WordPress.com just delivered this awesome stats I want to share with you. Enjoy it and have a Happy New Year 2013;).

Hier ist ein Auszug:

600 Personen haben 2012 den Gipfel des Mount Everest erreicht. Dieser Blog hat 2012 über 12.000 Aufrufe bekommen. Hätte jede Person, die den Gipfel des Mount Everest erreicht hat, diesen Blog aufgerufen, würde es 20 Jahre dauern, um so viele Aufrufe zu erhalten.

Klicke hier um den vollständigen Bericht zu sehen.

Tagged: 2013, happy, happy new year, new, stats, year

As the year comes to an end there are plenty of accomplishments that the LibreOffice community can be proud of, and a week ago we added another success — the end of our 6 day testing marathon[1] against the upcoming release of LibreOffice Version 4.0 (scheduled for February of 2013). While the Quality Assurance (QA) team didn’t set any goals for the week other than to “get as many people as possible involved with testing LibreOffice Version 4.0 Beta 1″, the statistics speak a great deal about how great our growing community is and far exceed the results that I personally was expecting. Any time “Version 4″ is referenced it includes the master build, Beta 1 build as well as the Alpha build.

Between December 14th and December 19th 445 bugs on FreeDesktop.Org (FDO) were modified in some way. These modifications included confirming bugs, adding details in comments, fixing bugs, confirming fixes, and bibisecting regressions.

On December 14th at the beginning of our test marathon 353 bugs were reported against Version 4, by the end of the marathon on December 19th, we were at 461 bugs (up 108 bugs in 6 days). Despite the fast increase of bug reports during the week, our number of UNCONFIRMED bugs only grew by 20 (from 57 to 77) — this showing that not only were users testing the suite extensively, users and QA staff were dedicated to triaging bugs as quickly as possible. The percent of fixed bugs (status of FIXED & VERIFIED) went from 45.61% to 48.16% of the total bugs reported against Version 4 (again this incorporates the 108 bug increase during the period).

The chart below gives a good idea of bug status’ during the period of the marathon:

The biggest spike was clearly in RESOLVED bugs but NEW (confirmed bugs) rose by nearly 20% and as already mentioned, UNCONFIRMED bugs rose nearly 35%.

The breakdown of bugs per component offers a good insight of what components are most popular and there weren’t many surprises. WRITER consistently was the most reported against component of LibreOffice – beginning at 102 of 353 bugs and ending at 127 of 461 bugs. Spreadsheet was second most popular but saw the largest spike in bugs reported against it during the week (rising from 56 bugs to 84 bugs, almost 50% increase). The last three components were in the following order (Presentation, Database, Drawing), non component bugs hovered around 40% of total bugs throughout the week (starting at 148 bugs, ending at 186 bugs) — unfortunately the general “LibreOffice” bug falls into this category and many of these bugs are about a specific component.

The charts below shows bugs reported against each component during the period of the marathon:

The final “stats” that I want to point out before finishing is on regressions which will get tremendous focus by developers as we near release date. On December 14th 91 bugs (34.7%) of bugs reported against Version 4 were marked as regression, on December 19th this number rose to 135 bugs (41.4%). While this number could be interpreted as bad for our product, in reality, this is tremendous news and a great success for the marathon. It is PRECISELY these bugs that we hope to discover and fix before stable release, in order to do this we must first report the bugs which is what we see here.

As a last important note, during the week we saw a tremendous increase of activity on our quality assurance IRC channel (#libreoffice-qa) on freenode. Every day developers, quality assurance contributors and users from around the world could be seen in the chat room, discussing strategies, future events, etc…Ultimately it was this aspect that I would say was the greatest success during the week. There were particular users (you know who you are ) that I am sure will continue to contribute substantially going into the future and whom I give a tremendous amount of thanks to. It is these contributors who continue to make LibreOffice a fantastic product for everyone, and I urge users and contributors alike to give thanks to one another for our combined dedication.

So as a recap — Between December 14th and December 19th:

• 445 bugs modified
• # of NEW (confirmed) bugs rose nearly 20%
• # of UNCONFIRMED bugs rose by 20 (57 to 77)
• Resolved & Verified bugs account for nearly 50% of bugs (up approximately 3%)
• Writer continues to be the most reported against component (consistently hovering above 25% of total bug reports)
• Spreadsheet saw the biggest spike in bugs (about 50% more bugs at end of marathon vs. beginning)
• Regressions rose from 95 bugs to 135 – rising from 34.7% of total to 41.4% [3]

All of the statistics have been posted online for everyone to see [2].

[1] http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/QA/Test_Marathon_LibreOffice_4.0

[2] https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/File:QA_Test_Marathon_Stats.ods

[3] These are not confirmed regressions, just bugs with regression in keyword field

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I have tried to summarize in a single text what we – members, developers, volunteers, native language communities, advocates and supporters – have achieved during 2012. Looking back, it has been amazing.

TDF has started 2012 with a hackers community of 379 individuals, mostly volunteers, which has continued to grow steadily – month after month – and has now reached the amazing figure of 567 developers (320 active during the last 12 months, which means that LibreOffice is the third largest open source desktop software project after Chrome and Firefox).

In early 2012, The Document Foundation – an truly community based independend organization – has been registered in Berlin, under the form of a German Stiftung (supervised by the German authorities). The oldest German Stiftung dates back to 1509, and over 250 of them have existed for over 500 years (so, stability is not an issue).

Once established, The Document Foundation has immediately attracted additional sponsors and supporters. Intel and Lanedo have joined the Advisory Board, while Project LiMux (City of Munich) and MIMO (the French Government organization responsible for the migration to FOSS) are actively supporting the project.

The Document Foundation and LibreOffice role inside the free software ecosystem have been recognized by the French Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault in a formal letter to the members of the French government.

In 2012, The Document Foundation has announced LibreOffice 3.4.5, LibreOffice 3.5, LibreOffice 3.5.1, LibreOffice 3.4.6, LibreOffice 3.5.2, LibreOffice 3.5.3, LibreOffice 3.5.4, LibreOffice 3.5.5, LibreOffice 3.6, LibreOffice 3.5.6, LibreOffice 3.6.1, LibreOffice 3.6.2, LibreOffice 3.5.7 and LibreOffice 3.6.3. LibreOffice 3.4 has been awarded Linux Questions Office Suite of the Year 2011.

In addition, the hackers community has started working on LibreOffice 4.0, which is already at Beta 2 and will be announced in February 2013. LibreOffice 4.0 will be a milestone release, and the first of a new generation of free office suites.

In order to further improve the quality of LibreOffice 3.5, 3.6 and 4, the QA community has organized several bug hunting sessions during 2012 and a full bug hunting marathon in December 2012 (with almost 500 bugs chased during a full week of tests).

LibreOffice community has met at FOSDEM in Brussels, at LinuxTag in Berlin, at LibreOffice Conference in Berlin, and in Hamburg and Munich for TDF Hackfests. In addition, local hackfests have been organized in the Netherlands and Brazil, and LibreOffice volunteers have attended several local events around the world.

In February 2012, TDF has launched LibreOffice Ask page, and the Windows version of LibreOffice has been made available for downloads from the Intel AppUp Center targeted to mobile PC and UltraBook owners.

In September 2012, TDF has joined the OASIS Consortium (Organisation for the Advancement of Standards in Information Society (OASIS). At the end of the same month, the new Membership Committee has been elected by TDF members: five members – Sophie Gautier, Fridrich Štrba (Chairman), Eike Rathke, Cor Nouws and Jean Weber – and two deputies – Simon Phipps and Leif Lodahl.

LibreOffice has been awarded the title of Free Office Suite of the Year 2011 by LinuxQuestions, and Best Office Suite 2012 by Linux Journal (in both cases, getting over 70% of the votes). In Brazil, LibreOffice has received the “Technology For Citizens Award” from Guarulhos City.

