LibreOffice

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/45228666

A new episode of LibreOffice/Collabora drama.

After years of discussions marked by accusations and finger-pointing, during which no real progress was made in resolving the legal issues, the authorities requested an audit whose results confirmed that resolving the issues was absolutely necessary to avoid losing non-profit status, with unforeseen consequences.

Unfortunately, the presence of company representatives on the Board of Directors (BoD), who were elected by employees of those same companies that are also TDF members, caused further delays to finding a solution, which has not yet been reached.

Fortunately, the introduction of restrictive measures – such as the decision to forfeit TDF membership status of Collabora employees – and the freezing of tenders, alongside the introduction of a robust procurement policy for development, has resulted in a positive outcome for the third audit. At least, the BoD has demonstrated a willingness to break the deadlock that has persisted since 2022.

cross-posted from: https://lemmus.org/post/20406309

Source: Mastodon.

Late to the party here as usual, but in addition to word spacing, LibreOffice Writer now also has letter spacing and glyph scaling. This may leave many of you scratching your heads, but for me at least this is incredibly important.

These are features that are present in Adobe InDesign (perhaps they are also in LaTeX, but I'm not as familiar with it), and are very nice to have for someone like me who is very picky about text layout, especially for books. I'm not fond of proprietary software, and I'm also not fond of Adobe, and so now that LO has these features, I am hopeful that I can now leave InDesign behind forever.

[For those of you who use Scribus: Scribus may already have these features, but honestly, and not to in any way denigrate the work the devs have done on it over the years, I personally have never had terribly good luck with it; maybe it's just me.]

Anyway, this is a real win for me, and will hopefully be for others as well who are trying to free themselves from crappy American proprietary late-capitalist enshittified software. 🙂