title: University of Alabama

text: Latin honors are conferred on graduates completing a bachelor's degree for the first time (including at other universities) with an overall grade point average of at least 3.5. "Cum laude" honors are conferred to graduates with a GPA of 3.5 or greater and less than 3.7 (without rounding). "Magna cum laude" honors are conferred with a GPA of 3.7 or greater and less than 3.9. "Summa cum laude" honors are conferred with a GPA of 3.9 or higher.


title: University of Alabama

text: The university follows a standard academic calendar based on the semester system, which divides the academic year, starting in mid-August, into two 15-week semesters (fall and spring) and the summer. The fall semester ends in December and the spring term lasts from January to early May. The summer, which lasts from mid-May to August, is divided into a 3-week "mini-semester" in May and two four-week sessions in June and July, respectively.


title: University of Alabama

text: In the 2021 "U.S. News & World Report" rankings, UA was tied for 143rd in the "National Universities" category (tied for 65th among "Top Public Schools"). Additionally, in the 2021 "U.S. News" rankings, the law school was tied for 31st in the nation, the business school was tied for 41st, the education school tied for 84th, and the engineering school was tied for 119th. In 2016, "Business Insider" ranked the UA law school as the third best public law school in the nation.


title: University of Alabama

text: In August 2020, the University of Alabama's College of Communication & Information Sciences was recognized for having the nation's top public relations program. The UA Department of Advertising and Public Relations was named the Most Outstanding Education Program by PRWeek during the 2020 PRWeek Awards. It is the department's ninth recognition as a finalist for the award and first selection as the top program.


title: University of Alabama

text: As of 2021 "The Princeton Review" ranks University of Alabama first in the nation as a party school, and first for having lots of Greek life. The university is also ranked the 8th most LGBT unfriendly school in the nation.


title: University of Alabama

text: The University of Alabama has 2.9 million document volumes, along with nearly 100,000 uncataloged government documents in its collection; of these 2.5 million volumes are held by the University Libraries. The University Libraries system has six separate libraries.


title: University of Alabama

text: The Amelia Gayle Gorgas Library, which sits on the Main Quad, is the oldest and largest of the university libraries. Gorgas Library holds the university's collections in the humanities and social sciences, as well as the university's depository of US government documents. The library opened in 1939 as a four-story Greek Revival structure on the site of the original university Rotunda and was named after the long-time university librarian and wife of eighth university president Josiah Gorgas. A seven-story addition was built behind the library in the 1970s.


title: University of Alabama

text: The Angelo Bruno Business Library, in the Business Quad, is named after the co-founder of the Bruno's grocery chain who gave the university $4 million to create a library focusing on commerce and business studies. Opened in 1994, the , three-story facility holds over 170,000 volumes. Bruno Library also houses the Sloan Y. Bashinsky Sr. Computer Center.


title: University of Alabama

text: The Eric and Sarah Rodgers Library for Science and Engineering, in the Science and Engineering Quad, is named after two popular, long-time professors of engineering and statistics, respectively. It opened in 1990, combining the Science Library collection in Lloyd Hall and the Engineering Library collection in the Mineral Industries Building (now known as HM Comer Hall). Rodgers Library was designed with help from IBM to incorporate the latest in informatics. McLure Education Library was founded in 1954 in a remodeled student union annex (across the street from the old Student Union, now Reese Phifer Hall) and named in 1974 after John Rankin McLure, the longtime dean of the College of Education. The William Stanley Hoole Special Collections Library, which holds the university's collection of rare and historical documents and books, is in Mary Harmon Bryant Hall. The Library Annex holds seldom-used books and journals, as well as other volumes which need special protection, that would otherwise take up valuable space in the libraries.


title: University of Alabama

text: Other libraries on campus are independent of the University Libraries. The Bounds Law Library, at the Law Center, holds more than 300,000 volumes. Established in 1978, the Health Sciences Library, at the University Medical Center, serves students at the College of Community Health Sciences. Its 20,000-volume collection includes clinical medicine, family practice, primary care, medical education, consumer health, and related health care topics. Located in Farah Hall (home of the Department of Geography) the Map Library and Place Names Research Center holds over 270,000 maps and 75,000 aerial photographs. The William E. Winter Reading Room of the College of Communication and Information Sciences is in Reese Phifer Hall and holds over 10,000 volumes. The School of Social Work Reading Room is in Little Hall and just around 200 volumes.


title: University of Alabama

text: UA is one of the 126 members of the Association of Research Libraries, which yearly compiles internal rankings. In 2011, the University of Alabama ranked 56th among all criteria, a marked improvement over a 2003 ranking of 97th.


title: University of Alabama

text: In the fall of 2011, the University of Alabama Trustees approved a resolution to expand Gorgas Library by , doubling the seating capacity from 1,139 to 2,278. This expansion also signaled the beginning of the construction of an Academic Honors Plaza, between the library and Clark Hall. The plaza includes green-space, fountains, benches, and decorative lighting.


title: University of Alabama

text: In academic year 2014–2015, UA received $76 million in research contracts and grants. The Alabama International Trade Center and the Center for Advanced Public Safety are two research centers at UA.


title: University of Alabama

text: The US Department of Homeland Security has selected The University of Alabama as a National Center of Academic Excellence (CAE) in Information Assurance Education and Research.


title: University of Alabama

text: The University of Alabama is a member of the SEC Academic Consortium. Now renamed the SECU, the initiative was a collaborative endeavor designed to promote research, scholarship and achievement amongst the member universities in the Southeastern conference. The SECU formed its mission to serve as a means to bolster collaborative academic endeavors of Southeastern Conference universities. Its goals include highlighting the endeavors and achievements of SEC faculty, students and its universities and advancing the academic reputation of SEC universities.


title: University of Alabama

text: In 2013, the University of Alabama participated in the SEC Symposium in Atlanta, Georgia which was organized and led by the University of Georgia and the UGA Bioenergy Systems Research Institute. The topic of the symposium was titled "The Impact of the Southeast in the World's Renewable Energy Future".


title: University of Alabama

text: In fall 2021, the university had an enrollment of 38,320 students, consisting of 31,688 undergraduates and 6,152 postgraduates, from all 67 Alabama counties, all 50 US states and the District of Columbia, and 78 foreign nations. Alabama residents comprised 41.4% of the undergraduate student body; out-of-state residents comprised 55.4%, and international (non-resident alien) students comprised 3.2%.


title: University of Alabama

text: The five Alabama counties with the highest enrollment of students were Tuscaloosa (3,158 students), Jefferson (2,836), Madison (1,295), Shelby (1,290) and Mobile (988), while the five states (beside Alabama) with the highest enrollment of students were Georgia (2,518 students), Texas (1,709), Illinois (1,649), Florida (1,550), and Tennessee (1,465).


title: University of Alabama

text: In 2013, UA ranked 1st in the nation among public universities in the enrollment of National Merit Scholars.


title: University of Alabama

text: The board of trustees chose to locate the UA campus in a field a mile away from the center of the town of Tuscaloosa (which was a considerable distance in early 19th century Alabama). The board consciously chose to make on-campus residence an integral part of the student experience at UA. Dormitories were among the first buildings erected at Alabama (the remains of one [Franklin Hall] is now the Mound on the Quad), and student residential life has been emphasized at UA ever since. Dormitories at the university include Blount Hall, Bryant Hall, Burke Hall, Harris Hall, John England, Jr. Hall, Lakeside Hall, Parham Hall, Paty Hall, Presidential Village I and II, Riverside Hall, Tutwiler Hall, and Ridgecrest East, West, and South. There are also two on-campus apartment complexes, Bryce Lawn and the Highlands. Today nearly 30% of students live on campus, including over 90% of first-year freshmen.


title: University of Alabama

text: The Student Government Association is the primary student advocacy organization at UA. The SGA is governed by the SGA Constitution and consists of a legislative branch, an executive branch and a judicial council.


title: University of Alabama

text: Since its founding in 1914, a secretive coalition of fraternities and sororities, commonly known as "The Machine", has wielded enormous influence over the Student Government Association. Occurrences of harassment, intimidation, and even criminal activities aimed at opposition candidates have been reported. Many figures in local, state, and national politics have come out of the SGA at the University of Alabama. "Esquire" devoted its April 1992 cover story to an exposé of The Machine. The controversy led to the university disbanding the SGA in 1993, which wasn't undone until 1996. "Machine" fraternities and sororities have traditionally accepted only white pledges, with only one documented case of an African American student being offered entry, in 2003.


title: University of Alabama

text: Controversy surrounding The Machine reemerged in August 2013, when sororities and fraternities were mobilized to elect two former SGA presidents, Cason Kirby and Lee Garrison, in closely contested municipal school board races. Before election day, questions about illegal voter registration were raised when evidence emerged that indicated eleven fraternity members fraudulently claimed to be living in a single house in one district. And on election day, leaked emails suggested that sorority/fraternity members may have been provided incentives to vote—including free drinks at local bars. As a result of possible voter fraud, Kirby's opponent filed a lawsuit challenging the election results and University of Alabama faculty have questioned whether The Machine has corrupted the democratic process in the City of Tuscaloosa.


title: University of Alabama

text: Greek letter organizations (GLOs) first appeared at the university in 1847 when two men visiting from Yale University installed a chapter of Delta Kappa Epsilon. When DKE members began holding secret meetings in the old state capitol building that year, the administration strongly voiced its disapproval. Over a few more decades, 7 other fraternities appeared at UA: Alpha Delta Phi in 1850, Phi Gamma Delta in 1855, Sigma Alpha Epsilon in 1856 (this was the founding chapter), Kappa Sigma in 1867, Sigma Nu in 1874, Sigma Chi in 1876, and Phi Delta Theta in 1877. Anti-fraternity laws were imposed that year, but were lifted in the 1890s. Women at the university founded the Zeta chapter of Kappa Delta sorority in 1903. Alpha Delta Pi soon followed.


title: University of Alabama

text: Hazing at UA fraternities, as in most American colleges, has been common. The Atlanta Constitution newspaper reported students receiving "100 licks with a paddle" by fellow students multiple times in the 1890s.