During 2012, many private and public organization have announced the migration of their desktop office suite to LibreOffice: several French ministries (500,000 desktops), city of Munich in Germany (15,000 desktops), the Capital Region of Denmark, Vieira do Minho in Portugal, Limerick in Ireland, Grygov in the Czech Republic, Las Palmas in Spain, the City of Largo in Florida, the municipality of Pilea-Hortiatis in Greece, Regione Umbria, Provincia di Milano and Provincia di Bolzano in Italy, and the Public Library System of Chicago.

This growth is reflected in the downloads of the Windows and MacOS X versions during 2012. The number of unique IPs who have downloaded LibreOffice has grown from just over 200,000 per week in January to well over 600,000 in December, for a total of 15 million unique IPs in 2012. Linux users, with very few exceptions, do not download LibreOffice as they can get the software from the repository of their distribution of choice.

The Document Foundation has also announced the Certification Program for LibreOffice, and the first group of certified developers. In 2013, the program will be extended to professionals active in migrations and trainings, and later to L1 and L2 support.

The last, and in my opinion the best news of 2012, waits TDF under the Xmas tree: in fact, just a few days before Xmas TDF has hired the first employee, to manage the infrastructure and take care of administrative tasks (which, thanks to the extremely fast growth of the project, are now a full time task): Florian Effenberger, who is already popular inside the project for his volunteer work.

The Board of Directors – with the obvious exception of Florian – has unanimously chosen him for infrastructure and administrative tasks, as he is already familiar with both, being the architect behind the entire infrastructure and the person who has been talking with the authorities during the process of putting in place The Document Foundation.

Florian Effenberger has been active inside the OOo project from 2004 to 2010, as infrastructure and then marketing lead, and has been a founder of TDF. During all these years he has put an incredible amount of hours – of his personal time – behind free software, OOo and LibreOffice.

From now on, Florian will devote his working hours to TDF, and will add the usual amount of volunteer hours for his BoD duties (which must be volunteer based, according to our statutes).

Florian Effenberger is going to be a tremendous asset for TDF, because he knows perfectly our ecosystem, he is a true free software advocate, and he is knowledgeable not only on administration and infrastructure but also on marketing.

Looking at 2013 and beyond, The Document Foundation is ready to face every challenge, and win over the competition not only by providing a better product but also by creating a different and better ecosystem for free office suites.

So far, TDF has been an exciting journey, and I am sure that what has happened is just the first chapter of a long and successful history.

• Woken early by a sick E. couldn't get back to sleep. Up, house cleaning, Jo, Mike & Robin over for a big roast lunch lots of fun getting to know them.
• Bit of a relax, out to the Carol service in the evening, practised for a couple of hours beforehand. Lots of people crammed in, played - helped M. with her Cello music - playing with H. N. and Andrew for a Calypso Carol. Suitable shared-supper blow-out afterwards: good to catch up with Ed, Sam, Gael and more.
• Home to try to get to grips with the un-written Christmas card crisis.

I don’t think that the screenshots need additional comments: LibreOffice is THE free office suite of reference for the Linux environment, surpassing every other software by a factor of six, and LibreOffice Writer is THE best single office program (sharing the spot with OOo Writer, hopefully for the last time, as LibreOffice is the de facto standard for all Linux distributions since 2011).

Best Office Suite

Best Single Office Product

Independence, democracy and meritocracy pay off (could anyone have doubts about this, after 10 years under the corporate umbrella?).

• Up late, substantial brunch with the family. E. feverish. Played games with babes, pottered around tidying the house up, wrapping presents and so on: fun.
• Out to Peace & Solomon's for an afternoon meal - good to catch up with them. Home, booked a series of personal family visiting flights in Australia: if you're in Sydney, Melbourne or Hobart between 22nd and 28th January and not going to LCA; it might be good to meet up.

There used to be a time that getting Linux on a system was simple. Just put Ubuntu on it, or XUbuntu if it is an older system. Done.

Not anymore, and I'm getting fed up of rebuilding my laptop...

I can't go for Ubuntu and Ubuntu-based distros (like Mint) because of some weird kernel issues.
I had issues with Fedora's 3.5 kernels, and taking in consideration that bug report above, it feels like any recent kernel is gonna go bad on me.
I've been using Linux Mint Debian Edition, and they're forgetting to update Firefox and Thunderbird despite security vulnerabilities. Plus, the HPLIP offered is half-broken.
UPDATE: I spoke on IRC with LMDE devs who are automating their infrastructure to test the new packages faster so that updates don't have to wait so much in the future.

I don't want to use GNOME because of a nasty CPU-hogging bug.
I don't want to use XFCE because of lame multimedia key support and buggy handling of keyboard layouts.

Of course, there are sort-of solutions to the above problems, but I'm tired. I want a distro that has good support for codecs and a great out of the box experience. I don't want to use super outdated software. And I don't want to be installing updates every other day. In other words, something I could use with someone who discover linux as well as a geek.

Of the big distros, only openSUSE is left, but it doesn't have the multimedia codecs. So, time to go for a bit arcane.

• PeppermintOS, Ultimate Edition, and PinguyOS are Ubuntu-based. So kernel problems are expected.
• MEPIS is based on Debian Stable. There is a way to be a bit less outdated though, but that doesn't sound too awesome (but maybe worth trying)
• PCLinuxOS is an interesting contender. I installed it in a VM and it reminds me of the old Red Hat Linux of yore, before it split between Red Hat and Fedora distributions. Its lack of a brainless package updater is the only thing I see against it right now. Somehow, it installed the 32-bit version, which I'm not sure I'm happy with.
• Fuduntu is another interesting contender. It is GNOME 2, but otherwise the software looks up-to-date and the GUI is sleek. I am running it in a VM and it looks like the choice of packages is limited. And beesu is driving me nuts asking my password every time.
• Kororaa is Fedora-based, but a decent option. UPDATE: Installed in a VM, there were a lot of updates to put there. It looks very cutting edge - Kernel 3.6.1, KDE, 4.9.2. Makes me think of Sabayon.
• Zorin OS is officially based off Ubuntu, but it looks like they are much more cutting edge. A lot of things are looking good, but that's a GNOME distro so...
• Sabayon feels beyond cutting edge. It makes me almost uncomfortable.
• Mageia sort-of has all the codecs installed... you need to enable another repo. It could be too much to ask for new users though. UPDATE: I installed in a VM and it won't start a GUI. FAIL!
• UPDATE: Crunchbang is based on Debian Stable, but has a backported version that is more up-to-date. But am I gonna get the same problems as Ubuntu, as the version is nearly same? Anyways, I installed it in a VM, and I have to say that I wouldn't recommend the interface to a newbie. It does have a wizard (text-based) to install the stuff you'd want, but I want it already there. Its interface is everything but user friendly. I would probably like it, but wouldn't vouch for my wife though...
• UPDATE: I didn't mention Fusion because, frankly, the Web site is confusing/wrong... Is Fusion 16 stable? Is the latest stable is 14? Why is it the link to it is telling me to download 16? I am not getting the feeling that this is maintained much, and so I didn't bother.

You might have read that stunt and wondered what happened... It turns out I got busy enough to skip writing.

So here it is.
I spent one month using Windows 7 with as many proprietary programs as possible. My experience:

• DRM-enabled things like YouTube paying movies work so much better. +1 For proprietary.
• For music playing, Windows Media Player isn't too awesome. It doesn't support the formats well, nor the tags in the music files for sorting them. On the other hand, every serious media player on Linux does these things super well. +1 for open source
• I had one BSOD in Windows. In Linux, it depends on the distribution and the software I use. Still, +1 for proprietary.
• User-friendliness of Excel was not very good with the separator thing, LO wins on that. +1 open source.
• Both WMP and the default video player handled the videos I wanted cleanly, so that's a draw.
• Keyboard layout switching worked good on both, so that's a draw.
• Weather widget is not as good as on Linux. +1 open source.
• HP Print setup is confusing and contradictory - I wasted a lot of ink on that. +2 open source.

