 Can you see something? Yeah, it's okay, Marina. Okay, great. It's a weird day with things exploding. So I'm just waiting for the next one. Everything is fine. Great. So welcome everybody. And today I want to try to share what is going on on the LibreOffice side about the Italian language support and in particular the current status and what we are planning to do. So about me, I am Marina Altini. I'm one of the founders of the LibreItalia Association that is the Italian association of the... Italian member of the LibreOffice community. So LibreItalia, I know it's quite easy to understand. Then I am a TDF member and I'm currently also the chairperson of the membership committee. On the open to the side, I am currently in the board and obviously I'm an open source addicted. So I'm really trying to learn a lot. I'm curious and I'm really happy to attend this event also for learning something new from all the other presenters. And apart from the open source activities, in my daily life, I'm a maintenance release coordination engineer at SUSE. And you will learn more about this part in another talk that I will give during the conference, talking about maintenance. But as I said before today, I want to talk about a topic that is really important to me, that is the localization of LibreOffice and the support that the users can have in Italian while using LibreOffice. So the agenda for today is indeed a status update of what we are facing now, which are the issues, what we are trying to do for solving the issues and in general the next step that we are planning and that we are trying to follow one by one. So the status, the status is definitely not a nice one because if you look at LibreOffice at the source code, you will unfortunately see that the last update for the language tools, so the dictionary, the Tessaros and so all the other tools that in general are supporting someone while using LibreOffice were updated last time in 2010. So I think that after 10 years, it's definitely time to take action, to do something for improving the current status. Why this status is this one? Because definitely at the OpenOffice time in Italy there was the PLIA, that was the association that was mainly taking care of all the activities around localization at that time OpenOffice. In the reality it was not just the linguistic project but it was the community behind OpenOffice in Italy. So as a normal extension of these activities the PLIA was taking care of the language tool and with taking care I mean that there were really good experience and skilled contributors working on the dictionary, working on the Tessaros and taking care of updating it, maintaining and so on. And everything was working in a normal way until there was the fork and until we moved to LibreOffice. So the problem there was that the last letter of that acronym, the O, means OpenOffice and they definitely decided to stay with the OpenOffice project and then with Apache OpenOffice. So in all this time it was really not possible to have updates on the dictionary and all the other language tools because the knowledge on the topic was completely there and because they were the maintainer and as you can imagine it was exactly not easy when there is a fork on going to keep all the community together so it can happen. It's not just something common in the LibreOffice area it's open source and there are frictions in the communities. So in several occasions the current localization team of LibreOffice was trying to contact the people that were maintaining the language tools on the Apache side but we had no success. We got really no answers. So that was mainly the starting point of something that was definitely not updated for too many years. Apart from this we discovered that there was an extension that was developed by the old existing maintainer that was last updated around 2015 but that was not merged with the existing LibreOffice code. This extension is only available on the Apache OpenOffice extension website so from the LibreOffice point of view the main issue is that if you are just installing LibreOffice you have the dictionary and all the other language tools that are installed by default because Italian is a language that is supported by LibreOffice with one of the main languages that are directly built in the core and the updated version is in an external place so you need to know that you need to search for the extension then you need to install it so the majority of the people are just installing the default version from the TDF website or in general from the Linux distribution and are getting really old 10 years old language tools and the other difficulty was definitely that the maintainers were really not reacting but they are still listed as maintainers and the side effect is that it's technically not possible to submit something because the responsible is not answering and it's really not clear what to do so we had this phase of waiting, trying to talk to solve the problem without a really direct action but this polite way was definitely not working so after 10 years the decision is taken so the LibreItalia association decided to take over the maintenance of these language tools for the Italian language so we can say that LibreItalia is forking the old language support that was provided at that time by OpenOffice and it was just another interesting coincidence in our community we have also other people contributing to the Mozilla projects and the Italian Mozilla community was just contacting the Italian localization team from LibreOffice asking to try to work together on the dictionary and the other language tools because also on the Mozilla side they are just reusing the existing package that was built at the OpenOffice time so in parallel with this the Italian community decided also to migrate all the localization materials from an existing old Dropbox instance