shoulders of giants

But the first release of a new framework would be empty without mentioning those on shoulder of whom we stand. First we would love to thank Will Lachance and Mark Maurer for having started more then 10 years ago the development of libwpd. It is this library and its wise interface design that allowed us to move incrementally to the current framework. Thank you guys, you know that without you we would be nowhere!

Besides your servant, David Tardon, and Valek Filipov, we would love to single out a discrete person, who speaks little but codes a lot. It is Laurent Alonso, without whom we would never be able to recover a huge amount of old MacIntosh documents. We thank equally to all our past and present Google Summer of Code students, without whom the road would be much more thorny.

LibreOffice and The Document Foundation

It would be a very big mistake if we did not thank the project from which we all originate, the LibreOffice project. The community gravitating around LibreOffice creates is caring, encouraging and creates the right environment to foster innovation.

Last but not least, our thanks go to The Document Foundation that did not hesitate to take us under its umbrella and provide all the necessary institutional support.

How to contribute

Now a new phase starts and you can be part of it! There are many ways to contribute. You drop by at the #documentliberation-dev channel at irc.freenode.net. There will always be someone to help you to join this exciting journey.

For more information about our activities, follow @DocLiberation on twitter, Join our Google plus community or like us on Facebook.

LibreOffice projects for Google Summer of Code 2014

We are happy to announce that the LibreOffice project has 10 Google Summer of Code projects for this 10th edition of the program. The selected projects and students are:

Project Title		Selected Student
Connection to SharePoint and Microsoft OneDrive		Mihai Varga
Calc / Impress tiled rendering support		Andrzej Hunt
Improved Color selection		Krisztián Pintér
Enhancing text frames in Draw		Matteo Campanelli
Implement Adobe Pagemaker import filter		Anurag Kanungo
Improvements to the Template manager		Efe Gürkan YALAMAN
Dialog Widget Conversion		freetank
Dialog Widget Conversion		sk94
Improve Usability of Personas		Rachit Gupta
Refactor god objects		Valentin

We wish all of them a lot of success and let the coding start!

LibreOffice CorelDraw import filter - support of version x7 landed

Corel released CorelDraw x7 on 27 March 2014. We had some time to look at the changes in file-format and we adapted libcdr to be able to open it. The changes landed this week in LibreOffice code, in master and libreoffice-4-2 branch. That means that support will be available in the next 4.2.x release.

It is good to note that while introspecting the files we discovered a flaw in CorelDraw x7 that makes files using the Pantone palette number 30 pretty unusable for CorelDraw users. We worked it around and the files are opening just fine in LibreOffice. Take this as a first contribution by the new Document Liberation Project.

LibreOffice and Google Summer of Code 2014

Hello, dear students!

This little blog is to remind you that in a bit more then 24 hours, the student applications for the 10^th edition of Google Summer of Code will be closed. It is always better to submit an imperfect proposal before the deadline then to miss the deadline by 5 minutes with perfect proposal. So, check our Ideas page and hurry up with applying.

AbiWord import filter in LibreOffice: another tool for the swiss army knife

It all started by an innocent (?) question on 28th of November 2013. The inimitable Caolán asked whether anybody considered writing an import filter for AbiWord document format. And the distinguished readership of this blog knows well what makes your servant tick. So, the very evening, a skeleton was written and libabw, a library to read AbiWord file-format, started. It was pretty exciting to write -- after a host of libraries for file-formats that are not documented anywhere -- a filter for a file-format of our cousin. There was a hope that existence of a reference implementation whose source code is widely accessible would make the endavour easy. It is undeniable that grepping for values of different enums made the work a bit easier. Nonetheless, a huge part of the work was still figuring out what is permitted in AbiWord and how a change of one parameter affects the rendering of a document. Other thing to find out was how to map the concepts in the ABW files into the libwpd API that is heavily influenced by ODF concepts.

But the date of the start meant that soon came the Christmas and with it a possibility to spend some free time on the library. Eventually it became very usable and the import filter made it -- as a late feature -- into the LibreOffice 4.2 line and users of the upcoming LibreOffice 4.2.0 release.

The library currently supports both the plain xml ABW files as well as the gzipped ZABW files. The converted features include:

• Tables, including nested tables
• Headers and footers, including different left, right and first page headers/footers
• Footnotes and endnotes
• Multi-column sections
• Embedded images

And since a picture speaks louder then hundred words, here are some screenshots:

A sample ABW file opened in AbiWord		The same ABW file opened in the upcoming LibreOffice 4.2.0

A sample (zlib compressed) ZABW file opened in AbiWord		The same ZABW file opened in the upcoming LibreOffice 4.2.0

As you can see from the screenshots, the world domination that we are actively seeking is having several contenders. But if you believe that we are the closest to its realization, please join the filter-writing fun! Show up on #libreoffice-dev channel at irc.freenode.net. You are also encouraged to follow my twitter and Google+ accounts. And stay tuned for more exciting news in the near future. We can promise you that you will have a lot of fun in the growing community of LibreOffice filter writers.

Thank You!

Dear friends!

From the bottom of my heart I would like to thank you for your support during the past elections for The Document Foundation Board of Directors. Without you my election would be never possible and I never took it for granted. I am thankful for your trust. You cannot even immagine how happy and grateful I am for your support. Especially in a moment where my relationship with our project undergoes major changes.

I pray to be always up to the task to co-guide our project with wisdom and integrity.

I love you

Fridrich

Fridrich Štrba, candidate for TDF Board of Directors

The time has come when The Document Foundation will elect a new Board of Directors. As you might already know, there are many good candidates. And since I clearly think I am the best of them, I am writing this to ask you to vote for me. Some of you might know me a bit already, but it is never bad to present myself.

My name is Fridrich Štrba, national of Switzerland and Slovakia, happily married with Susan since more then 12 years and father of 3 wonderful children: Patrick (9), Miriam (6) and Nathanael (3).

My story with LibreOffice started around 2004, with its predecessor, OpenOffice.org. I was just trying to contribute to libwpd which is the horse-power of our WordPerfect import and the OpenOffice.org integration was an interesting thing to contribute to. And since then, my love story with our project went through different stages, but we are still together and sometimes even happy.

I have been mentoring Google Summer of Code students since 2006 and recently I was co-responsible for several import filters for reverse-engineered formats (i.e. Visio, CorelDraw, MS Publisher). I can frankly say that my development and marketing work around the filters are a huge part of the reason why LibreOffice is called the "Swiss army knife of file-formats". We managed quite recently to bootstrap a vibrant community of filter-writers and the the amount of supported file-formats will only grow.

Between 2007 and 2013, I was highly blessed to be working on LO as my day-job, employed by Novell, then SUSE. Since September 2013, I am again a volunteer as many of you. This new-acquired independence is an advantage. I have no monetary interests of any kind in LibreOffice and, if elected, I will take decisions only and only considering the good of the project as such.

The advantage of my election would be that I am part of various native language communities. I speak several languages and can understand the aspirations of the corresponding communities. Besides that, I was part of the Membership Committee from 2010 and the last year, I was its Chairman. In this quality, I was able to push forward my vision of diverse and open and inclusive community that goes beyond personal sympathies or aversions. And this is the vision I desire to pursue if you give me your trust.

And since it is written "You don't have because you don't ask", with this message I ask you to cast your vote for me.