Still have not found that perfect gift for that special person in your life? It is never too late to give. Make a donation to the LibreOffice Project in their name!

Download the following .svg file[1], and, tailor the sum to the amount you would like to donate with your favorite vector graphics editor (our suggestion: Inkscape[2]), OR, print them, just as they are, with the amount of $10 already inserted for you. Go to the LibreOffice donation website and complete the donation in their name[3].

We would like to thank you in advance for this wonderful act of kindness which is most appreciated.

LibreOffice Marketing Team

====================

[1] https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/images/a/a5/Donation_card.svg

NOTE: This work is licensed under the Attribution Share-Alike 3.0 Unported License – http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/. Visit the LibreOffice wiki pages for more details of the file: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/File:Donation_card.svg

[2] http://inkscape.org/?lang=en

[3] http://donate.libreoffice.org/

====================

NOTE: To modify the amount in Inkscape:

• load the Donation_card.svg file
• double-click on the amount
• modify the amount
• print

 

• Up early; chat with Felix, mail chew, breakfast, form filling, posted Chinese visa bits. Plugged away at a domain-mapper slowness affecting both rtf and docx import (the joys of code sharing I suppose) got somewhere after lots of idiocy, it is remarkably easy to forget how STL containers work after a week away from them.
• Glad to see my work on bootchart2 is not entirely obsolete and is being used for GNOME login profiling at least (warning Big Lebowski / gun image on link) - such graphs make my fingers itchy. Worked in the evening, then a Dr Who.
• Beginning of a two week Christmas vacation, relaxation in a box.

• Mail chew, status report, polished and pushed a TDF blog about our Munich Hack-fest thanking our supporters etc. Also encouraging to get a blog out about shipping on the Raspberry Pi app-store.
• J. picked up M. from school - sick (again). Lunch. Team call, ESC call. Dinner with the babes; put them to bed, J. out for a party. Spent the evening doing some fun profiling / speedup of word-count and i18npool's break-iterators.

I don’t think that the screenshots need additional comments: LibreOffice is THE free office suite of reference for the Linux environment, surpassing every other software by a factor of six, and LibreOffice Writer is THE best single office program (sharing the spot with OOo Writer, hopefully for the last time, as LibreOffice is the de facto standard for all Linux distributions since 2011).

Best Office Suite

Best Single Office Product

Independence, democracy and meritocracy pay off (could anyone have doubts about this, after 10 years under the corporate umbrella?).

I don’t think that the screenshots need additional comments: LibreOffice is THE free office suite of reference for the Linux environment, surpassing every other software by a factor of six, and LibreOffice Writer is THE best single office program (sharing the spot with OOo Writer, hopefully for the last time, as LibreOffice is the de facto standard for all Linux distributions since 2011).

Best Office Suite

Best Single Office Product

Independence, democracy and meritocracy pay off (could anyone have doubts about this, after 10 years under the corporate umbrella?).

The intense pace of development work on LibreOffice as we approach our 4.0 release has rather delayed an update on our recent extremely successful LibreOffice hack-fest. To give an idea of the work going on, instead of the around 1500 commits per month we normally get, we had nearly a month’s worth of commits in the last two weeks before our feature freeze, with lots of bug fixing ever since; things have been busy.

Some portion of this work was done by the more than thirty LibreOffice developers that arrived to augment the existing Munich Limux developers – who kindly hosted us. Munich is a forward looking enterprise who have deployed Linux to their fifteen-thousand users, and have committed to moving to LibreOffice.  First of all – many thanks to our friendly hosts who provided a great venue, helped feed us, so we could continue coding late into the night, and tidied up the detritus afterwards: your contribution is greatly appreciated.

It was also nice to meet a number of the Debian guys – who had a separate room for a parallel bug squashing party some of whom took an interest in and did a little LibreOffice work too. We had over thirty participants for LibreOffice alone, with other new people we’d never met before showing up and getting involved over the weekend which was particularly encouraging.

So what did we get done ?

as always with LibreOffice there were a lot of scattered improvements; you can read the full list in the wiki, but here are some highlights:

• Miklos with Michael Stahl obsoleted a great chunk of horrible RTF filter, improved performance and should significantly improve our copy/paste behavior on windows from MS Office.
• Robert, David, Bjoern and Norbert(remotely) helped get a staging / gerrit test site up and running to help upgrade and manage our gerrit instance (which makes contributing patches very easy)
• Kendy made the UI for the drop-down style selector very much more attractive with live previews
• Rob Snelders and Christine Koppelt made some great strides improving the (pretty) Bug Submission Assistant that Loic originally created to give bugzilla an end-user usable bug filing front-end.
• Michael Meeks worked on getting to the bottom of an intermittent Java / LibreOffice crasher causing the critical Wolmux e-government plugin problems. Thanks to Andrew Haley of RedHat for fixing the underlying problem (in Java naturally).
• Lionel and David made improvements to ‘Base’ and helped debug longer term issues
• Thorsten worked on polishing the Android remote-control for Impress
• Markus made conditional formatting even more beautiful and stable in Calc
• Peter Baumgarten produced a beautiful playterm session (with video thanks to Cloph) to help people build LibhreOffice as well as some German comment translations.
• Christina Roßmanith worked on  improvements for SVG import
• Markus Maier translated some German code comments, and helped migrate dialogs to the new UI layout.
• Italo Vignoli – inspired us with various kinds of wonderful Italian food.
• and more (that was not easy to enumerate).

It was excellent to see so many friendly faces, introduce new people to the team, get people more familiar with the code, meet old friends and be encouraged about the great progress we’re making. Getting everyone to stand in one place, at the same time proved rather problematic, however here is a picture of a subset of twenty-plus happy LibreOffice contributors, and some Debian-ites:

Finally, none of this can happen without people helping to host and fund the work.  Many thanks to those who provided financial and logistical support to the enterprise – as well as our many individual donors who help support The Document Foundation’s ability to get developers together to improve their productivity.

The Limux Project: hosting and co-organising, thanks to Jan-Marek Glogowski

Thorsten Heintke – an individual donation for travel bursaries

Credativ GmbH for food and beverages

DBI Klarl & Schuler GmbH for the saturday pizza

• Up early; mail chew, sync. with Vojtech. Poked LCA travel some more. Lunch, into town for passport photos. Back, forgot how soul-destroying dealing with Government beaurocracy is - a few dozen pages of paperwork helps remind one.
• Bits of admin, wrote some blurb. Reading through older-mail, rather pleased with Caolan's description of the difference between a TWIP and an EMU. Poked at some gstreamer testing in 4.0, filed expenses.
• Thrilled to see LibreOffice as the Linux Journal Readers Choice of 2012 - with 73% of the vote, with Google Docs as #2 with 12%, what a sensible lot of readers they apparently have; thanks.

Antiquated metaphors in icons can work better than modern, but complicated ones. This can be shown on the example of the ‘save’ icon.

A lot of the Tango and Oxygen icons that are used in the standard tool bar in LibreOffice Writer are based on the same metaphor. From the icons that differ in metaphor, the icons used for ‘Saving a document’ are especially interesting. This is one result of the large scale icon test of LibreOffice Writer icons (read about the methodology of testing icons).

In our work with different projects we have often been asked why antiquated metaphors are still used in icon design. Examples of these antiquated icons could be the shiny metal container representing a database or the floppy disc for saving data. Younger people might not even have seen either of the originals.

Use a floppy disc to represent ‘save’

As the Oxygen icon used for saving is a floppy disc, while the Tango icon is a filing cabinet with an inwards pointing arrow, we were especially curious for the performance of these two icons. Would younger users prefer the cabinet as they might not know what a floppy disc is?

The results are stunning. There was not the slightest problem with using the floppy disc, while the filing cabinet metaphor more or less failed:

Even when looking at the group of young users the results do not change significantly and the antiquated floppy disc still scores a perfect 10.0. The filing cabinet scores higher with younger than with older users though, but still not reaching acceptable values.

