FOSDEM: Android app to control LibreOffice presentations

Developer version of the "Impress Android Remote"
Source: Michael Meeks Together with version 4.0 of LibreOffice, due out in the next few days, the developers plan to release the "Impress Android Remote" app that allows the office suite's presentation features to be controlled from Android smartphones. The developers plan to release the app at the same time as, or shortly after, LibreOffice 4.0; communication with the presentation rendering system will be handled via Bluetooth. This is some of the information that LibreOffice developer Michael Meeks offered in his presentation at this year's "Free and Open source Software Developers European Meeting" (FOSDEM 2013), which ended on Sunday.

Meeks also mentioned various other new features in version 4.0, including improved graphics scaling and better support for languages where the writing direction is from right to left. In future, the drop-down menus for paragraph templates will show the formatting that they will produce. Version 4.0 will also support Firefox themes (formerly Personas) to customise the look of the office suite.

Michael Meeks presenting the new features of LibreOffice 4.0 Under Ubuntu's Unity desktop, LibreOffice 4.0 will be able to display its window menu in the desktop interface's top bar. Further details can be found in the slides of a similar presentation�  that Meeks gave a few days ago at linux.conf.au (LCA). Leading up to the conference, the organisers of FOSDEM also published an interview with Meeks on their web pages.

As in many previous presentations, Meeks specifically asked all German language speakers to help translate the German-language comments in the source code of LibreOffice, saying that many developers can't do anything with the German comments, and that this makes it more difficult for them to understand the source code.

(djwm)