to the TDF NextCloud the reasons are not just for migrating away from something that is a closed source and it's not following the spirit of an open source community but the other idea was also to be able to keep all the information all the documentation and all the materials available to the contributors that are currently part of the community but having everything centralized at TDF is also a way to keep these information available also when some community member maybe will decide to leave or new one will join the TDF umbrella should support the community also on this side centralizing the materials so for this we were also reorganizing the really huge backup of documents internal guides and so on moving everything to the TDF NextCloud and the other really hard and difficult part was definitely to try to retrieve all the information that we had at the OpenOffice and Plio time because this documentation was shared only across the small team that was making the language tools for the Italian language and we lost contact with them and at the beginning when we decided to finally restart the process we were really without the information without updated files so we were just able to grab what was available in the source code from LibreOffice Core in the sub-module that is providing the Italian language and there were some other documents saved locally by other contributors but it was really a process the old and boring process of checking archives, backups with the hope to have something helpful to reuse and what we are definitely doing is to start to document everything so the idea is to also update what is needed on the TDF side on the main Wiki for being sure that everyone that wants to contribute can find an easy way to start not only just contacting the existing translation group and the next step that we started was the cleaning up of the existing dictionary we decided to start from the dictionary because we were in the position to start completely from scratch also for collecting the really basic how-to for handling the files and in general the dictionary from the language tool is probably the easiest and it's not an easy task to do it's really a long one but at least the cleaning up is something that can also help to start to keep in contact with the file format and the different roles for creating the dictionary and then what we want to do is definitely to join the forces with the Mozilla folks also because they are willing to work on the topic and it doesn't make any sense to just fork something across two different communities that are active on the very same topic just a waste of time and a waste of resources and all together we can make the language support definitely better than now and as a side effect of this we want to definitely share more how to create and edit all these dictionaries and files that are normally provided with LibreOffice and the first comment is it's ready the plan was to submit it just during the conference also for celebrating a bit this huge anniversary after ten years of all the dictionary we are ready to restart and submit the new version so the committee is ready in the next days we want to post the first comment on Garrett and then we will wait for the senior developers that will do the review and will decide to approve or ask for more changes before merging the submission so it's a nice feeling it's that exciting moment when you know that finally things are moving on and improving and another step that we want to keep in the list and to start it's definitely to involve also more experts on the topic because we don't want just to update the dictionary but there is the Tessauros that it's a bit more tricky or all the other iPhone nation tools and we know that in our localization team in any case there are experts on this topic and we were already discussing and we definitely need to involve all the resources that are already available and directly in our community and another step that maybe a bit more with my membership committee head I want to really try to find a way to make possible to have much more contributors just editing the files and being able to push what is needed for improving the language tools the feeling that we had until now was really bad because we had some ideas but we were without the knowledge and we were not able to improve something that was waiting for us so I definitely want to bring more people directly on the code level pushing the changes for the starting with the dictionary but also with the rest of the language tools for Italian so something else that could help definitely to ask to the other localization teams that are already updating really frequently the language support tools also for understanding if maybe there is a smarter way to do things and so on and for the tools there is the already used proofing tool that is a really nice graphical user interface developed by Marco Pinto for editing the files without being forced to directly edit manually the file with the risk to maybe create a mess in the important files for the language support so we have definitely a lot to do and I would really love to do this work all together starting with the existing Italian localization team but definitely learning more also from the other localization community and why not also projects I mean we have a lot in common also with other communities and I can't believe that the need to have the support in the local languages it's just the need of the Italian community so let's try to do it together Any questions, any suggestions, advice? I think no, so Nothing else, congrats to the Italian team Thank you, thank you Very nice I think it was definitely something needed we waited too long for restarting Okay, so that's all from my side Thank you all, we are still only live the platforms are working there is nothing else exploding around and it's really a nice feeling