As a conclusion we strongly advise you not to try to find a substitute for the floppy disc to represent the ‘save’ action.

Is a filing cabinet even more antiquated?

Even though the data does not allow us to draw direct conclusion about the rational behind it, we think there might be two major problems with using the filing cabinet metaphor:

• It is likely that esp. younger people do not know what a filing cabinet actually is. They are not used to storing paper data or do have access to a filing cabinet. So improving the icon to such a metaphor does not make it easier for younger users, but makes it harder for older users.
• There is too much detail in the cabinet icon in respect to its size. The significant longer time people needed to identify the icon as the right one indicate that they first had to reason about it and disassemble it into its meaningful parts to be able to read it. The floppy disc on the other hand is a clear and simple icon (We will publish a discussion about detail in an icon soon).

We should use the floppy disc icon for future version of the Tango icons in LibreOffice.

You are invited to take a look at the raw results of this study in the LibreOffice project on UserWeave.net and discuss with us in the comments.

More than 3000 users took part in the first two LibreOffice icon tests. The demographics prove us to have gathered reliable data.

What a vivid community! We asked the users of LibreOffice to take part in our Icon Tests and about 1500 participants joined each of the tests within a week. The first test used the Tango, the second the Oxygen icon set.

For the tests we used the tool tip of the icon within LibreOffice Writer as stimulus. They were presented randomly along all 24 icons (read more about the methodology of testing icons). In both test we asked the same demographic questions to be able to describe the population that took part.

Great User Feedback

In total 1998 participants started the Tango test and 1493 finished it. This „responder quote“ of 74% is fairly high for an online study that takes some minutes. In the Oxygen study 2527 participants started and 1645 finished. The drop out of about 35% is still good for online studies.

The second study attracted more people because we got a contributor who translated it into Spanish (see Table 5 below). Next to this both studies were run in English, French, German, Hebrew, Italian and Polish. So if you want to help us to conduct the next survey in your language as well – and hence to increase your cultural impact – just drop me a mail.

The population of users is about equal in both studies. Most users are below 40 years old as you can see from Table 1.

Table 1: Age distribution

Age	Tango (in %)	Oxygen (in %)
0-20	7	9
20-30	44	53
30-40	27	24
40-50	13	9
50-60	6	4
60+	2	2

Where are the women?

Table 2 shows the typical bias towards a male population in free software surveys. If you have any idea how to get a better ration here, please use the comments to share it!

Table 2: Sex distribution

Sex	Tango (in %)	Oxygen (in %)
Female	2	3
Male	98	97

In Table 3 you can see that users use Writer and Calc on a very frequent base. Impress still gets quite high ratio of usage but the other applications Draw, Base and Maths are only used rarely

Table 3: Usage of LibreOffice Components

Usage of	Tango (mean; 1=never, 5=daily)	Oxygen (mean; 1=never, 5=daily)
Writer	3.82	3.79
Calc	3.32	3.17
Impress	2.21	2.28
Draw	1.89	1.86
Base	1.43	1.47
Math	1.65	1.75

The typical user we reached uses a Linux Machine. Table 4 lists the details.

Table 4: Usage of operating systems

OS	Tango (in %)	Oxygen (in %)
Windows	21	17
Mac OS	4	3
Linux (KDE)	36	42
Linux (Gnome)	36	35
Other	3	4

LibreOffice all over the world

Last you can see in the rather lengthy Table 5 that we got feedback from over 100 countries. Here you can see how much more users we got from Spanish speaking countries in the Oxygen test, proving how important localisation of the tests is.

Table 5: Countries of origin of the participants

Country	Tango (No. of participants)	Oxygen (No. of participants)
Afghanistan	2
Albania	1
American Samoa	1
Andorra	1	1
Argentina	14	106
Armenia	1
Australia	12	11
Austria	14	16
Belarus	7	1
Belgium	21	26
Bolivia		2
Bosnia and Herzegovina	2	1
Bouvet Island	1
Brazil	35	31
Bulgaria		1
Cambodia		1
Canada	30	20
Chile	6	36
China	3	3
Cocos (Keeling) Islands	1
Colombia	4	49
Costa Rica	2	5
Croatia	3
Cuba		24
Czech Republic	16	12
Denmark	35	28
Dominica		1
Dominican Republic		5
Ecuador		8
Egypt		1
El Salvador	1	17
Estonia	2	3
Ethiopia	1
Fiji	1
Finland	8	12
France	105	57
French Guiana	1
French Polynesia	2
Germany	179	172
Gibraltar		1
Greece	4	5
Greenland	1	1
Guatemala		5
Honduras		3
Hong Kong	1	1
Hungary	12	9
Iceland	2	1
India	10	6
Indonesia	6	2
Ireland	3	2
Israel	44	5
Italy	241	35
Jamaica	1
Japan	16	11
Jersey	1
Kazakhstan	1
Kenya	1
Latvia	4	2
Lebanon	1	2
Lithuania	6	3
Luxembourg	1	1
Macedonia	1	1
Malaysia	2
Malta	1
Mauritius		1
Mexico	7	95
Moldova	2	2
Morocco	1	1
Netherlands	18	37
New Zealand	3	3
Nicaragua		2
Niue		1
Norway	5	3
Panama	1	5
Paraguay	1
Peru		16
Poland	26	30
Portugal	18	8
Puerto Rico		4
Romania	11	6
Russia	204	237
Saudi Arabia		1
Serbia	1	2
Singapore	1
Slovakia	3	2
Slovenia	10	9
South Africa	4	2
South Sudan	1
Spain	31	179
Sri Lanka	1
Sweden	19	13
Switzerland	19	9
Taiwan	3
Tanzania		1
Thailand	2	1
Turkey	11	7
Ukraine	37	46
United Arab Emirates	1
United Kingdom	55	48
United States	80	65
Uruguay	1	8
Uzbekistan	1	1
Venezuela		15
Zimbabwe	1

Conclusion

As always it’s surprising how agile the LO community is and how many people participate in such tests. With a distribution of users like we have reached, we can split data on several parameters and still have enough values for valid evaluations.

The corresponding values in both tests are a strong indicator for the gathering of representative data. Still, it would be good to mobilize female users for the next tests. We are convinced there are more female users of LibreOffice out there.

Join with your expertise

As always: If you are interest in the raw data, simply join the LibreOffice project on UserWeave and add your own thoughts and findings in the comments.

The full fledged free office suite is available on the credit card sized single-board computer developed by the Raspberry Pi Foundation

Cambridge (UK) and Berlin (Germany), December 17, 2012 – The Raspberry Pi Foundation (http://www.raspberrypi.org/) and The Document Foundation (http://www.documentfoundation.org/) announce the availability of the full fledged version of LibreOffice (http://www.libreoffice.org/) on the Raspberry Pi, the credit-card sized computer created with the intention of stimulating the teaching of basic computer science in schools. The Raspberry Pi is a little PC which plugs into a TV and a keyboard and can be used for many of the things that most desktop PC can do, like spreadsheets, word-processing and games.

LibreOffice is the first comprehensive office suite to run on a 40 dollar credit card sized PC, without any compromise on features and performances. LibreOffice has been ported to ARM by multiple contributors from Canonical, Debian and RedHat, and was packaged for the Raspberry Pi by Rene Engelhard as a part of his work as the Debian maintainer for LibreOffice.

“The availability of LibreOffice, the best free office suite ever, on the Raspberry Pi – the most affordable PC ever, targeted to hardware and software enthusiasts, and schools – is extremely important for The Document Foundation, because it will contribute to the growth of the brand awareness in key market segments”, comments Bjoern Michaelsen, a Canonical developer and a deputy member of the Board of Directors of The Document Foundation.