title: University of Alabama

text: In fall 2009, the university sanctioned 29 men's and 23 women's GLOs. Additionally, an unknown number of non-sanctioned GLOs existed. Four governing boards oversee the operations of the university-sanctioned GLOs: the Interfraternity Council (IFC), the National Panhellenic Conference (NPC), the National Pan-Hellenic Council (NPHC) and the Unified Greek Council (UGC).


title: University of Alabama

text: The number of men in GLOs more than doubled from 2002 to 2009, with fifteen fraternities reporting active memberships of more than 100 (where as recently as 2001 none reported memberships greater than 100). Following 2008 fall recruitment, almost all Panhellenic sororities participating through all rounds had potential new member class sizes of 80 or more; nearly all Panhellenic sororities also now have more than 200 total members. To accommodate growth in the student population since 2005, the university has sanctioned three new fraternities and two new sororities. Additionally, four new sorority houses were added, built behind the President's Mansion.


title: University of Alabama

text: Despite having the first non-white student initiated into a historically white Greek organization on campus in 2000, high segregation within Alabama's Greek system has long been considered a major point of concern due to many other public college Greek systems becoming more integrated. John P. Hermann, a now-retired English professor, tried in the 1990s and 2000s to end what he referred to as "taxpayer-supported segregation". Controversy erupted again in September 2013, when a story in the campus paper, "The Crimson White", revealed that alumnae of Greek organizations had prevented a black student from being accepted in an all-white sorority. As a result, the Alabama Panhellenic Association allowed recruitment to continue through continuous open bidding. According to "TIME", a deal that would allow black students to join historically white sororities was announced by the university as "the first step toward ending more than a century of systematic segregation in the school's sorority system".


title: University of Alabama

text: With over 10,000 active students, UA has one of the largest Greek systems in the nation. Since 2003, Greek organizations at UA have spent over $200 million renovating and building new multimillion-dollar Greek mansions to remain competitive in recruiting and retaining members. In 2019, 29% of male undergraduates were in university-sanctioned fraternities; 44% of female undergraduates were in university-sanctioned sororities.


title: University of Alabama

text: In 1987, the Theta Sigma chapter of Alpha Kappa Alpha became the first historically black Greek organization and only historically black sorority with a traditional house on Greek row. The previous year before moving to the sorority side of Greek row, the house AKA was making arrangements to acquire had burning crosses on the front lawn. UA officials claimed it was a distasteful prank but the local black community disputed that claim saying it was a serious threat against integrating Greek row. Two white male students were briefly detained for questioning but they were not charged with anything and their full identity and Greek affiliations were never released. The Kappa Alpha chapter of Alpha Phi Alpha is the first and only historically black fraternity with a traditional house on fraternity row.


title: University of Alabama

text: Several honor societies are present at the University of Alabama. Some honor societies are national organizations with a local chapter while others are local organizations.


title: University of Alabama

text: The "Crimson White" is the student-produced newspaper. Published two times a week during the academic year and weekly during the summer, the "CW" normally distributes 15,000 copies per publication. The "CW" received a 2010 Mark of Excellence Award for "Best All-Around Daily Student Newspaper at a Four-Year College or University" in the Southeast region by the Society of Professional Journalists. The CW won the Mark of Excellence Award again in 2011 and a Gold Crown Award from the Columbia Scholastic Press Association for its spring 2011 issues. The Crimson White was also inducted into the College Media Hall of Fame for its coverage of the April 2011 tornado that caused massive damage in Tuscaloosa. Other UA student publications include the "Blount Truth Literary Journal", "Marr's Field Journal", and "Alice".


title: University of Alabama

text: The University of Alabama's intercollegiate athletic teams are known as the "Alabama Crimson Tide" (this name can be shortened to "Alabama", the "Crimson Tide", or even the "Tide"). The nickname "Crimson Tide" originates from a 1907 football game versus Auburn University in Birmingham where, after a hard-fought game in torrential rain in which Auburn had been heavily favored to win, Alabama forced a tie. Writing about the game, one sportswriter described the offensive line as a "Crimson Tide", in reference to their jerseys, stained red from the wet dirt.


title: University of Alabama

text: Alabama competes primarily in the Southeastern Conference (Western Division) of the NCAA's Division I. Alabama fields men's varsity teams in football, basketball, baseball, golf, cross country, swimming and diving, tennis, and track and field. Women's varsity teams are fielded in basketball, golf, cross country, gymnastics, rowing, soccer, softball, swimming and diving, tennis, track and field, and volleyball. The athletic facilities on campus include the Bryant–Denny Stadium, named after legendary football coach Paul "Bear" Bryant and former UA President George Denny, and the 14,619-seat Coleman Coliseum. Alabama's women's rowing team competes in the Big 12 conference of the NCAA's Division I.


title: University of Alabama

text: Alabama maintains athletic rivalries with Auburn University and the University of Tennessee. The rivalry with Auburn is especially heated as it encompasses all sports. The annual Alabama-Auburn football game is nicknamed the "Iron Bowl". While the rivalry with Tennessee is centered around football for the most part, there is no shortage of acrimony, especially given the recent history between then-UT Coach Phillip Fulmer and his relationship to the Tide's most recent NCAA probation. There are also rivalries with Louisiana State University (football and baseball), University of Mississippi (football and men's basketball), Mississippi State University (football, men's basketball), University of Georgia (women's gymnastics), and the University of Florida (football, softball).


title: University of Alabama

text: The University of Alabama football program, started in 1892, has won 25 SEC titles and 18 national championships (including 12 awarded by the Associated Press and 8 by the Coaches Poll). The program has compiled 36 10-win seasons and 59 bowl appearances, winning 32 of them – all NCAA records. Alabama has produced 18 hall-of-famers, 97 All-Americans honored 105 times, and 4 Heisman trophy winners (Mark Ingram II, Derrick Henry, DeVonta Smith, and Bryce Young).


title: University of Alabama

text: The Crimson Tide's current home venue, Bryant–Denny Stadium, opened in 1929 with a capacity of around 12,000. The most recent addition of the stadium was completed in 2010. An upper deck was added in the south end zone, completing the upper deck around the stadium. The current official capacity of the stadium is 101,821. The previous addition was the north end zone expansion, completed 2006. The Tide has also played many games, including the Iron Bowl against rival Auburn University, at Legion Field in Birmingham.


title: University of Alabama

text: Nearly synonymous with Alabama football is legendary coach Paul "Bear" Bryant whose record at the University of Alabama was 232–46–9. He led the Crimson Tide to 6 national titles in 1961, 1964, 1965, 1973, 1978, and 1979, which is tied with Notre Dame's legendary coach Knute Rockne. Alabama's current head football coach Nick Saban has won a total of 7 national titles, including six at Alabama. Additionally, the 1966 team was the only one in the country to finish with a perfect record, but poll voters denied the 12–0 Alabama team the three-peat as Michigan State and Notre Dame played each other to a 10–10 tie in what was considered the "Game of the Century" and subsequently split the national championship.


title: University of Alabama

text: On December 12, 2009, sophomore running back Mark Ingram II was awarded the Heisman Trophy as college football's best player. In being so named, Ingram became the first Heisman Trophy winner for the University of Alabama. Alabama defeated Texas 37–21 in the BCS Championship game on January 7, 2010, capping a perfect season, an SEC Championship, and winning its first national championship in the BCS era. Alabama defeated Louisiana State University 21–0 on January 9, 2012, to win its second BCS National Championship. Alabama won its third BCS National Championship in January 2013 defeating Notre Dame 42–14, becoming the first school to win three BCS Titles. On January 1, 2015, No. 1 Alabama lost to No. 4 Ohio St. in the second game of the first College Football Playoffs 42–35. On December 12, 2015, running back Derrick Henry was awarded the Heisman Trophy, becoming only the second winner for the University of Alabama. On January 11, 2016, Alabama defeated Clemson to win the National Championship, 45–40. In January 2017, Alabama lost to Clemson 35–31 in the National Championship. They beat SEC rival Georgia 26–23 in overtime during the 2018 National Championship in January 2018. In January 2019, Alabama lost to Clemson 44–16 in the National Championship. In the 2020 season, Alabama earned a 13–0 record against an all-SEC schedule during the COVID-19 pandemic including winning the SEC Championship against Florida, the Rose Bowl against Notre Dame, and the National Championship game against Ohio State. Crimson Tide Wide Receiver DeVonta Smith was awarded the Heisman Trophy, the program's third winner. In the 2021 season, the Crimson Tide would post a 13-2 record, including a 41-24 win over Georgia in the SEC championship game to win their 29th conference title. They would then go on to beat the Cincinnati Bearcats 27-6 in the Cotton Bowl, culminating in an eventual loss to Georgia in the National Championship by a score of 33-18. Along with a successful football season, Alabama's starting quarterback, Bryce Young, won the Heisman trophy - becoming the 4th player from the university to win it, and the 1st quarterback from the University to win it.


title: University of Alabama

text: The school's fight song is "Yea Alabama", written in 1926 by Lundy Sykes, then editor of the campus newspaper. Sykes composed the song in response to a contest by the Rammer Jammer to create a fight song following Alabama's first Rose Bowl victory. The song as it is played by the Million Dollar Band during games and known to most people is simply the chorus of the larger song. The Alabama Alma Mater is set to the tune of "Annie Lisle", a ballad written in the 1850s. The lyrics are usually credited as, "Helen Vickers, 1908", although it is not clear whether that was when it was written or if that was her graduating class.


title: University of Alabama

text: University of Alabama graduates include 15 Rhodes Scholars, 59 Goldwater Scholars, and 16 Truman Scholars. UA graduates have also been named to the USA Today All-USA College Academic Team.


title: University of Alabama

text: The University of Alabama is the alma mater of numerous notable people in politics, sports, business, entertainment, science, art, and literature. Among UA's alumni are Harper Lee, Bear Bryant, Mel Allen, Joe Namath, George Wallace, Jim Nabors, Joe Scarborough, Hugo Black, E. O. Wilson, poet Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, and Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales.


