László Németh

What motivates a potential code contributor? And a full-time free-software developer? A fun project. LibreOffice development is fun, but also a real challenge, so we must consciously find the flow in it (not quite an oxymoron). While I present my recent LibreOffice, Numbertext, LibreLogo and Hunspell developments, partially sponsored by FSF.hu Foundation, Hungary, I collect the ten funniest moments of them, that were left out of the release notes (i.e. https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleaseNotes/7.5#Default.E2.80.9Cspellout.E2.80.9Dnumberandcurrencyformats, https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleaseNotes/7.4#Newtypographicsettings, https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleaseNotes/7.4#NewnumberinginShowChanges_mode etc.).

3 lightning talks about news and the most important experiences of the various LibreOffice developments made for migration projects in public administration and education, based on my recent presentations of LiboCon, Tirana, and our newer results.

Building a LibreOffice development team: We have found and filed more than three hundred bugs during the biggest LibreOffice migration project of Hungary. Our help desk service couldn't handle these efficiently using half measures and workarounds, so we started to build a small LibreOffice development team focusing on the most important OOXML compatibility and other migration problems. After three month learning and trial period, we summarize our results and failures for LibreOffice community.

LibreOffice language technology – news and best practices: This lightning talk shows new and improved language technologies of LibreOffice and their usage: new features of Hunspell spell checker (better handling of words written separately or with special orthography, faster suggestions, etc.), “Grammar by” spell checking for default technical dictionaries, Numbertext and NatNum12 number modifier for default date and other formats fulfilling special language needs, and exemplary developments for example for German (hyphenation using compound feature of libhyphen) and Hungarian (fields with automatic article selection; spell checking of word with special word breaking, for example, recognizing the parenthesized word forms, like “us(ag)e”).

LibreOffice and eTwinning: LibreLogo in schools and teacher training programs: LibreLogo, integrated Logo extension of LibreOffice is based on strong practical and educational principles. After 4 years of research period, lead by Andreas Formiconi, University of Florence advocates LibreLogo usage in eTwinning program, community of European schools. This short presentation summarize the research results and recent and planned improvements of LibreLogo.

One of the best thing, that could have happened to LibreOffice is the development its online version.

We can edit typographic quality documents in a browser using arbitrary page layout with page styles, headers and footers, footnotes, linked frames, custom fonts, also with font features, like true small capitals and ligatures.

These WYSIWYG document editing and form filling capabilities aren't limited by incomplete web standards and clients, and they are based on the OpenDocument format and its embedded XML based form standard, XForms.

We have made minor, but important LibreOffice improvements, too, like changing the default, unprofessional ASCII apostrophe to the long-awaited typographic one (U+2019) in online and desktop versions of LibreOffice.

To solve the problem of the simplified toolbars of the online version, we allowed to use nearly all keyboard shortcuts of LibreOffice in the online version, also adding new ones for compatibility and better usage, for example the shortcut Ctrl-Alt-F for footnote insertion.

The presentation will show several online document editing examples, focusing on the typographic quality and easy layout management (like online usage of the OpenDocument character, paragraph, list, page and other styles, the strengths of Writer word processor), and the related developments.