“I’m very impressed that the LibreOffice team didn’t have to make any changes to the code in order for it to compile and smoothly run on Raspberry Pi”, said Eben Upton from the Raspberry Pi Foundation. “It’s also great to have a comprehensive office suite available in the Pi Store at launch, making people even more aware of the potential of this device”.

LibreOffice is available from the Raspberry Pi Store (http://store.raspberrypi.com/projects/libreoffice), which is described here: http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/2768 (including instructions on how to install it). Raspberry Pi Foundation announcement press release is here: http://blog.indiecity.com/?page_id=2269.

About the Raspberry Pi

The Raspberry Pi is a tiny computer, designed to fit in a pocket, and cheap enough to be bought with pocket money. It was developed by the not-for-profit Raspberry Pi Foundation in Cambridge to help children engage with computer programming, and has won dozens of awards in its first year of release. Additional information at http://www.raspberrypi.org.

About The Document Foundation (TDF)

The Document Foundation is an open, independent, self-governing, meritocratic organization, which builds on ten years of dedicated work by the OpenOffice.org Community. TDF was created in the belief that the culture born of an independent foundation brings out the best in corporate and volunteer contributors, and will deliver the best free office suite. TDF is open to any individual who agrees with its core values and contributes to its activities, and warmly welcomes corporate participation, e.g. by sponsoring individuals to work as equals alongside other contributors in the community. As of November 30, 2012, TDF has over 150 members and over 2.000 volunteers and contributors worldwide.

Some time ago I wrote a few articles about administrative installation of LibreOffice on Windows. I have had quite a lot of feedback. Later there has come a wiki page on The Document Foundation wiki: Its called Deployment and Migration. Nice but its still rather cumbersome to actually create a parameter string that works. I have created a MSIEXEC parameter generator in a very simple spreadsheet

Gonna knock you right on the head”

– John Lennon, Instant Karma

Last year before Christmas, I donated 220 Euro to the Document Foundation and I hope it helped as a tiny contribution to all the awesome things that happened with the Document Foundation and LibreOffice in this year, like getting volunteers to our events, providing food and drinks at Hackfests etc..

This year I will try to do this a bit different. I think donating to the Document Foundation is as important as ever: the developments of the last year show that we are approaching a vital decision point and we are accelerating while doing so. While the Document Foundation is fighting for freedom in software and productivity, its easy to forget that to profit from the benefits of this work even more basic freedom and rights — easily taken for granted — are required. Still many have to fight hard for those.

Witness.org is one organization that helps to make human rights and freedom universal by letting no violation pass unobserved. As I firmly believe freedom to be essential regardless of scale or context, I hereby pledge to donate 10 Euro to witness.org for every power of 2 in Euros donated to the Document Foundation in December 2012. That is:

• 1 Euro donated to the Document Foundation in December 2012 => I will donate 10 Euros to witness.org
• 2 Euros donated to the Document Foundation in December 2012 => I will donate 20 Euros to witness.org
• 4 Euros donated to the Document Foundation in December 2012 => I will donate 30 Euros to witness.org
• 8 Euros donated to the Document Foundation in December 2012 => I will donate 40 Euros to witness.org
• 16 Euros donated to the Document Foundation in December 2012 => I will donate 50 Euros to witness.org
• …

So please: Make me pay!

It is true that the support of the most used Microsoft Visio file formats in LibreOffice will celebrate 1 year next February. And I will gladly have a birthday talk with any of you who will be freezing in Brussels during the next FOSDEM 2013. Nonetheless, even though libvisio was in development for several months already, the Visio story was far from finished when we released that day. As I already mentioned in another blogpost concerning reverse-engineering of file formats, assessment of a conversion quality in this kind of cases is illusory before real users get to stress-test it with real-life documents.
Since the first release of our filter in LibreOffice 3.5.0, we were improving it thanks to bug reports from our users. It is a big thank you that I would like to say to all those that took the bother to submit reports in our bugzilla. Without you, guys, this filter would be only a moot exercise.
But wait... Do I write this blog now only to thank the people who contributed to the current quality of the filter? Yes to a big extent! Nevertheless, I know that the distinguished readers of this blog would like to have some news. And, yes, we have some news.
The libvisio library underwent heavy re-factoring as we started to understand more and more details about the underlying file-format.

1. A particular bug report about files imported as empty pages provided us with a document structure that we did never see before. This resulted in a more generic parser and unification on the way we parse master shapes and visible pages.
2. This re-factoring in its turn allowed us to extend our file-format coverage to all earlier binary Visio file-format versions. We now support all binary Visio documents starting from Visio 1 (released in 1992).
3. Extending the support to earlier file-format versions allowed us to better understand the development of the file-format, to find more information that we did not parse before, and improve the conversion quality for other binary versions too.
4. Another re-factoring came with our work to support the XML-based Visio file-formats, namely the "XML Drawing" also known as *.vdx; and the Microsoft Visio 2013 new file-format, known as *.vsdx.

So the news is that LibreOffice 4.0.0 will be able to open ALL Visio files starting from Visio 1 (release in 1992) until Microsoft Visio 2013 (released just some weeks ago).
And since the readers of this blog are more interested in pictures than in pointless words, here come some candies for your eyes:

File opened in Visio 1.0		The same file opened in LibreOffice 4.0.0 beta1

VSDX File opened in Microsoft Visio 2013		The same file opened in LibreOffice 4.0.0 beta1

So, download the LibreOffice 4.0.0 beta1 and help us testing the new big release. We are interested in bug reports that help us to improve our quality. And for those that would love to support us with donations, just click here:

“Linux does endless loops in six seconds”

– allegedly Linus Torvalds, 1995 at the First Dutch International Symposium on Linux

 

The  LibreOffice 4.0 Test Marathon will start on Friday, and this is a call to arms to join in on the fun!

Now, while a lot of people will join the test marathon just for the good cause, for others it might need some candy to persuade them. So here is some sweet sugar:

Bibisect 4.0

Dicke Bertha had her burn-in in the last days. She compiled 146 full builds of the LibreOffice master branch from May 2012 up till now.

It took her some 25 hours churning away with a load average >32 — interrupted only twice: Once because I left two other LibreOffice compiles lying around on tmpfs before starting this and then ran out of tmpfs buildspace — whoopsie!

A second time the build run was briefly interrupted because a cppunittest loved Bertha so much it went into an endless loop. And despite Linus’ claim above, Linux even 17 years later does not do endless loops in six seconds (also: where is my flying car?).

Just for fun, here are some ccache stats from the full run:

cache hit (direct)               1404831
cache hit (preprocessed)          144192
cache miss                        677524

I combined that with the builds from the older bibisect runs into one big respository. Thus in this 4.1 GB download you have:

• 262 full builds of LibreOffice (~16MB per install)
  
• covering a range of 26365 commits since August 2011
• thats one build every ~100 commits

Thus if you notice a regression that has been introduced at some point in the last 16 months, you can run a binary bisect and after testing 9 times in different versions of LibreOffice if the bug is there, you will have the regression pinned down to a range of ~100 commits, at which point it will be much easier to sack those responsible fix the bug quickly. So how can you help with this? In two ways:

• read HowToBibisect and start bibisecting
• if you dont want to do that, you can still help to find bugs that are regressions and can be tested well (on Ubuntu) and mark them with “bibisectrequest” in whiteboard status

Testcase management

Thanks to the work of Yifan, Sophie, Petr and many others the Document Foundation now has a MozTrap instance — and in this marathon we will find out how its workflow integrates with the rest of LibreOffices QA and development processes. So what is MozTrap? Their own documentation webpage explains lengthly and eloquently: ” MozTrap is a test case manager.”. So we could again run to wikipedia and read that short article about that, but that would not be much fun.

If you cut past all the buzzwords, you find that ‘test case management’ means, we have a web tool that:

• manages a set of things to test with some kind of software (in the simplest case this might be: “Does LibreOffice start?”)
• shows testers simple instructions to perform and report back if everything works as expected
• then allows QA people do all kinds of statistics and voodoo on this data

So, it is really simple and you are invited to join in! As a bonus you can make sure that developers know now, if something broke since the last release and since the release in February is still a bit off have more time to fix it until then!