title: LibreOffice

text: LibreOffice () is a free and open-source office productivity software suite, a project of The Document Foundation (TDF). It was forked in 2010 from OpenOffice.org, an open-sourced version of the earlier StarOffice. The LibreOffice suite consists of programs for word processing, creating and editing of spreadsheets, slideshows, diagrams and drawings, working with databases, and composing mathematical formulae. It is available in 115 languages. TDF doesn't provide support for LibreOffice, but enterprised-focused editions are available from companies in the ecosystem.


title: LibreOffice

text: LibreOffice uses the OpenDocument standard as its native file format, but supports formats of most other major office suites, including Microsoft Office, through a variety of import and export filters.


title: LibreOffice

text: LibreOffice is available for a variety of computing platforms, with official support for Microsoft Windows, macOS and Linux and community builds for many other platforms. LibreOffice is the default office suite of most popular Linux distributions.


title: LibreOffice

text: It is the most actively developed free and open-source office suite, with approximately 50 times the development activity of Apache OpenOffice, the other major descendant of OpenOffice.org, in 2015.


title: LibreOffice

text: LibreOffice Online is an online office suite which includes the applications Writer, Calc and Impress and provides an upstream for projects such as commercial Collabora Online.


title: LibreOffice

text: The project was announced and a beta released on 28 September 2010. In the nine months between January 2011 (the first stable release) and October 2011, LibreOffice was downloaded about 7.5 million times. In 2015, the project claimed 120 million unique downloading addresses from May 2011 to May 2015, excluding Linux distributions, with 55 million of those being from May 2014 to May 2015. The Document Foundation estimates that there are 200 million active LibreOffice users worldwide; approximately 25% are students and 10% are Linux users, who usually find LibreOffice part of their preferred distribution.


title: LibreOffice

text: LibreOffice is cross platform software. The Document Foundation developers target Microsoft Windows (IA-32 and x86-64), Linux (IA-32, x86-64 and ARM) and macOS (x86-64). There are community ports for FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD and Mac OS X 10.5 PowerPC receive support from contributors to those projects, respectively. LibreOffice is also installable on OpenIndiana via SFE.


title: LibreOffice

text: Historically predecessors of LibreOffice, back to StarOffice 3, have run on Solaris with SPARC CPUs that Sun Microsystems (and later Oracle) made. Unofficial ports of LibreOffice, versions now obsolete, have supported SPARC. Current unofficial ports of LibreOffice 5.2.5 run only on Intel-compatible hardware, up to for Solaris 11.


title: LibreOffice

text: In 2011, developers announced plans to port LibreOffice both to Android and to iOS. A beta version of a document viewer for Android 4.0 or newer was released in January 2015; In May 2015, LibreOffice Viewer for Android was released with basic editing capabilities. In February 2020, Collabora released its first officially supported version of LibreOffice (branded as Collabora Office) for Android and iOS. In July 2020 Collabora shipped an app, branded as Collabora Office, for ChromeOS, as used on the popular Chromebook line of notebook computers as well as other form factors of computers.


title: LibreOffice

text: The LibreOffice Impress Remote application for various mobile operating systems allows for remote control of LibreOffice Impress presentations.


title: LibreOffice

text: LibreOffice Online is the online office suite edition of LibreOffice. It allows for the use of LibreOffice through a web browser by using the canvas element of HTML5. Development was announced at the first LibreOffice Conference in October 2011, and is ongoing. The Document Foundation, IceWarp, and Collabora announced a collaboration to work on its implementation. A version of the software was shown in a September 2015 conference, and the UK Crown Commercial Service announced an interest in using the software. On 15 December 2015, Collabora, in partnership with ownCloud, released a technical preview of LibreOffice Online branded as Collabora Online Development Edition (CODE). In July 2016 the enterprise version Collabora Online 1.0 was released. The same month, Nextcloud and Collabora partnered to bring CODE to Nextcloud users. By October 2016, Collabora had released nine updates to CODE. The first source code release of LibreOffice Online was done with LibreOffice version 5.3 in February 2017. In June 2019, CIB software GmbH officially announced its contributions to LibreOffice Online and "LibreOffice Online powered by CIB".


title: LibreOffice

text: In October 2020 Collabora announced the move of its work on Collabora Online from The Document Foundation infrastructure to GitHub.


title: LibreOffice

text: A detailed 60-page report in June 2015 compared the progress of the LibreOffice project with the related project Apache OpenOffice. It showed that "OpenOffice received about 10% of the improvements LibreOffice did in the period of time studied."


title: LibreOffice

text: As its native file format to save documents for all of its applications, LibreOffice uses the Open Document Format for Office Applications (ODF), or OpenDocument, an international standard developed jointly by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC). LibreOffice also supports the file formats of most other major office suites, including Microsoft Office, through a variety of import and export filters.


title: LibreOffice

text: LibreOffice can use the GStreamer multimedia framework in Linux to render multimedia content such as videos in Impress and other programs.


title: LibreOffice

text: Visually, LibreOffice used the large "Tango style" icons that are used for the application shortcuts, quick launch icons, icons for associated files and for the icons found on the toolbar of the LibreOffice programs in the past, and used on the toolbars and menus by default. They were later replaced by multiple icon themes to adapt the look and feel of specific desktop environment, such as Colibre for Windows, and Elementary for GNOME.


title: LibreOffice

text: LibreOffice also ships with a modified theme which looks native on GTK-based Linux distributions. It also renders fonts via Cairo on Linux distributions; this means that text in LibreOffice is rendered the same as the rest of the Linux desktop.


title: LibreOffice

text: With version 6.2, LibreOffice includes a ribbon-style GUI, called Notebookbar, including three different views.


title: LibreOffice

text: This feature has formerly been included as an experimental feature in LibreOffice 6 (experimental features must be enabled from LibreOffice settings to make the option available in the View menu).


title: LibreOffice

text: LibreOffice uses HarfBuzz for complex text layout, it was first introduced in 4.1 for Linux and 5.3 for Windows and macOS. Fonts with OpenType, Apple Advanced Typography or SIL Graphite features can be switched by either a syntax in the Font Name input box or the Font Features dialog from the Character dialog.


title: LibreOffice

text: LibreOffice supports a "hybrid PDF" format, a file in Portable Document Format (PDF) which can be read by any program supporting PDF, but also contains the source document in ODF format, editable in LibreOffice by dragging and dropping.


title: LibreOffice

text: The LibreOffice project uses a dual LGPLv3 (or later) / MPL 2.0 license for new contributions to allow the license to be upgraded. Since the core of the OpenOffice.org codebase was donated to the Apache Software Foundation, there is an ongoing effort to get all the code rebased to ease future license updates. At the same time, there were complaints that IBM had not in fact released the Lotus Symphony code as open source, despite having claimed to. It was reported that some LibreOffice developers wanted to incorporate some code parts and bug fixes which IBM already fixed in their OpenOffice fork.


title: LibreOffice

text: LibreOffice supports third-party extensions. , the LibreOffice Extension Repository lists more than 320 extensions. Another list is maintained by the Apache Software Foundation and another one by the Free Software Foundation. Extensions and scripts for LibreOffice can be written in C++, Java, CLI, Python, and LibreOffice Basic. Interpreters for the latter two are bundled with most LibreOffice installers, so no additional installation is needed. The application programming interface for LibreOffice is called "UNO" and is extensively documented.


title: LibreOffice

text: LibreOffice Basic is a programming language similar to Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) but based on StarOffice Basic. It is available in Writer, Calc and Base. It is used to write small programs known as "macros", with each macro performing a different task, such as counting the words in a paragraph.


title: LibreOffice

text: Members of the OpenOffice.org community who were not Sun Microsystems employees had wanted a more egalitarian form for the OpenOffice.org project for many years; Sun had stated in the original OpenOffice.org announcement in 2000 that the project would eventually be run by a neutral foundation and put forward a more detailed proposal in 2001.


title: LibreOffice

text: Ximian and then Novell had maintained the ooo-build patch set, a project led by Michael Meeks, to make the build easier on Linux and due to the difficulty of getting contributions accepted upstream by Sun, even from corporate partners. It tracked the main line of development and was not intended to constitute a fork. It was also the standard build mechanism for OpenOffice.org in most Linux distributions and was contributed to by said distributions.


title: LibreOffice

text: In 2007, ooo-build was made available by Novell as a software package called Go-oo (ooo-build had used the go-oo.org domain name as early as 2005), which included many features not included in upstream OpenOffice.org. Go-oo also encouraged outside contributions, with rules similar to those later adopted for LibreOffice.


title: LibreOffice

text: Sun's contributions to OpenOffice.org had been declining for some time. They remained reluctant to accept contributions and contributors were upset at Sun releasing OpenOffice.org code to IBM for IBM Lotus Symphony under a proprietary contract, rather than under an open source licence.


title: LibreOffice

text: Sun was purchased by Oracle Corporation in early 2010. OpenOffice.org community members were concerned by Oracle's behaviour towards open source software, specifically the Java lawsuit against Google and Oracle's withdrawal of developers, and lack of activity on or visible commitment to OpenOffice.org, as had been noted by industry observers – as Meeks put it in early September 2010, "The news from the Oracle OpenOffice conference was that there was no news." Discussion of a fork started soon after.


title: LibreOffice

text: On 28 September 2010, The Document Foundation was announced as the host of LibreOffice, a new derivative of OpenOffice.org. The Document Foundation's initial announcement stated their concerns that Oracle would either discontinue OpenOffice.org, or place restrictions on it as an open source project, as it had on Sun's OpenSolaris.


title: LibreOffice

text: LibreOffice 3.3 beta used the ooo-build build infrastructure and the OpenOffice.org 3.3 beta code from Oracle, then adding selected patches from Go-oo. Go-oo was discontinued in favour of LibreOffice. Since the office suite that was branded "OpenOffice.org" in most Linux distributions was in fact Go-oo, most moved immediately to LibreOffice.


