ApacheCon EU 2014

The sun never sets on the OpenOffice localization community. Volunteers from all continents help translating OpenOffice, its documentation and its website into dozens of languages.
We'll discuss the localization of OpenOffice both as a community story and a technical story. The community was restarted from scratch at Apache and welcomes new volunteers on a regular basis. Tools were developed and extended at Apache to help translators, with benefits for all Apache projects.

Developing code within the huge, and sometimes daunting, Apache OpenOffice code can sometimes be very difficult, specially if you only want to add a very specific piece of code that few people want.
As part of an ongoing effort to improve the Operation Research capabilities within Apache OpenOffice, I will try to document the different parts of an Apache OpenOffice extension.

Apache OpenOffice supports a framework called UNO, Universal Network Objects, for developing extensions. Extensions can be written in C/C++, Python or Java.

The UNO documentation is somewhat sparse and most of the developers end up taking some existing extension and use it as a template to write their own. This introductory talk will consider the characteristics behind UNO and will provide the basics to write such applications.

A well-known XKCD comic parodies the industry's solution to standards proliferation: a new, "universal" standard to replace all its predecessors. We all know where that leads. In this talk, I'll discuss an alternate approach that deals with the mess without creating more of it, in the context of word processing.

We want software that can read and write multiple formats, which means creating lots of filters. These should operate in a non-destructive manner, allowing modifications without losing information during conversion. I've been working on this for the past couple of years as part of UX Write - supporting HTML, Microsoft Word, LaTeX, and soon, ODF. I'd like to share this work with the community.

Let's pool our efforts and start an open source project to make these and new filters available in a way that can be used by everybody, for any purpose, and on any platform.