Ubuntu packages for alpha/beta releases

On the LibreOffice prereleases PPA you find a packaged version of LibreOffice 4.0 beta1 for Ubuntu Raring that you can use in the test marathon. There is also a version of LibreOffice 4.0 alpha1 for Ubuntu 12.10 (Quantal) there, which should you also be able to use for discovering bugs.

I have a beta1 package for Ubuntu 12.10 ready too, but it is cheating quite a bit, because I disabled Python as the beta1 requires Python3.3 which is not directly available on Ubuntu 12.10.

Ubuntu stable release updates

Just for completeness: For Ubuntu 12.04 LTS a stable release update to the final (for the series) 3.5.7 has been uploaded (actually it has even been updated while waiting in the queue). For Ubuntu 12.10, version 3.6.4 is currently in probation in the LibreOffice PPA. Should no problems turn up, it will be proposed become a update soon.

In the previous blog post there was a Christmas postcard created by the help of LibreLogo, the simplified programming interface of LibreOffice Writer for graphic design. Now I will show more DTP-related examples: typesetting chessboards with high print quality in LibreOffice 4.0, and a special Christmas ball. (It will be possible to test these examples in the next beta version of LibreOffice 4.0 under Windows, too).
Typesetting chessboards using special chess fonts. This example (see first picture and PDF, ODT with source code) uses a special TrueType font, Chess Merida, filled with characters of the same size (partially combined with black hatched background). The LibreLogo program puts every characters into different text shapes using the LABEL command. The text shapes are grouped by the special PICTURE command of LibreLogo, so the result will be a single grouped shape (use the ungroup icon of the Drawing Object Properties toolbar to remove this grouping). The program asks for the point size of the figures and the positions of the chess figures in chess notation. Decoding of the standard notation is solved by only a few program lines, thanks to the compact Python data structures of LibreLogo.

Typesetting chessboards only with standard Unicode characters, by notation or manual positioning. This chessboard drawing program depends only from standard Unicode chess characters (see second picture, and PDF, ODT with source code). To get real white figures from the transparent characters of the Unicode white chess figures the program draws two invisible square shapes for a figure, and put a black chess figure character in white into the background square, and the white chess character into the foreground square by the TEXT commands (see picture). The two squares are grouped by PICTURE. Without the given notation, the program draws a full chessboard, and it’s possible to move the figures to the requested positions manually (frames of the invisible squares allow precise positioning).
Christmas song on a Christmas ball. These beautiful Christmas balls are composed of 5-5 paper stripes. The stripes contain plain and upside-down lines of a Christmas song (English version with instructions: PDF, ODT with source code). The Christmas balls (and the Christmas stars of the previous post) were very popular on the Christmas Fair yesterday, thanks for the nice work of Veronika Bognár and Éva Bozsó.

In LibreOffice and Apache OpenOffice, tables of contents (ToCs) are grouped with index and bibliographical entries under Insert -> Indexes and Tables. All of them are created with a similar procedure, but the details vary for each case. Tables of contents in particular allow much more options for formatting than are available in MS Office.

The basic steps are easy:

1. 1. Mark in the text the entries for the table of contents.
2. 2. Position the table of contents where you want it.
3. 3. Format the ToC (if necessary)

The details, though — those take a bit more explaining. If you want, you can settle for the default look and structure, and create a TOC in seconds. But, if you take the time and effort, you can control almost all aspects of the TOC.

CREATING ENTRIES

If your document uses paragraph styles — specifically, heading styles — most of the time you probably have no need to create entries for the TOC. The paragraph styles Heading 1-10 are used by default when the TOC is created.

In most cases, you will want to use only three levels of headings, so that the TOC is easy to read and you can reduce about the challenge of formatting each level differently.

Later, as you format, you will have the option of supplementing or even replacing the Heading 1-10 styles with others with a limited number of other styles, such as List, Text Body, or Default, for a Heading Style. You can also add any style you have created. But, at this point, you only need to make a note of which ones you want to include.

If you haven’t used paragraph styles, you must create a manual entry. To create a manual entry, highlight the words that you want to appear in the TOC, then go to Insert -> Indexes and Tables -> Entry. In the Index field, select Table of Contents. By default, the entry will be the words you highlighted, but you can also add a custom entry in the Entry field. Choose the level for the entry, then click the Insert button.

creating-manual-entries

The selected words are highlighted in dark gray. Alternatively, if you created a custom entry, a thin gray field is added to the text.

POSITIONING AND FORMATING THE TOC

Move your cursor to the place where you want the TOC. Usually, of course, that will be near the front of the document. Then select Insert -> Indexes and Tables -> Index and Tables. Do not click the OK button until you are satisfied with the format.

Even if you don’t want any custom formatting, select from the Index/Table tab the Type Table of Contents. You will also save yourself some trouble if you check the Protected against manual formatting box.

inserting-index-table-index-<wbr>table</wbr>

This is also the place when you add additional paragraph styles to the TOC. On the Index/Table tab , select Create from -> Additional Styles, and click the button on the same line. The Assign Style window opens, and from there you can highlight a style, then use the arrows to choose which level of the TOC it will appear on.

[assigning-styles.png]One especially convenient option is to use additional paragraphs to add either the Caption styles or similiar custom styles for figures or charts to your TOC. Unselect Create from -> Outlines, and the TOC becomes a custom table.

Moving to the Entries tab, you can adust the format for each line of the TOC. Begin by selecting the first Level in the lefthand pane. At the top middle is the Structure field, which consists of individual building blocks that make up the structure of each entry: Chapter number, Entry text, Tab stop, Page number and Hyperlink (which lets you click on a TOC entry to jump to the entry in the text).

entries-tab

Each of these building blocks can be given a particular Character Style, and some can be formatted in other ways — for example, you can choose a fill character and position for the tab stop. You can also add characters, including spaces, in the structure field, allowing you to do such things as adding dingbats at the start of each entry

You can also delete a building block from the Structure field, or add one by clicking on the list of building blocks below the field. You can even delete all the blocks and design the entry structure from scratch, doing such things as placing the page number before the entry text, a structure that eliminates the need for a tab stop with leader dots because the page and entry are closer together, and is generally considered more elegant by typographers. This is an option lacking in most word processors, including MS Word.

Once you have formatted the first level entries to your satisfaction, you can either give each level you use its own format or else click the All button to apply your custom design to all levels.

The remaining tabs tabs are largely self-explanatory, but of limited use. The Background tab gives you the option of creating a color background for the TOC — an option that you should use sparingly, if at all. On the Styles Tab, you can change the paragraph styles used by the TOC, although the only reason I can see for doing so is that you already have a style you want to use and want to avoid the drudgery of reproducing it faithfully. On the Columns tab, you can set the TOC to display in multiple columns, an option that can save space, but might require some reformatting of the styles and the entry structure.

As you work, the pane on the left offers a preview of the design, although you might need to squint to make out some of the details. When you have made all the changes you are going to, click the OK button, and the TOC displays in the gray background that indicates a field in LibreOffice.

toc1

toc2

toc3

LATER ALTERATIONS

After insertion, you can reformat the entries in the TOC by editing the Contents paragraph styles.

For any other alterations, right-click anywhere in the TOC, and select Edit Index/Table to return to the Insert Table/Index dialog. Should you add headings or other entries, you can also update the TOC from from the right-click menu. Still another right-click menu item deletes the entire TOC.

right-click-menu

Probably, most users will be satisfied with only minor changes from LibreOffice’s default TOC. Still, the options are there — maybe slightly arcane, but offering more when you need it.

 BY BRUCE BYFIELD

Worldlabel.com is your best source for blank labels for laser and inkjet printing

Self-Publishing using LibreOffice Writer:How to use free software to write, design, and create PDFs for print-on-demand books, by Jean Hollis Weber. You don’t need expensive software to write, design, and create PDFs for self-published, print-on-demand books. LibreOffice Writer is free, easy to use, and has powerful page layout features suitable for producing books such as [...]