title: LibreOffice

text: Oracle was invited to become a member of The Document Foundation. However, Oracle demanded that all members of the OpenOffice.org Community Council involved with The Document Foundation step down from the OOo Community Council, claiming a conflict of interest.


title: LibreOffice

text: The name "LibreOffice" was picked after researching trademark databases and social media, as well as after checks were made to see if it could be used for URLs in various countries. Oracle rejected requests to donate the OpenOffice.org brand to the project.


title: LibreOffice

text: LibreOffice was initially named BrOffice in Brazil. OpenOffice.org had been distributed as BrOffice.org by the "BrOffice Centre of Excellence for Free Software" because of a trademark issue.


title: LibreOffice

text: Oracle announced in April 2011 that it was ending its development of OpenOffice.org and would lay off the majority of its paid developers. In June 2011, Oracle announced that it would donate the OpenOffice.org code and trademark to the Apache Software Foundation, where the project was accepted for a project incubation process within the foundation, thus becoming Apache OpenOffice. In an interview with LWN in May 2011, Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth blamed The Document Foundation for destroying OpenOffice.org because it did not license its code under Oracle's Contributor License Agreement. In opposition to Shuttleworth's view, the former Sun executive Simon Phipps argued in the interview for the same online magazine, that the lay-off was an inevitable business decision by Oracle, not impacted by existence of LibreOffice.


title: LibreOffice

text: In March 2015, an LWN.net comparison of LibreOffice with its cousin project Apache OpenOffice concluded that "LibreOffice has won the battle for developer participation".


title: LibreOffice

text: In late 2017 The Document Foundation held a competition for the new mascot of LibreOffice. The mascot was to be used primarily by the community, and was not intended to supersede existing logos for the project. Over 300 concepts were submitted before the first evaluation phase.


title: LibreOffice

text: The mascot contest was cancelled soon after new submissions stopped being accepted. The Document Foundation cited their lack of clear rules and arguments among community members as their reasoning for cancelling the contest.


title: LibreOffice

text: Since March 2014 and version 4.2.2, two different major "released" versions of LibreOffice are available at any time in addition to development versions (numbered release candidates and dated nightly builds). The versions are designated to signal their appropriateness for differing user requirements. Releases are designated by three numbers separated by dots. The first two numbers represent the major version (branch) number, and the final number indicates the bugfix releases made in that series. LibreOffice designates the two release versions as:


title: LibreOffice

text: LibreOffice uses a time-based release schedule for predictability, rather than a "when it's ready" schedule. New major versions are released around every six months, in January or February and July or August of each year. The initial intention was to release in March and September, to align with the schedule of other free software projects.


title: LibreOffice

text: Commercially supported distributions for LibreOffice with service-level agreements are available via partners such as Collabora (marketed as Collabora Office and Collabora Online), CIB (marketed as CIB Office on the Microsoft Store), and Red Hat. The three vendors are major corporate contributors to the LibreOffice project.


title: LibreOffice

text: As of version 7.1, the open source release of LibreOffice is officially branded as "LibreOffice Community", in order to emphasize that the releases are intended primarily for personal individual use, and are "not targeted at enterprises, and not optimized for their support needs". The Document Foundation states that usage of the community versions in such settings "has had a two-fold negative consequence for the project: a poor use of volunteers' time, as they have to spend their time to solve problems for business that provide nothing in return to the community, and a net loss for ecosystem companies."


title: LibreOffice

text: The figure shows the worldwide number of LibreOffice users from 2011 to 2018 in millions. References are in the text.


title: LibreOffice

text: "2011": The Document Foundation estimated in September 2011, that there were 10 million users worldwide who had obtained LibreOffice via downloads or CD-ROMs. Over 90% of those were on Windows, with another 5% on OS X. LibreOffice is the default office suite for most Linux distributions, and is installed when the operating system is installed or updated. Based on International Data Corporation reckonings for new or updated Linux installations in 2011, The Document Foundation estimated a subtotal of 15 million Linux users. This gave a total estimated user base of 25 million users in 2011. In 2011, the Document Foundation set a target of 200 million users worldwide before the end of 2020.


title: LibreOffice

text: "2013": In September 2013, after two years, the estimated number of LibreOffice users was 75 million. A million new unique IP addresses check for downloads each week.


title: LibreOffice

text: "2018": The Document Foundation estimated in 2018 that there are 200 million active LibreOffice users worldwide. About 25% of them are students and 10% Linux users (who often automatically receive LibreOffice through their distribution). In comparison, Microsoft Office was used in 2018 by 1.2 billion users.


title: LibreOffice

text: Starting in 2011, The Document Foundation has organized the annual LibreOffice Conference, as follows:


title: Star Trek: First Contact

text: Star Trek: First Contact is a 1996 American science fiction film directed by Jonathan Frakes (in his motion picture directorial debut) and based on the franchise "Star Trek". It is the eighth film in the "Star Trek" film series, the second to star the cast of "". In the film, the crew of the USS "Enterprise"-E travel back in time from the 24th century to the mid-21st century to stop the cybernetic Borg from conquering Earth by changing their past.


title: Star Trek: First Contact

text: After the release of "Star Trek Generations" in 1994, Paramount Pictures tasked writers Brannon Braga and Ronald D. Moore with developing the next film in the series. Braga and Moore wanted to feature the Borg in the plot, while producer Rick Berman wanted a story involving time travel. The writers combined the two ideas; they initially set the film during the European Renaissance, but changed the time period that the Borg corrupted to the mid-21st century, after fearing the Renaissance idea would be "too kitsch". After two better-known directors turned down the job, cast member Jonathan Frakes was chosen to direct to make sure the task fell to someone who understood "Star Trek".


title: Star Trek: First Contact

text: The film's script required the creation of new starship designs, including a new USS "Enterprise". Production designer Herman Zimmerman and illustrator John Eaves collaborated to make a sleeker ship than its predecessor. Principal photography began with weeks of location shooting in Arizona and California, before production moved to new sets for the ship-based scenes. The Borg were redesigned to appear as though they were converted into machine beings from the inside-out; the new makeup sessions took four times as long as their appearances on the television series. Effects company Industrial Light & Magic rushed to complete the film's special effects in less than five months. Traditional optical effects techniques were supplemented with computer-generated imagery. Jerry Goldsmith produced the film’s score.


title: Star Trek: First Contact

text: "Star Trek: First Contact" was released on November 22, 1996, and was the highest-grossing film on its opening weekend. It eventually made $92 million in the United States and Canada with an additional $54 million in other territories, combining to a worldwide total of $146 million. Critical reception was mostly positive; critics including Roger Ebert considered it to be one of the best "Star Trek" films, and it was the most positively reviewed film in the series (92% of reviews were positive) until being marginally surpassed (94%) by the 2009 reboot film. The Borg and the special effects were lauded, while characterization was less evenly received. Scholarly analysis of the film has focused on Captain Jean-Luc Picard's parallels to Herman Melville's Ahab and the nature of the Borg. "First Contact" was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Makeup and won three Saturn Awards. It was followed by "" in 1998.


title: Star Trek: First Contact

text: In the 24th century, Captain Jean-Luc Picard awakens from a nightmare in which he relives his assimilation by the cybernetic Borg . He is contacted by Admiral Hayes, who informs him of a new Borg threat against Earth. Picard's orders are for his ship, , to patrol the Neutral Zone in case of Romulan aggression; Starfleet is worried that Picard is too emotionally involved with the Borg to join the fight.


title: Star Trek: First Contact

text: Learning the fleet is losing the battle, the "Enterprise" crew disobeys orders and heads for Earth, where a single Borg Cube ship holds its own against a group of Starfleet vessels. "Enterprise" arrives in time to assist the crew of and its commander, the Klingon Worf. Picard takes control of the fleet and directs the surviving ships to concentrate their firepower on a seemingly unimportant point on the Borg ship. The Cube launches a smaller sphere ship towards Earth before being destroyed. "Enterprise" pursues the sphere into a temporal vortex. As the sphere disappears, "Enterprise" discovers Earth has been altered – it is now populated by Borg. Realizing the Borg have used time travel to change the past, "Enterprise" follows the sphere through the vortex.


title: Star Trek: First Contact

text: "Enterprise" arrives hundreds of years in its past on April 4, 2063, the day before Zefram Cochrane's historic warp drive flight that leads to humanity's first encounter with alien life. The crew realizes the Borg are trying to prevent first contact and assimilate humanity while the planet is reeling from a devastating global war. After destroying the Borg sphere, an away team transports down to Cochrane's ship, "Phoenix", in Bozeman, Montana. Picard has Cochrane's assistant Lily Sloane sent back to "Enterprise" for medical attention. The captain returns to the ship and leaves Commander William T. Riker on Earth to make sure "Phoenix"s flight proceeds as planned. While in the future Cochrane is seen as a hero, the real man built the "Phoenix" for financial gain and is reluctant to be the historic figure the crew describes.


title: Star Trek: First Contact

text: A group of Borg invade "Enterprise"s lower decks, assimilating crew and modifying the ship. Picard and a team attempt to reach engineering to disable the Borg with a corrosive gas, but are forced back; the android Data is captured in the melee. A frightened Lily corners Picard with a weapon, but he gains her trust. The two escape the Borg-infested area of the ship by creating a diversion in the holodeck. Picard, Worf, and the ship's navigator, Lieutenant Hawk, travel outside the ship in space suits to stop the Borg from calling reinforcements by using the navigational deflector, but Hawk is assimilated in the process. As the Borg continue to assimilate more decks, Worf suggests destroying the ship, but Picard angrily calls him a coward. Lily confronts the captain and makes him realize he is acting irrationally because of his own past with the Borg. Picard orders an activation of the ship's self-destruct, then orders the crew to head for the escape pods while he stays behind to rescue Data.


title: Star Trek: First Contact

text: As Cochrane, Riker, and engineer Geordi La Forge prepare to activate the warp drive on "Phoenix", Picard discovers that the Borg Queen has grafted human skin onto Data, giving him the sensation of touch he has long desired so that she can obtain the android's encryption codes to the "Enterprise" computer.


