I recently dived into the SmartArt support of LibreOffice, which is the component responsible for displaying complex diagrams from PPTX. I focus on the case when only the document model and the layout constraints are given, not a pre-rendered result.

First, thanks to our partner SUSE for working with Collabora to make this possible.

When I began contributing code to LibreOffice, I faced some issues because I didn't know several facts that the other active contributors knew. This blog post summarizes some of those facts, and I hope it will be useful for other new contributors!

On the 1st and 2nd of April, KDAB will once again be sponsors at this fast-growing Qt event in Italy: QtDay 2019.

The biggest Qt event in the region, now in its 8th year, contrary to what its name suggests, QtDay 2019 boasts a full two days of technical talks and workshops, each day with two to three tracks.

Once a year, the LibreOffice Community gathers for a global community event: the LibreOffice Conference, or LibOCon. After a series of successful events – Paris, October 2011; Berlin, October 2012; Milan, September 2013; Bern, September 2014; Aarhus, September 2015; Brno, September 2016; Rome, October 2017; and Tirana, September 2018 – the venue for 2019 is Almeria, Spain.

To ease the organization, TDF Board of Directors has decided to open the call for location for 2020, to give the 2020 event organizers the opportunity of attending the conference in Almeria in September 2019. The LibreOffice Conference takes place between September and November, with a preference for September.

The Document Foundation invites all members and contributors to submit talks, lectures and workshops for this year’s conference in Almeria (Spain). The event is scheduled for early September, from Wednesday 11 to Friday 13. Whether you are a seasoned presenter or have never spoken in public before, if you have something interesting to share about LibreOffice or the Document Liberation Project, we want to hear from you!

It’s time to register to the GSOC programm for the different LibreOffice tasks.

As the notebookbar is available for the regular users I hope to get students how are interested in Improve the LibreOffice notebookbar.

Call for Papers for LibreOffice Asia Conference 2019, held at the Nihonbashi Tokyo Tower (at Cyboze, Inc., Tokyo Office) on May 25th (Sat) and 26th (Sun), is now open.

LibreOffice Asia Conference will be the first event gathering LibreOffice users, advocates and contributors (not only development, but also localization, PR/marketing, documentation, quality assurance, … etc.) from different countries in Asia, to exchange and share experiences and knowledge.

During the conference, we will discuss LibreOffice related business such as supporting and training, migrating to LibreOffice and the ODF true standard format, developing, and any other community activity in Asia. In addition, we will have guests from the core team at The Document Foundation, which is a charitable foundation and the home of LibreOffice.

Design ideas: My focus was on technical content. The basic layout is dictated by the Fedora Docs project but a bit of design work on the welcome page and the addition of any IoT specific logos would be nice. Also, there are a few screenshots that could use a pointer or box to highlight the area described in the text.

Verify links for downloads and upgrades: The working group now has regular updated images available in a CDN and the next downloadable image is in progress along with the final version of the landing page for downloads. Once the update and release schedule process is smoothed out, the documentation needs to be verified.

Get ready for F30: When Fedora 30 is ready, the site will need some Release Notes and the User Guide will need some updates to cover new features. You can submit suggestions as iot-docs issues in pagure.

The cynical among us might be tempted to think that an announcement from the GNOME project about the removal of a feature — a relatively unused feature at that — would be an unremarkable event. In practice, though, Debarshi Ray's announcement that the GNOME Online Accounts (GOA) subsystem would no longer support the "documents" access point touched off a lengthy discussion within the project itself. The resulting discussion revealed a few significant problems with GOA and, indeed, with the concept of online-account management in any sort of open-source umbrella project like GNOME.

GOA is meant to provide a single sign on system integrating GNOME applications with web-based services. Any application that, for example, wants to access files stored in Google Drive would ordinarily have to ask the user for credentials and log into Drive separately, which gets tiresome for users running a lot of applications. By routing this access through GOA, the GNOME developers hope to simplify the process of using those services. GOA includes a number of different "integration points" for different types of services, including files, email, calendars, contacts, and more.

The "documents" point was used by the Documents application, which is meant to help users manage their documents. It has suffered, though, from a lack of both users and developers and lacks basic features; Michael Catanzaro described it as "basically just 'bad evince'". That certainly restricts its prospects for success; as Ray put it: "it doesn't stand any chance of adoption unless it can open files like /usr/bin/evince". Documents has duly been removed from the core set of GNOME applications. Since it was the only core application using the "documents" integration point, that point is now being removed.

For fans of Devuan, the downstream of Debian focused on "init system independence" or just "Debian without systemd", their first-ever conference is happening in just over one month.