Introduction

[Frank Peters <fr...@googlemail.com>]

Let me also introduce myself to this illustrious circle.

My name is Frank Peters (I go by the name of
fpe on OOo) and I have been involved in
StarOffice and OpenOffice.org documentation
efforts since 2001.

Back in 2002, I have been leading the efforts
to migrate the help content from an undocumented,
closed, clumsy binary format to a new XML based format
(likely as clumsy but more open ;-) when the help
content sources were opened. I also was working on
a help authoring kit that allows editing the help
from within OOo.

I am not a software developer by education but
rather a bold enthusiast with some basic
background (these are the most dangerous, I know).

Some years ago, I used to co-lead the documentation
project and back then I tried to encourage the use
of the wiki for documentation purposes. Meanwhile,
the documentation wiki has grown quite and I
am still lurking around there occasionally.

My hope is that we'll be able to create a lively community
around Apache OOo without many of the reservations
that seemed to govern community under the auspices of
Sun and Oracle, and I hope that we will overcome any
competitive feelings with TDF/LO and rather switch
to a mode of benevolent collaboration.

My primary concern are the users of the software
and I understand that with its end-user focus,
OOo is somewhat unique among the Apache projects.

I am eager to help as much as I can to get the
project thriving again and explore new pathways
for docs and training.

Frank

Re: Introduction

[IngridvdM <In...@gmx-topmail.de>]

Hi all,

My name is Ingrid von der Mehden. Some may know me as Ingrid Halama 
which is my former name. I am a developer on OpenOffice.org, alias iha.

I started to code on StarOffice in 1998 as an employee at Star Division. 
This small German company was bought by Sun in 1999, which then was 
bought by Oracle last year. I'm currently employed by Oracle and I'm a 
member of the OASIS TC 'Open Document Format for Office Applications 
(OpenDocument)'. I was not involved in the decision making process to 
whom donate the OpenOffice.org code to. I am here on my own free will as 
a private person. I do not speak on behalf of my employer nor on behalf 
of any other entity.

My past work was to lead the Sun/Oracle internal development of the
chart component. I am one of the authors of the current implementation. 
Some years ago we have rewritten that module basically completely new 
reusing only little of the former code. This has become necessary to 
allow for further feature development. It was an interesting adventure 
to get the new component connected and work together with all the other 
parts of the office (interfaces for load/save/filter, embedding via Ole 
and new data connections to calc and writer).

Analyzing the chart related parts of ODF and working out proposals for 
corrections and extensions has been also a significant part of my work.

Just to give an impression of the coding I have done in the recent 
years: For OOo 3.4 Beta I've added date axes (one can display bars over 
time having monthly intervals now). At the OOo Hackfest 2010 Regina and 
me started making the size of the legend customizable and we got it also 
integrated into OOo 3.4 Beta. Thanks to Regina for the helping hands and 
eyes! For OOo 3.3 I coded on hierarchical axis labels and some other 
layout and rendering stuff. I supported my mentee Weizhao from RedOffice 
to implement the new chart types 'bubble' and 'filled net' for OOo 3.2 
and helped Kohei from Novell to get in a switch for the behavior 
regarding data from hidden cells. Further I did some work focusing on 
usability (context menu stuff and a new element selector list box) where 
Sophie lend me her helping eyes to get the things tested in time. OOo 
3.1 has seen more flexible positioning of axes and axis labels and some 
other work for right to left layout for an Arabic version. And so on and 
on. :-)

In the future I would like to focus more on scientific chart users. I 
think this is necessary to allow for a broader adoption of 
OpenOffice.org within universities. Some essential features are still 
missing here - for example X error bars. This feature has currently the 
most votes (140) among the open chart features. Closely followed by 
polynomial trend lines with 129 votes. Eric B, I am happy to see you 
here! Very good to have a university expert available to ask :-) What do 
you think? Would implementing these features benefit your students or 
are there other things that are needed even more urgent?

What also might be interesting for the scientific users is a surface 
chart type. My former mentee Weizhao from RedOffice has worked on this 
already. We've had a very fruitful cooperation. Sadly Weizhao went out 
to take another opportunity last year. I must admit that I have lost 
track a bit of the surface chart topic as always something different has 
been more urgent on my agenda recently. So I am sending my greetings to 
the people from RedOffice! Maybe we can reconnect working on this topic 
when things are running here?

Among the people from IBM I see Jian Fang Zhang. Was it you who 
identified some serious chart bugs last year and send me the nice 
patches to fix them? Thanks again for that! :-) By the way, I guess you 
are located in China also? So I am sending greetings from Europe to Asia 
again!

I am excited to see so many known and new names and colleagues from all 
over the world. Looking forward to get to work on more cool stuff together!

Ingrid