title: Star Trek: First Contact

text: Although Picard offers himself to the Borg in exchange for Data's freedom and willingly become Locutus again, Data refuses to leave. He deactivates the self-destruct and fires torpedoes at "Phoenix". At the last moment the torpedoes miss, and the Queen realizes Data betrayed her. The android ruptures a coolant tank, and the corrosive vapor eats away the biological components of the Borg. With the Borg threat neutralized, Cochrane completes his warp flight. The next day the crew watches from a distance as an alien Vulcan ship, attracted by the "Phoenix" warp test, lands on Earth. Cochrane greets the aliens. Having ensured the correction of the timeline, Picard bids Lily farewell and the "Enterprise" crew slip away and return to the 24th century.


title: Star Trek: First Contact

text: "First Contact" is the first film in the "Star Trek" film series in which none of the main characters from "" appear. Rather, the main cast of "" play the following characters:


title: Star Trek: First Contact

text: The film also introduced the voice of the Borg character, played by Jeff Coopwood, uttering the memorable line: ""Resistance is futile,"" which was also the film's tagline. The Borg's ominous warning was: ""We are the Borg. Lower your shields and surrender your ships. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service us. Resistance is futile.""


title: Star Trek: First Contact

text: Several of "The Next Generation"s recurring characters also appeared in the film; Dwight Schultz reprised his role of Lieutenant Reginald Barclay and Patti Yasutake briefly appeared as Nurse . Whoopi Goldberg was not asked to return as Guinan, a wise bartender whose homeworld was destroyed by the Borg. Goldberg only learned about the decision through the newspapers. "What can I say? I wanted to do it because I didn't think you could do anything about the Borg without [my character]", she said, "but apparently you can, so they don't need me."


title: Star Trek: First Contact

text: Michael Horton appears as a bloodied and stoic Starfleet Security Officer; his character would be given the name Lt. Daniels in the . Neal McDonough plays Lt. Hawk, the "Enterprise" helmsman who aids in the defense of the ship until he is assimilated and killed. McDonough was cavalier about his role as a disposable "redshirt", saying that since one of the characters in the deflector dish battle had to die, "that would be me".


title: Star Trek: First Contact

text: The third draft of the script added cameos by two actors from the sister television series "", which was in its when the film was released. Robert Picardo appears as the "Enterprise"s Emergency Medical Hologram; Picardo played the holographic Doctor in "Voyager". He won the cameo after suggesting to producers that the "Enterprise" should have the same technology as "Voyager". Picardo's line "I'm a doctor, not a door stop", is an allusion to the "Star Trek" original series character Dr. Leonard McCoy. Picardo's fellow "Voyager" actor Ethan Phillips, who played Neelix, cameos as a nightclub maître d' in the holodeck scene. Phillips recalled that the producers wanted the fans to be left guessing whether he was the person who played Neelix or not, as he did not appear in the credits; "It was just kind of a goofy thing to do." During production, there were incorrect rumors that Avery Brooks would reprise his role as "" captain Benjamin Sisko. As with many "Star Trek" productions, new, disposable redshirt characters are killed off over the course of the plot.


title: Star Trek: First Contact

text: In December 1992, Paramount Pictures executives approached "Star Trek: The Next Generation" producer Rick Berman and engaged him to create two films featuring the cast of the television series. Berman decided to develop two screenplays simultaneously, and prioritize the most promising one for the first film. The effort of writers Brannon Braga and Ronald D. Moore was chosen and developed into "Star Trek Generations". Two months after the release of "Generations", Paramount decided to produce the second feature for a winter holiday 1996 release. Paramount wanted Braga and Moore, who had written the "Generations" script and a number of "Next Generation" episodes, to pen the screenplay. Berman told Braga and Moore that he wanted them to think about doing a story involving time travel. Braga and Moore, meanwhile, wanted to use the Borg. "Right on the spot, we said maybe we can do both, the Borg and time travel," Moore recalled. The Borg had not been seen in full force since the fourth-season episode of "The Next Generation", "The Best of Both Worlds" and had never been heavily featured in the series due to budget constraints and the fear that they would lose their scare factor. "The Borg were really liked by the fans, and we liked them," Moore said. "They were fearsome. They were "unstoppable". Perfect foils for a feature story."


title: Star Trek: First Contact

text: In deciding to combine the two-story ideas, the writers decided that the time travel element could play out as the Borg attempt to prevent humanity from ever reaching space and becoming a threat. "Our goals at that point were to create a story that was wonderful and a script that was [...] producible within the budget confines of a "Star Trek" film", said Berman. One major question was identifying the time period to which the Borg would travel. Berman's suggestion was the Renaissance; the Borg would attempt to prevent the dawn of modern European civilization. The first story draft, titled "Star Trek: Renaissance", had the crew of the "Enterprise" track the Borg to their hive in a castle dungeon. The film would have featured sword fights alongside phasers in 15th-century Europe, while Data became Leonardo da Vinci's apprentice. Moore was afraid that it risked becoming campy and over-the-top, while Stewart refused to wear tights. Braga, meanwhile, wanted to see the "birth of "Star Trek"", when the Vulcans and humans first met; "that, to me, is what made the time travel story fresh", he said.


title: Star Trek: First Contact

text: With the idea of "Star Trek"s genesis in mind, the central story became Cochrane's warp drive test and humanity's first contact. Drawing on clues from previous "Star Trek" episodes, Cochrane was placed in mid-21st-century Montana, where humans recover from a devastating world war. In the first script with this setting, the Borg attack Cochrane's lab, leaving the scientist comatose; Picard assumes Cochrane's place to continue the warp test and restore history. In this draft Picard has a love interest in the local photographer Ruby, while Riker leads the fight against the Borg on the "Enterprise". Another draft included John de Lancie's omnipotent character Q. Looking at the early scripts, the trio knew that serious work was needed. "It just didn't make sense [...] that Picard, the one guy who has a history with the Borg, never meets them," Braga recalled. Riker's and Picard's roles were swapped, and the planetside story was shortened and told differently. Braga and Moore focused the new arc on Cochrane himself, making the ideal future of "Star Trek" come from a flawed man. The idea of Borg fighting among period costumes coalesced into a "Dixon Hill" holographic novel sequence on the holodeck. The second draft, titled "Star Trek: Resurrection", was judged complete enough that the production team used it to plan expenses. The film was given a budget of $45 million, "considerably more" than "Generations" $35 million price tag; this allowed the production to plan a larger amount of action and special effects.


title: Star Trek: First Contact

text: Braga and Moore intended the film to be easily accessible to any moviegoer and work as a stand-alone story, yet still satisfy the devoted "Star Trek" fans. Since much of Picard's role made a direct reference to his time as a Borg in "The Next Generation" episodes "The Best of Both Worlds", the opening dream sequence was added to explain what happened to him in the show. The pair discarded an opening which would have established what the main characters had been doing since the last film in favor of quickly setting the story. While the writers tried to preserve the idea of the Borg as a mindless collective in the original draft, Paramount head Jonathan Dolgen felt that the script was not dramatic enough. He suggested adding an individual Borg villain with whom the characters could interact, which led to the creation of the Borg Queen.


title: Star Trek: First Contact

text: Cast member Frakes was chosen to direct. Frakes had not been the first choice for director; Ridley Scott and John McTiernan reportedly turned down the project. Stewart met a potential candidate and concluded that "they didn't know "Star Trek"". It was decided to stay with someone who understood the "gestalt of "Star Trek"", and Frakes was given the job. Frakes reported to work every day at 6:30 am. A major concern during the production was security—the script to "Generations" had been leaked online, and stronger measures were taken to prevent a similar occurrence. Some script pages were distributed on red paper to foil attempted photocopies or faxes; "We had real trouble reading them," Frakes noted.


title: Star Trek: First Contact

text: Frakes had directed multiple episodes of "The Next Generation", "Deep Space Nine" and "Voyager", but "First Contact" was his first feature film. Whereas Frakes had seven days of preparation followed by seven days of shooting for a given television episode, the director was given a ten-week preparation period before twelve weeks of filming, and had to get used to shooting for a 2.35:1 anamorphic ratio instead of the television standard 1.33:1. In preparation, he watched "Jaws", "Close Encounters of the Third Kind", "" and the works of James Cameron and Ridley Scott.


title: Star Trek: First Contact

text: Throughout multiple script revisions a number of titles were considered, including "Star Trek: Borg", "Star Trek: Destinies", "Star Trek: Future Generations" and "Star Trek: Generations II". The planned title of "Resurrection" was scrapped when 20th Century Fox announced the title of the fourth "Alien" film as "Alien Resurrection"; the film was rebranded "First Contact" on May 3, 1996.


title: Star Trek: First Contact

text: "First Contact" was the first "Star Trek" film to make significant use of computer-generated starship models, though physical miniatures were still used for the most important vessels. With the "Enterprise"-D destroyed during the events of "Generations", the task of creating a new starship fell to veteran "Star Trek" production designer Herman Zimmerman. The script's only guide on the appearance of the vessel was the line "the new "Enterprise" sleekly comes out of the nebula". Working with illustrator John Eaves, the designers conceived the new "Sovereign"-class "Enterprise"-E as "leaner, sleeker, and mean enough to answer any Borg threat you can imagine". Braga and Moore intended it to be more muscular and militaryesque. Eaves looked at the structure of previous "Enterprise" iterations, and designed a more streamlined, capable war vessel than the "Enterprise"-D, reducing the neck area of the ship and lengthening the nacelles. Eaves produced 30 to 40 sketches before he found a final design he liked and began making minor changes. Working from blueprints created by Paramount's Rick Sternbach, the model shop at effects house Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) fabricated a miniature over a five-month period. Hull patterns were carved out of wood, then cast and assembled over an aluminum armature. The model's panels were painted in an alternating matte and gloss scheme to add texture. The crew had multiple difficulties in prepping the miniature for filming; while the model shop originally wanted to save time by casting windows using a clear fiberglass, the material came out tacky. ILM instead cut the windows using a laser. Slides of the sets were added behind the window frames to make the interior seem more dimensional when the camera tracked past the ship.


