What Arabic, Turtle and Google have to do with each other

Time for my notes from the LibreOffice conference 2012, in Berlin recently.

The week was well organised by our friends of the German LibreOffice community. The location was at a ministry, close to station Berlin Hauptbahnhof.
And the weather was excellent, so the 10 minutes walk from the hotel to the conference venue could be done in a T-shirt. Mid October :-) So, what items do I really want to mention?

First there was the positive key-note by Jeremy Allison from Google. Included in his presentation were two slides that make extremely clear what the value of open source is for Google ..

.. and for others too!

 
A beautiful project is the localization of LibreOffice in Arabic. Because of the language structure, that needs some more attention then just doing the translating. The support for languages with what 'we' call complex text layout (CTL-support – see Tools > Options > Language settings ..) has to be improved on various points.
Various speakers and developers from Saudi Arabia were present to give explanation about the project and their work. Also about the way they contact schools and universities and about their future plans with LibreOffice. A clear and inspiring contribution!

Quite intriguing I experienced the presentation of LibreLogo ( … turtle vector graphics for everybody) by László Németh, whom we know from among others spell-checking tools. LibreLogo is fine combination of drawing, and learning to work with teh computer, commands and documents. And this all bundled in an extension that you can install easily in LibreOffice.
Give it a try - not only fun, but interesting too if you feel that education and marketing are important! And when you run in a problem trying it: no worry because for sure I'll write about it again shortly.

Further I've seen interesting topics as continues improvements and developments with Calc, work for iMac and Android, collaborative editing via the internet, building and lots of tools for developers, and QA, EasyHacks. Stopping at this point, I'm sure I forget many that deserve credit and attention too.

But we did have a pleasant event, cosy as we say, with people from all corners of the earth and topics of interest for all. So everyone that has a bit more with LibreOffice then just using: ... see you in 2013 :-)
And before that, don't miss this one!

Reacties

  1. SvdA4 november 2012 om 05:46

    Hi Cor,

    I'm looking forward to seeing videos of some of these talks.

    When will they be available online?

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