Linz (Austria) – Reisisoft releases LibreOffice Server Install GUI 3.0

LibreOffice Server Install GUI v3.0 is an exciting release. It has a whole set of new features, some of them have been inspired by Harald Köster, who presented a list of 15! Items; HK means “inspired by Harald Köster”. So, let’s skip the quotations of people who made this possible and just list them up.

• Translators:
  • Da – Leif Lodahl
  • Es – Adolfo Jayme Barrientos
  • Fr – Sophie Gautier
  • He – Yaron Shahrabani
  • Pt – Carlos Moreira
  • Sl – Martin Srebotnjak

Without the work of you the software would not be that great

So, now I am going to reveal the new features. If something is not working as excepted, feel free to mail me, leave a comment or (preferred) submitting a bug on GitHub:

• With this version, downloading the latest master is possible again (There has been a change in the link on the LibreOffice side)
• Added a header to the built-in downloader. Hopefully I am going to get some statistics from the LibreOffice side….
• Version of the GUI can be determined now ( HK#4 )
• Hopefully it is now clear, what “Should a subfolder be created automatically” should mean… (HK#8)
• Shortcuts pointing to the soffice.exe of the last parallel installation can be created ( HK#10)
• Manager added ( HK #15 )
  • Parallel installations can be deleted with the manager ( HK#13)

I really hope that this program will help you to enjoy testing the 4.1 master and the 4.0 beta1 of LibreOffice.

Yours sincerely,

Florian Reisinger (Programmer and coordinator)

Download

Screenshot:

Tagged: C#, GUI, LibreOffice, open source, QA, qa team, Reisisoft, Server Installation, Server Installation GUI, software, stable version, technology, UI, Version 3, Windows

Self-Publishing using LibreOffice Writer:
How to use free software to write, design, and create PDFs for print-on-demand books

You don’t need expensive software to write, design, and create PDFs for self-published, print-on-demand books. LibreOffice Writer is free, easy to use, and has powerful page layout features suitable for producing books such as novels and short story or poetry collections. This book explains how to write, edit, and design a book; lay out the pages using styles and templates; build a table of contents and index; include pictures, graphics, and special effects; and create a PDF for submission to POD services.

Printed copies are available from Lulu.com.

You can download and buy a PDF of the book from this page. This book has no DRM; you may copy it onto as many of your devices as you wish. If you buy a printed copy, you are welcome to a free copy of the PDF.

On the occasion of the large scale usability test of the LibreOffice Writer icons, this article explains how subjective and objective measurements can help to understand the quality of an icon-term relationship.

A picture says more than 1000 words. On top of that, icons have a fixed size, no matter which language the software runs in. This is part of the reason why they are widely used to represent functions or actions for example in menu bars.

In the last weeks we have asked users to help us to assess the quality of the icons we use in the LibreOffice Writer menu bar. We used the Open Usability Platform UserWeave.net to conduct the tests. This platform presents a single term and a variety of icons. The task for the participant is to quickly select the best fitting icon for that term.

Combining objective and subjective measurements

The platform measures how fast an icon was chosen by the user. So it provides two distinct indicators:

1. The subjective choice of an icon
2. The objective time it takes to choose the icon

The platform calculates an overall score for the icon-term relationship, that ranges between 10 for a perfect icons to a theoretical minimum of 0, when an icon was never associated with a term.

Implicitly some more indicators can be derived, like the number of missing assignments and the ratio of icons that get assigned to multiple terms. You can find values for each of them in the results.

In the example above you can see that the icon for ‘Auto Spellcheck’ was chosen quickly, but often got mixed up with the icon for ‘Spelling and Grammar’, giving a poor overall score of 6.0.

You have to understand that this does not necessarily mean that the icon is unsuited. It might also be that the term it is supposed to be associated with is problematic. So the test really measures the strength of the relation between icon and term.

In the LibreOffice tests for example we use the tooltips that appear, when you hoover the mouse over the icons as terms. So we test the strength of the relation between the icon and the actually used term to explain the icon to the user.

Evaluate the quality of your existing icons

There are two possible ways to test icons. In the first one you present a set of icons and the corresponding tool tip for each of the icons. So you have one target icon for every term.

As a result you would hope for a perfect 10.0 for all your icon-term relationships. But in reality you get a feeling about the differing quality of the icons you provide. For this way of testing you can say as a rule of thumb that good icons score well above 9.0.

Find the best icon for your term

In a second use-case you try to find the best icon for a certain term. Therefore you present different icon solutions for this term. With this way of testing you have to be aware that icons that are similar, e.g. because they use the same metaphor or only differ in colour, will most likely not differ much in their result.

With the LibreOffice study we have taken the first step. We now know how good (some of) the different icon-term relationships in LibreOffice are, and we will publish the results in the next weeks. We will also take the next step and find better metaphors for the not-so-good-working icons using the second approach.

Join the discussion!

You are invited to take a look at the raw results of the studies in the LibreOffice project on UserWeave.net and discuss with us in the comments.

I am on the high speed train between Bologna and Milano and I have just assisted to a product demonstration of Windows 8, from a Microsoft promoter.

Apart from the considerations about the size of the budget for such a granular promotion, is it a sign of weak sales?

About

Due to popular request, I’m putting up a polished version of the backup script that we’ve been using over the years at Lanedo to backup our systems remotely. This script uses a special feature of rsync(1) v2.6.4 for the creation of backups which share storage space with previous backups by hard-linking files.
The various options needed for rsync and ssh to minimize transfer bandwidth over the Internet, time-stamping for the backups and handling of several rsync oddities warranted encapsulation of the logic into a dedicated script.

Resources

The GitHub release tag is here: backups-0.0.1
Script URL for direct downloads: sayebackup.sh

Example

This example shows creation of two consecutive backups and displays the sizes.

$ sayebackup.sh -i ~/.ssh/id_examplecom user@example.com:mydir # create backup as bak-.../mydir
$ sayebackup.sh -i ~/.ssh/id_examplecom user@example.com:mydir # create second bak-2012...-snap/
$ ls -l         # show all the backups that have been created
drwxrwxr-x 3 user group 4096 Dez  1 03:16 bak-2012-12-01-03:16:50-snap
drwxrwxr-x 3 user group 4096 Dez  1 03:17 bak-2012-12-01-03:17:12-snap
lrwxrwxrwx 1 user group   28 Dez  1 03:17 bak-current -> bak-2012-12-01-03:17:12-snap
$ du -sh bak-*  # the second backup is smaller due to hard links
4.1M    bak-2012-12-01-03:16:50-snap
128K    bak-2012-12-01-03:17:12-snap
4.0K    bak-current

Usage

Usage: sayebackup.sh [options] sources...
OPTIONS:
  --inc         make reverse incremental backup
  --dry         run and show rsync with --dry-run option
  --help        print usage summary
  -C <dir>      backup directory (default: '.')
  -E <exclfile> file with rsync exclude list
  -l <account>  ssh user name to use (see ssh(1) -l)
  -i <identity> ssh identity key file to use (see ssh(1) -i)
  -P <sshport>  ssh port to use on the remote system
  -L <linkdest> hardlink dest files from <linkdest>/
  -o <prefix>   output directory name (default: 'bak')
  -q, --quiet   suppress progress information
  -c            perform checksum based file content comparisons
  --one-file-system
  -x            disable crossing of filesystem boundaries
  --version     script and rsync versions
DESCRIPTION:
  This script creates full or reverse incremental backups using the
  rsync(1) command. Backup directory names contain the date and time
  of each backup run to allow sorting and selective pruning.
  At the end of each successful backup run, a symlink '*-current' is
  updated to always point at the latest backup. To reduce remote file
  transfers, the '-L' option can be used (possibly multiple times) to
  specify existing local file trees from which files will be
  hard-linked into the backup.
 Full Backups:
  Upon each invocation, a new backup directory is created that contains
  all files of the source system. Hard links are created to files of
  previous backups where possible, so extra storage space is only required
  for contents that changed between backups.
 Incremental Backups:
  In incremental mode, the most recent backup is always a full backup,
  while the previous full backup is degraded to a reverse incremental
  backup, which only contains differences between the current and the
  last backup.
 RSYNC_BINARY Environment variable used to override the rsync binary path.