title: Star Trek: First Contact

text: In previous films, Starfleet's range of capital ships had been predominantly represented by the "Constitution"-class "Enterprise" and just five other ship classes: the "Miranda" class from "", the "Excelsior" and the "Oberth" class from "", and the "Galaxy" and "Nebula" classes from "The Next Generation". ILM supervisor John Knoll insisted that "First Contact"s space battle prove the breadth of Starfleet's ship configurations. "Starfleet would probably throw everything it could at the Borg, including ships we've never seen before," he reasoned. "And since we figured a lot of the background action in the space battle would need to be done with computer-generated ships that needed to be built from scratch anyway, I realized there was no reason not to do some new designs." Alex Jaeger was appointed visual effects art director to the film and assigned the task of creating four new starships. Paramount wanted ships that would look different from a distance, so the director devised multiple hull profiles. Knoll and Jaeger had decided that the ships had to obey certain "Star Trek" ship precedents, with a saucer-like primary hull and elongated warp nacelles in pairs. The "Akira" class featured the traditional saucer section and nacelles combined with a catamaran-style double hull; the "Norway" class was based on the USS "Voyager"; the "Saber" class was a smaller ship with nacelles trailing off the tips of its saucer section; and the "Steamrunner" class featured twin nacelles trailing off the saucer and connected by an engineering section in the rear. Each design was modeled as a three-dimensional digital wire-frame model for use in the film.


title: Star Trek: First Contact

text: The film also required a number of smaller non-Starfleet designs. The warp ship "Phoenix" was conceived as fitting inside an old nuclear missile, meaning that the ship's nacelles had to fold into a space of less than . Eaves made sure to emphasize the mechanical aspect of the ship, to suggest it was a highly experimental and untested technology. The "Phoenix"s cockpit labels came from McDonnell-Douglas space shuttle manuals. Eaves considered the Vulcan ship a "fun" vessel to design. Only two major Vulcan ships had been previously seen in "Star Trek", including a courier vessel from "". Since the two-engine ship format had been seen many times, the artists decided to step away from the traditional ship layout, creating a more artistic than functional design. The ship incorporated elements of a starfish and a crab. Because of budget constraints, the full ship was realized as a computer-generated design. Only a boomerang-shaped landing foot was fabricated for the actors to interact with.


title: Star Trek: First Contact

text: The "Enterprise" interior sets were mostly new designs. The bridge was designed to be comfortable-looking, with warm colors. Among the new additions was a larger holographic viewscreen that would operate only when activated, leaving a plain wall when disabled. New flatscreen computer monitors were used for displays, using less space and giving the bridge a cleaner look. The new monitors also allowed for video playback that could simulate interaction with the actors. The designers created a larger and less-spartan ready room, retaining elements from the television series; Zimmerman added a set of golden three-dimensional "Enterprise" models to a glass case in the corner. The observation lounge was similar to the design in the "Enterprise"-D; the set itself was re-used from the television show, the only such set not to be struck following the filming of "Generations", though it was expanded and underwent a color change. Engineering was simulated with a large, three-story set, corridors, a lobby, and the largest warp core in the franchise to date. For its Borg-corrupted state, the engineering section was outfitted with Borg drone alcoves, conduits and Data's "assimilation table" where he is interrogated by the Queen. Some existing sets were used to save money; sickbay was a redress of the same location from "Voyager", while the USS "Defiant" scenes used "Deep Space Nine"s standing set. Some set designs took inspiration from the "Alien" film series, "Star Wars" and "2001: A Space Odyssey".


title: Star Trek: First Contact

text: The spacewalk scene on the "Enterprise" exterior was one of the most challenging sets to envision and construct for the film. The production had to design a space suit that looked practical rather than exaggerated. Fans were built into the helmets so that the actors would not get overheated, and neon lights built into the front so that the occupant's faces could be seen. When the actors first put the helmets on, the fully enclosed design made it hard to breathe; after a minute of wearing the suit Stewart became ill, and shooting was discontinued. The set for the ship's outer hull and deflector dish were built on gimbals at Paramount's largest sound stage, surrounded by bluescreen and rigged with wires for the zero gravity sequences. The stage was not large enough to accommodate a full-sized replica of the "Enterprise" dish, so Zimmerman had to scale down the plans by 15 percent.


title: Star Trek: First Contact

text: The Starfleet uniforms were redesigned for the film by the "Star Trek" costumer Bob Blackman to give a more militaristic feel, with grey padded shoulders, black torso/sleeves/leggings and colored undershirts/stripe cuffs. The new uniforms from this film were later adopted in the fifth season of "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine", beginning with "" and for the rest of the series, but the crew on "Star Trek: Voyager" continued to use the old "DS9" uniforms, due to being stuck in the Delta Quadrant. Since Blackman was also handling the costumes for the television series, non-Starfleet design clothes were delegated to Deborah Everton, a newcomer to "Star Trek" who was responsible for more than 800 costumes during production. Everton was tasked with updating the Borg's costumes to something new, but reminiscent of the television series. The bulky suits were made sleeker and outfitted with fiber optic lights. The time-travel aspect of the story also required period costumes for the mid 21st century and the 1940s "Dixon Hill" nightclub holodeck recreation. Everton enjoyed designing Woodard's costumes because the character went through many changes during the course of the film, switching from a utilitarian vest and pants in many shots to a glamorous dress during the holodeck scene.


title: Star Trek: First Contact

text: Everton and makeup designers Michael Westmore, Scott Wheeler, and Jake Garber wanted to upgrade the pasty white look the Borg had retained since "The Next Generation"s second season, born out of a need for budget-conscious television design. "I wanted it to look like they were [assimilated or "Borgified"] from the inside out rather than the outside in," Everton said. Each Borg had a slightly different design, and Westmore designed a new one each day to make it appear that there was an army of Borg; in reality, between eight and twelve actors filled all the roles as the costumes and makeup were so expensive to produce. Background Borg were simulated by half-finished mannequins. Westmore reasoned that since the Borg had traveled the galaxy, they would have assimilated other races besides humans. In the television series, much of the Borg's faces had been covered by helmets, but for "First Contact" the makeup artist removed the head coverings and designed assimilated versions of familiar "Star Trek" aliens such as Klingons, Bolians, Romulans, Bajorans, and Cardassians. Each drone received an electronic eyepiece. The blinking lights in each eye were programmed by Westmore's son to repeat a production member's name in Morse code.


title: Star Trek: First Contact

text: The makeup time for the Borg expanded from the single hour needed for television to five hours, in addition to the 30 minutes necessary to get into costume and 90 minutes to remove the makeup at the end of the day. While Westmore estimated that a fully staffed production would have around 50 makeup artists, "First Contact" had to make do with fewer than ten people involved in preparation, and at most 20 artists a day. Despite the long hours, Westmore's teams began to be more creative with the prosthetics even as they decreased their preparation times. "They were using two tubes, and then they were using three tubes, and then they were sticking tubes in the ears and up the nose," Westmore explained. "And we were using a very gooey caramel coloring, maybe using a little bit of it, but by the time we got to the end of the movie we had the stuff dripping down the side of [the Borg's] faces—it looked like they were leaking oil! So, at the very end [of the film], they're more ferocious."


title: Star Trek: First Contact

text: The Borg Queen was a challenge because she had to be unique among Borg but still retain human qualities; Westmore was conscious of avoiding comparisons to films like "Alien". The final appearance involved pale gray skin and an elongated, oval head, with coils of wire rather than hair. Krige recalled the first day she had her makeup applied: "I saw everyone cringing. I thought, great; they made this, and they've scared themselves!" Frakes noted that the Queen ended up being alluring in a disturbing way, despite her evil behavior and appearance. Zimmerman, Everton and Westmore combined their efforts to design and create the Borgified sections of the "Enterprise" to build tension and to make the audience feel that "[they are being fed] the Borg".


title: Star Trek: First Contact

text: Principal photography took a more leisurely pace than on "The Next Generation" because of a less hectic schedule; only four pages of script had to be filmed each day, as opposed to eight on the television series. "First Contact" saw the introduction of cinematographer Matthew F. Leonetti to the "Star Trek" franchise; Frakes hired him out of admiration for some of his previous work on films such as "Poltergeist" and "Strange Days". Leonetti was unfamiliar with the "Star Trek" mythos when Frakes approached him; to prepare for the assignment, he studied the previous four films in the franchise, each with a different cinematographer—"" (Donald Peterman), "" (Andrew Laszlo), "" (Hiro Narita), and "Generations" (John Alonzo). The cameraman also spent several days at the sets of "Voyager" and "Deep Space Nine" to observe filming.


title: Star Trek: First Contact

text: Leonetti devised multiple lighting methods for the "Enterprise" interiors for ship standard operations, "Red alert" status, and emergency power. He reasoned that since the ship was being taken over by a foreign entity, it required more dramatic lighting and framing. While much of the footage was shot at 50–70 mm focal lengths using anamorphic lenses, 14 mm spherical lenses were used for Borg's-eye-view shots. Leonetti preferred shooting with long lenses to provide a more claustrophobic feel, but made sure the length did not flatten the image. Handheld cameras were used for battle sequences so that viewers were brought into the action and the camera could follow the movements of the actors. The Borg scenes were received positively by test-screening audiences, so once the rest of the film had been completed, a Borg assimilation scene of the "Enterprise" crew was added in using some of the money left in the budget to add action.


title: Star Trek: First Contact

text: Since so many new sets had to be created, the production commenced filming with location photography. Four days were spent in the Titan Missile Museum, south of Tucson, Arizona—the disarmed nuclear missile was fitted with a fiberglass capsule shell to stand in for the "Phoenix"s booster and command module. The old missile silo provided a large set that the budget would have prohibited building from scratch, but the small size created difficulties. Each camera move was planned in advance to work around areas where the lighting would be added, and electricians and grips donned rock-climbing harnesses to move down the shaft and attach the lights. To give greater dimension to the rocket and lend the missile a futuristic appearance, Leonetti chose to offset the missile's metallic surface with complementary colors. Using different-colored gels made the rocket appear longer than it actually was; to complete the effect, shots from the "Phoenix"s nose downwards and from the engines up were filmed with a 30 mm lens to lengthen the missile.


