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Monthly Archives: April 2012

LibreOffice Hamburg HackFest 2012

After catching up a bit with the sleep deficit from the past three days, let me share a few impressions from the spring 2012 Hamburg HackFest. An amazing number of 30+ people gathered over the weekend at the Hamburg Attraktor, socializing, chatting, and working on all kinds of stuff, like

iOS UNO bridges, Calc unit tests, CSV import, Writer border enhancements, gbuild system, pdf export watermarking, UI paper cut fixing, keyboard shortcuts, startup performance, icon themes, UI mockups, adding comments for l10n strings, rtf filter fixes, svg import, gtk3 backend, drawing layer, help content, Unhosted connector, QA processes, bibisect, gerrit, Impress wide screen support, Impress toolpanel configuration, win32 cross-compiling, and chart bugfixing.

Let me also take the opportunity to thank our sponsors and supporters, without whom this event would not have been possible. In no particular order, Attraktor e.V. for hosting us, The Document Foundation donors for providing the funds for travel bursaries, Lanedo and nerdshirt for drinks and tshirts, Italo and Christina for cooking wonderful pasta, my co-organizers Eike and Björn for doing lots of legwork & organization, including provisions for couch surfing – and of course all attendants for sharing their weekend and merry mood with us!

full room at attraktor

Saturday morning, LibreOffice hackers at work

pair programming

Saturday night pair-programming

In total, we got more than 80 commits originating from Hackfest coding to date, I’ll update this post when more pending stuff arrives. Other posts about the hackfest here (updated):

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LibreOffice keeps adding more language support

Since The Document Foundation got formally established as a German charitable foundation earlier this year, we were pondering a number of activities to sponsor, that would be in line with our statutory and regulatory obligations. As our statutes advise TDF to further the use of Free Software, among other things, by introducing children and adolescents to FLOSS and LibreOffice in particular, one rather obvious problem with that is a certain language barrier (there’s considerable use of slang in youth culture, alongside a lack of older vocabulary sometimes used in UI), plus an issue with comprehending longer, more complex sentences (which pop up in e.g. tooltip help, or LibreOffice documentation texts).

The corpus of available research around these issues is still rather incomplete (the field is new, and somewhat controversial), but we see a very practical need here. That’s why I plan, possibly already with LibreOffice 3.6, to support a fourth German sub-locale (besides German, German/Swiss, German/Austria) – German/Kiez. That would include initial UI translation, dictionary, and help. A hopefully illustrating example, on why this is useful (my German-speaking audience will notice how different from standard German this dialect is) here:

I will seek to get EU funding for that, if at all possible, especially since via that project, TDF can hopefully also contribute to this new field of linguistic research – e.g. by supporting case studies on how more easily pupils take up UI that’s presented in “their” language, compared to standardized German. Which, in closing, really is one of the many strong selling points for FLOSS – the Freedom to tweak, and translate, to your local user’s needs, whatever you think they are.

We will work on this, and many other things by the way, at the upcoming Hamburg Hackfest on April 14th/15th.