See Also

Testbit Tools – Version 11.09 Release

Drawing and programming are fun, and it’s often useful to combine them. The aim of LibreLogo, the new experimental LibreOffice module + Writer toolbar to give an easy, Logo-like, Python based programming environment to the excellent vector graphics of LibreOffice. Here (and in my next posts) I will show examples of LibreLogo usage in school/office environment.

Fine graphics with printing quality. PDF and SVG exports of the OpenDocument format support printing and DTP programs: click on the first picture for the SVG export (Warning! It may halt Firefox 15).

Precise drawing. Turtle moving commands of LibreLogo supports printing measurements, and combining with manual handling of drawing objects in LibreOffice, it can save expensive decorative paper, as for these 3D Christmas stars (made for the local School Christmas fair). PDF, PDF2 (with spirals), ODT (with LibreLogo source).

Fancy, unique documents. This Christmas background created by random snowflakes: Unicode character “❄” (U+2744) with random sizes, positions and angles. The result of the LibreLogo program has been modified (overlapping of snowflakes, title) manually. PDF, ODT (with LibreLogo source).

More information: my LibreOffice conference presentation and a blog post also about LibreLogo from Cor Nouws.

Hi!

I hope you are interested in how the development of LibreOffice Server Install works…

So, before we begin, I want to thank all of you, who proposed some features. Due to my skills I am only able to react on events inside the application. So, I am currently not able to do something like “on installation finished”…

Whatever, I got a great input, which I thought at first is impossible, but currently I think it is possible: Certainly a “manager” is a needed and now also possible wish for parallel installation of LibreOffice…. I hope that I am able to program this . So, do you have questions or ways to improve the program. I am open for input

By the way, this is my first developer statement, so it is quite short. Please comment questions and I am going to answer it in the next post of this series

Hope to herar from you soon

What was SDF and why did we kill it? LibreOffice source code contains translatable content in various file formats. It was desirable to present translatable content to translators in a single file format, so they did not have learn how to edit different file formats. Therefore back in the OpenOffice.org era SDF file format was invented. It was a simple tab separated text file. Localization tools extacted translatable content into SDF file format, and localized SDF files were merged back to source code during the build.

One cannot imagine simpler file format, than a tab separated text. When I translated OpenOffice.org into Hungarian, I built a tool set around it, and translated it happily. But not every translator was a programmer, or capable of using scripts. Translators demanded PO file format, which is a quasi-standard file format for localization in the open source world. Translate Toolkit and Pootle became part of the localization process, en-US SDF file was converted to POT (PO Template) files, and translated PO files were converted back to SDF manually.

When LibreOffice project started, I wanted to amend the process for two reasons.

1. Huge SDF files blew the git repository. Git does not work well with large, frequently updated text files.
2. Manual conversion from PO to SDF was a tedious job.

Therefore I implemented to store PO files in git, and convert them to SDF automatically during the build. In LibreOffice 3.4 we used po2oo from Translate Toolkit for the back-conversion. In LibreOffice 3.5 po2oo was replaced by po2lo written by Miklos Vajna, which was 30x as fast as po2oo.

But why convert translations from one format to another, why not use PO files directly? This is what was developed in feature/killsdf branch in the past few months. Most of the programming work was done by a young developer, Tamas Zolnai, who was a trainee at Novell Hungary in the summer, and now he is a fellow of FSF.hu Foundation (FSF.hu sponsors his work on LibreOffice). Now localization tools extract translatable content from the source code directly to PO files, and they read PO files directly during the build. SDF files are not generated any more. At the same time localization tools were refactored. Perl scripts have gone. All tools are in C++ now. Further cleanup and optimizations are on the way on master branch. I fixed the last remaining issues after the merge in Munich Hackfest 2012.

When I first came here, this was all swamp.

Everyone said I was daft to build a castle on a swamp, but I built in all the same, just to show them.

It sank into the swamp.

So I built a second one. That sank into the swamp.

So I built a third. That burned down, fell over, then sank into the swamp.

But the fourth one stayed up. And that’s what you’re going to get, Lad, the strongest castle in all of England.

– King of Swamp Castle, Monty Python and the Holy Grail

It has been a long time without communicating with the distinguished readership of my blog. There was a hard decision to be made between producing code and producing literature. The code won until now. But now I have found a time to lift my head up from the coding, so the literature is back.

Many of you might be wondering what happened since my post about the text support in CorelDraw files from last June. Things are going pretty well. Since the CorelDraw import filter was released with LibreOffice 3.6, the users started to use the feature and report bugs. We were working on fixing them and improving the libcdr's quality.

Quick overview of reverse-engineering process

From my discussions with our users and developers on-line and during some of the conferences that I attended, I realize that there is a slight misunderstanding in the large public about how the reverse-engineering works. So, here are some thoughts that may help understand it a bit more:

At the beginning of the process, there is a file-format. We don't know anything about its internal structure. There is no documentation whatsoever about it. One tries to generate a file in this file-format and examine it in hexadecimal viewer. Next, one tries to operate some little change in the document and examine what changed in the file itself. Eventually after many iterations, one might find regularities and some structure that helps to divide the file into several sections or blocks of more manageable size. It is essential in this phase that one can encode this information into some kind of introspection tool, since a plain hexadecimal viewer is not a very productive tool in the long run. We use for introspection of documents Valek Filippov's oletoy, a python tool that stores our knowledge about the structure of different file-formats.

Once there is enough information about how to parse the document structure, the next target becomes to get some visible results. In order to save time and get visible results in a short time, all libraries such as libcdr or libvisio, use the libwpg's interface. Reusing this interface means a considerable saving of time, since there are already working generators of ODG and SVG from the callbacks of this interface. Having visible results soon in the development/reverse-engineering cycle also allows visually asses the import results and correct them if necessary. Eventually, one can realize the absence of necessary information and try to go back to reverse-engineering to find it.

Users' feedback is essential

The support of reverse-engineered file-formats is a constant work-in-progress. A subtle dance between implementation and information digging. In this process, the user feedback is an essential element. The theories about the meaning of some information inside file hold only until a file comes to falsify them. Even a complex file generated by a developer is easily beaten by real life documents. And each file that shows a "weird" bug is advancing the understanding of the file-format. Let us look at this example:

After the release of LibreOffice 3.6.1, we got a not so good assessment of the quality of the CorelDraw import filter in the heise.de' c't review. Those of you that understand German can delight in the nuanced evaluation:

Ein neuer Import-Filter in Draw öffnet jetzt auch CorelDraw-Dateien, was uns im Test allerdings nur mit sehr einfachen Zeichnungen fehlerfrei gelang. In dieser Form ist er schlicht unbrauchbar.

Which can be mildly translated into English (given the understatements so common in en-GB):

A new import filter in Draw opens now also CorelDraw files, which we managed to do without errors only with very simple drawings. In this form, it is rather unusable.

Since we are really concerned about the quality of our software, we are thankful for any bug report whether it is brought to us in a friendly or other manner. This specific bug report helped us to understand how are stored in newer CorelDraw files chains of matrix transforms. And since a picture speaks louder then thousand words, compare the document c't was refering to opened in LibreOffice 3.6.2 and then in LibreOffice 3.6.3, after we fixed the position bits.

File opened in Libreoffice 3.6.2		The same file opened in LibreOffice 3.6.3

So feel encouraged to submit bugs against the CorelDraw import filter, or — even better — send us patches for your favorite itch.