title: Star Trek: First Contact

text: After the completion of the "Phoenix" shots, the crew moved to two weeks of nighttime shooting in the Angeles National Forest. Zimmerman created a village of fourteen huts to stand in for Montana; the cast enjoyed the scenes as a chance to escape their uniforms and wear "normal" clothes. The last location shoot was at an art deco restaurant in Los Angeles' Union Station, which stood in for the Dixon Hill holonovel; Frakes wanted a sharp contrast with the dark, mechanical Borg scenes. While the cinematographer wanted to shoot the scene in black and white, Paramount executives deemed the test footage "too experimental" and the idea was dropped. The site made using high-wattage lights impractical, so Leonetti opted to use dimmer master lights near the ceiling and took advantage of a large window to shine diffused lights through. To give the scene a black-and-white feel, Leonetti made sure to use light without any coloration. "I like creating separation with lighting as opposed to using color," he explained. "You can't always rely on color because the actor might start to melt into the background." By separating the backlights, Leonetti made sure that the principal actors stood out of the backdrop. The shoot used a ten-piece orchestra, 15 stuntmen, and 120 extras to fill the seats. Among the nightclub patrons were Braga, Moore, and the film's stunt coordinator, Ronnie Rondell.


title: Star Trek: First Contact

text: After location shooting was completed, shooting on the new Engineering set began May 3. The set lasted less than a day in its pristine condition before it was "Borgified". Filming then proceeded to the bridge. During normal operation scenes, Leonetti chose to cast crosslighting on the principals; this required the ceiling of the set to be removed and lighting grids to be situated around the sides. These lights were then directed towards the actors' faces at 90-degree angles. The set was lined with window paneling backed by red lights, which would blink intermittently during red-alert status. These lights were supplemented by what Leonetti called "interactive light"; these were off-stage, red-gelled lights that cast flashing rims on the bridge set and heads of the crew. For the Borg intrusion, the lighting originated solely from instrument panels and red-alert displays. The fill light on these scenes was reduced so that the cast would pass through dark spots on the bridge and interiors out of the limited range of these sources. Small 30- and 50-watt lights were used to throw localized shafts of light onto the sets.


title: Star Trek: First Contact

text: Next came the action sequences and the battle for the "Enterprise", a phase the filmmakers dubbed "Borg Hell". Frakes directed the Borg scenes similar to a horror film, creating as much suspense as possible. To balance these elements he added more comedic elements to the Earth scenes, intended to momentarily relieve the audience of tension before building it up again. Leonetti reconfigured the lighting to reflect the takeover of the ship interiors. "When the ship gets Borgified, everything is changed into more of a squared-off, robotic look with sharp edges but rounded images," he explained. To give the corridor walls more shape, Leonetti lit them from underneath. Since the halls were so small and the ceilings would be visible in many of the shots, special attention was paid to hiding the light fixtures.


title: Star Trek: First Contact

text: For the live-action spacewalk scenes, visual-effects supervisor Ronald B. Moore spent two weeks of bluescreen photography at the deflector set. Frakes regarded filming the scene to be the most tedious in the film because of the amount of preparation it took for each day's shoot. Since the rest of the "Enterprise"-E, as well as the backdrop of Earth, were to be added later in post-production, it became confusing to coordinate shots. Moore used a laptop with digital reproductions of the set to orient the crew and help Frakes understand what the finished shot would look like. A one-armed actor portrayed the Borg whose arm Worf slices off to accurately portray the effect intended, and the actors' shoes were fitted with lead weights to remind the actors they were to move slowly as if actually wearing gravity boots. McDonough recalled that he joined Stewart and Dorn in asking whether they could do the shots without the weights, as "they hired us because we are actors", but the production insisted on using them.


title: Star Trek: First Contact

text: The last scene filmed was the film's first, Picard's Borg nightmare. One camera shot begins inside the iris of Picard's eyeball and pulls back to reveal the captain aboard a massive Borg ship. The shot continues to pull back and reveal the exterior of a Borg ship. The scene was inspired by a New York City production of "" in which the stage surrounded the audience, giving a sense of realism. The shot was filmed as three separate elements merged with digital effects. The crew used a 50 mm lens to make it easier for the effects team to dissolve the closeup shots with the other elements. Starting from Stewart's eye, the camera pulled back , requiring the key light to increase in intensity up to 1,000 foot-candles so that there was enough depth to keep the eye sharp. The surface of the stage proved too uneven to accomplish the smooth dolly pullback required by the effects team, who needed a steady shot to blend a computer-generated version of Picard's eye with the pullback. The dolly track was raised off the stage floor and layered with pieces of double-thick birch plywood, chosen for its smooth finish. The entire set for the scene was wide and high; gaps left by the dolly reveal were filled in later digitally. Principal photography finished on July 2, 1996, two days over schedule but still under budget. Shooting took a total of sixty days.


title: Star Trek: First Contact

text: The majority of "First Contact"s effects were handled by Industrial Light & Magic under the supervision of John Knoll. Smaller effects sequences, such as phaser fire, computer graphics, and transporter effects, were delegated to a team led by visual-effects supervisor David Takemura. Accustomed to directing episodes for the television series, Frakes was frequently reminded by effects artist Terry Frazee to "think big, blow everything up". Most of the effects sequences were planned using low-resolution computer-generated animatics. These rough animated storyboards established length, action and composition, allowing the producers and director to ascertain how the sequences would play out before they were shot.


title: Star Trek: First Contact

text: "First Contact" was the last film to feature a physical model of the "Enterprise". For the ship's dramatic introduction, the effects team combined motion control shots of the "Enterprise" model with a computer-generated background. Sequence supervisor Dennis Turner, who had created "Generations" energy ribbon and specialized in creating natural phenomena, was charged with creating the star cluster, modeled after the Eagle Nebula. The nebular columns and solid areas were modeled with basic wireframe geometry, with surface shaders applied to make the edges of the nebula glow. A particle render that ILM had devised for the earlier tornado film "Twister" was used to create a turbulent look within the nebula. Once the shots of the "Enterprise" had been captured, Turner inserted the ship into the computer-generated background and altered its position until the images matched up.


title: Star Trek: First Contact

text: The opening beauty pass of the new "Enterprise" was the responsibility of visual-effects cinematographer Marty Rosenberg, who handled all the other miniatures, explosions, and some live-action bluescreen elements. Rosenberg had previously shot some of the "Enterprise"-D effects for "Generations", but had to adjust his techniques for the new model; the cinematographer used a 50 mm lens instead of the 35 mm used for "Generations" because the smaller lens made the new "Enterprise"s dish appear stretched out. Knoll decided to shoot the model from above and below as much as possible; side views made the ship appear too flat and elongated. Rosenberg preferred motion-control passes of ships over computer-generated versions, as it was much easier to capture a high level of detail with physical models rather than trying to recreate it by computer graphics.


title: Star Trek: First Contact

text: For the Borg battle, Knoll insisted on closeup shots that were near the alien vessel, necessitating a physical model. ILM layered their model with an additional five inches of etched brass over a glowing neon lightbox for internal illumination. To make the Borg vessel appear even larger than it was, Knoll made sure that an edge of it was facing the camera like the prow of a ship and that the Cube broke the edges of the frame. To give the Cube greater depth and texture, Rosenberg shot the vessel with harsher light. "I created this really odd, raking three-quarter backlight coming from the right or left side, which I balanced out with nets and a couple of little lights. I wanted it to look scary and mysterious, so it was lit like a point, and we always had the camera dutched to it; we never just had it coming straight at us," he said. Small lights attached to the Cube's surface helped to create visual interest and convey scale; the model was deliberately shot with a slow, determined pacing to contrast with the Federation ships engaged in battle with the Borg. The impact of Federation weaponry on the Borg Cube was simulated using a model of the Cube. The model had specific areas which could be blown up multiple times without damaging the miniature. For the final explosion of the Cube, Rosenberg shot ten Cube miniatures with explosive-packed lightweight skins. The Cubes were suspended from pipes sixty feet above the camera on the ground. Safety glass was placed over the lens to prevent damage, while the camera was covered with plywood to protect it from bits of plastic that rained down after each explosion. The smaller Borg sphere was a model that was shot separately from the Cube and digitally added in post-production. The time-travel vortex the Sphere creates was simulated with a rocket re-entry effect; bowshock forms in front of the ship, then streams backwards at high speed. Interactive lighting was played across the computer-generated "Enterprise" model for when the ship is caught in the time vortex.


title: Star Trek: First Contact

text: The miniature "Enterprise" was again used for the spacewalk sequence. Even on the large model, it was hard to make the miniature appear realistic in extreme close-up shots. To make the pullback shot work, the camera had to be within one eighth of an inch from the model. Painter Kim Smith spent several days on a tiny area of the model to add enough surface detail for the close-up, but even then the focus was barely adequate. To compensate, the crew used a wider-angle lens and shot at the highest f-stop they could. The live-action scenes of the spacewalking crew were then digitally added. Wide shots used footage of photo doubles walking across a large bluescreen draped across ILM's parking lot at night.


title: Star Trek: First Contact

text: ILM was tasked with imagining what the immediate assimilation of an "Enterprise" crewmember would look like. Jaeger came up with a set of cables that sprang from the Borg's knuckles and buried themselves in the crewmember's neck. Wormlike tubes would course through the victim's body and mechanical devices break the skin. The entire transformation was created using computer-generated imagery. The wormlike geometry was animated over the actor's face, then blended in with the addition of a skin texture over the animation. The gradual change in skin tone was simulated with shaders.


title: Star Trek: First Contact

text: Frakes considered the entrance of the Borg Queen—when her head, shoulders, and steel spine are lowered by cables and attached to her body—as the "signature visual effect in the film". The scene was difficult to execute, taking ILM five months to finish. Jaeger devised a rig that would lower the actress on the set, and applied a prosthetic spine over a blue suit so that ILM could remove Krige's lower body. This strategy enabled the filmmakers to incorporate as many live-action elements as possible without resorting to further digital effects. To make the prosthetics appear at the proper angle when her lower body was removed, Krige extended her neck forward so it appeared in line with the spine. Knoll did not want it to seem that the Queen was on a hard, mechanical rig; "we wanted her to have the appropriate 'float'," he explained. Using separate motion control passes on the set, Knoll shot the lower of the upper torso and the secondary sequence with Krige's entire body. A digital version of the Borg body suit was used for the lowering sequence, at which point the image was morphed back to the real shot of Krige's body. The animated claws of the suit were created digitally as well using a detailed model. As reference to the animators, the shot required Krige to realistically portray "the strange pain or satisfaction of being reconnected to her body".


title: Star Trek: First Contact

text: Jerry Goldsmith scored "First Contact", his third "Star Trek" feature. He wrote a sweeping main title which begins with Alexander Courage's "Star Trek" fanfare. Instead of composing a menacing theme to underscore the Borg, Goldsmith wrote a pastoral theme linked to humanity's hopeful first contact. The theme uses a four-note motif used in Goldsmith's "Star Trek V: The Final Frontier" score, which is used in "First Contact" as a friendship theme and general thematic link. A menacing march with touches of synthesizers was used to represent the Borg. In addition to composing new music, Goldsmith used music from his previous "Star Trek" scores, including his theme from "The Motion Picture". The Klingon theme from the same film is used to represent Worf.


title: Star Trek: First Contact

text: Because of delays with Paramount's "The Ghost and the Darkness", the already-short four-week production schedule was cut to just three weeks. While Berman was concerned about the move, Goldsmith hired his son, Joel, to assist. The young composer provided additional music for the film, writing three cues based on his father's motifs and a total of 22 minutes of music. Joel used variations of his father's Borg music and the Klingon theme as Worf fights hand-to-hand (Joel said that he and his father decided to use the theme for Worf separately). When the Borg invade sickbay and the medical hologram distracts them, Joel wrote what critic Jeff Bond termed "almost Coplandesque" material of tuning strings and clarinet, but the cue was unused. While Joel composed many of the film's action cues, his father contributed to the spacewalk and "Phoenix" flight sequences. During the fight on the deflector dish, Goldsmith used low-register electronics punctuated by stabs of violent, dissonant strings.


title: Star Trek: First Contact

text: In a break with "Star Trek" film tradition, the soundtrack incorporated two licensed songs: Roy Orbison's "Ooby Dooby" and Steppenwolf's "Magic Carpet Ride". GNP Crescendo president Neil Norman explained that the decision to include the tracks was controversial, but said that "Frakes did the most amazing job of integrating those songs into the story that we had to use them".


title: Star Trek: First Contact

text: GNP released the "First Contact" soundtrack on December 2, 1996. The album contained 51 minutes of music, with 35 minutes of Jerry Goldsmith's score, 10 minutes of additional music by Joel Goldsmith, "Ooby Dooby" and "Magic Carpet Ride". The compact disc shipped with CD-ROM features only accessible if played on a personal computer, including interviews with Berman, Frakes, and Goldsmith.


title: Star Trek: First Contact

text: On April 2, 2012, GNP Crescendo Records announced a limited-edition collector's CD featuring the complete score by Jerry Goldsmith (with additional music by Joel Goldsmith), newly remastered by recording engineer Bruce Botnick, with an accompanying 16-page booklet including informative notes by Jeff Bond and John Takis. The expanded album [GNPD 8079] runs 79 minutes and includes three tracks of alternates.


title: Star Trek: First Contact

text: Frakes believes that the main themes of "First Contact"—and "Star Trek" as a whole—are loyalty, friendship, honesty, and mutual respect. This is evident in the film when Picard chooses to rescue Data rather than evacuate the ship with the rest of the crew. The film makes a direct comparison between Picard's hatred of the Borg and refusal to destroy the "Enterprise" and that of Captain Ahab in Herman Melville's novel "Moby-Dick". The moment marks a turning point in the film as Picard changes his mind, symbolized by his putting down his phaser. A similar "Moby-Dick" reference was made in "Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan" and although Braga and Moore did not want to repeat it, they decided it worked so well they could not leave it out.


title: Star Trek: First Contact

text: In "First Contact", the individually inscrutable and faceless Borg fulfil the role of the similarly unreadable whale in Melville's work. Picard, like Ahab, has been hurt by his nemesis, and author Elizabeth Hinds said it makes sense that Picard should "opt for the perverse alternative of remaining on board ship to fight" the Borg rather than take the only sensible option left, to destroy the ship. Several lines in the film refer to the 21st-century dwellers being primitive, with the people of the 24th century having evolved to a more utopian society. In the end, it is Lily (the 21st-century woman) who shows Picard (the 24th-century man) that his quest for revenge is the primitive behavior that humans had evolved to not use. Lily's words cause Picard to reconsider, and he quotes Ahab's words of vengeance, recognizing the death wish embedded therein.


title: Star Trek: First Contact

text: The nature of the Borg in "First Contact" has been the subject of critical discussion. Author Joanna Zylinska notes that while other alien species are tolerated by humanity in "Star Trek", the Borg are viewed differently because of their cybernetic alterations and the loss of freedom and autonomy. Members of the crew who are assimilated into the Collective are subsequently viewed as "polluted by technology" and less than human. Zylinska draws comparisons between the technological distinction of humanity and machine in "Star Trek" and the work of artists such as Stelarc. Oliver Marchart drew parallels between the Borg's combination of many into an artificial One and Thomas Hobbes's concept of the Leviathan. The nature of perilous first contact between species, as represented by films such as "Independence Day", "Aliens" and "First Contact," is a marriage of classic fears of national invasion and the loss of personal identity.


title: Star Trek: First Contact

text: 1996 marked the 30th anniversary of the "Star Trek" franchise. The franchise was on rocky ground; ratings for "Deep Space Nine" and "Voyager" had shed millions of viewers, being bested by "" as the highest-rated syndicated series. Some fans remained upset Paramount cancelled "The Next Generation" at the height of its popularity, and "Generations" was a commercial success but not critically praised.


title: Star Trek: First Contact

text: "First Contact" was heavily marketed, to an extent not seen since the release of "Star Trek: The Motion Picture" in 1979. Several novelizations of the film were written for different age groups. Playmates Toys produced six and nine-inch action figures in addition to ship models and a phaser. Two "making of" television specials premiered on HBO and the Sci-Fi Channel, as well as being promoted during a 30th-anniversary television special on UPN. The theatrical trailer to the film was included on a "Best of Star Trek" music compilation, released at the same time as the "First Contact" soundtrack. Simon & Schuster Interactive developed a Borg-themed video game for Macintosh and Windows personal computers. The game, "", functioned as an interactive movie with scenes filmed at the same time as "First Contact" production. A video game adaptation of the film was also announced by Spectrum HoloByte, and would have taken the form of a real-time strategy game set entirely on the "Enterprise" during the Borg takeover, though it was never released. Paramount heavily marketed the film on the internet via a "First Contact" web site, which averaged 4.4 million hits a week during the film's opening run, the largest amount of traffic ever on a motion-picture site.


title: Star Trek: First Contact

text: The film premiered on November 18, 1996, at Mann's Chinese Theater in Hollywood, Los Angeles. The main cast save Spiner were in attendance, as were Moore, Braga, Jerry Goldsmith, and producer Marty Hornstein. Other "Star Trek" actors present included DeForest Kelley, René Auberjonois, Avery Brooks, Colm Meaney, Armin Shimerman, Terry Farrell, Kate Mulgrew, Roxann Dawson, Jennifer Lien, Robert Duncan McNeill, Ethan Phillips, Tim Russ, Garrett Wang and Robert Picardo. After the screening, 1,500 guests crossed the street to the Hollywood Colonnade, where the interiors had been dressed to match settings from the film: the holodeck nightclub, part of the bridge, a "star room", the Borg hive and the "crash 'n' burn lounge". The film received a royal premiere in the United Kingdom, with the first screening attended by Charles, Prince of Wales.


title: Star Trek: First Contact

text: "First Contact" opened in 2,812 theaters beginning November 22, grossing $30.7 million its first week and making it the top movie at the US box office. The film was knocked out of the top place the following week by "101 Dalmatians", earning $25.5 million. The film went on to gross $77 million in its first four weeks, remaining in the top-ten box office during that time. It closed with a US & Canadian gross of $92,027,888 and an international gross of $54 million for a total of $146 million worldwide.


title: Star Trek: First Contact

text: "First Contact" opened in Britain on December 13, 1996, at number two and was the first "Star Trek" film not to reach number one in that market since "The Wrath of Khan". It was still a box office success, earning £8,735,340 to become the highest grossing film in the series in that territory until the release of the "Star Trek" reboot film in 2009. The film was the best-performing "Star Trek" film in international markets until 2009's "Star Trek" film, and Paramount's best showing in markets such as New Zealand, making $315,491 from 28 sites by year's end.


title: Star Trek: First Contact

text: "First Contact" garnered positive reviews on release. Audiences surveyed by CinemaScore gave the film a grade "A−" on scale of A to F. Ryan Gilbey of "The Independent" considered the film wise to dispense with the cast of "The Original Series:" "For the first time, a "Star Trek" movie actually looks like something more ambitious than an extended TV show," he wrote. Conversely, critic Bob Thompson felt that "First Contact" was more in the spirit of the 1960s television series than any previous installment. "The Globe and Mail" Elizabeth Renzeti said that "First Contact" succeeded in improving on the "stilted" previous entry in the series, and that it featured a renewed interest in storytelling. Kenneth Turan of the "Los Angeles Times" wrote, ""First Contact" does everything you'd want a "Star Trek" film to do, and it does it with cheerfulness and style." Adrian Martin of "The Age" noted that the film was geared towards pleasing fans: "Strangers to this fanciful world first delineated by Gene Roddenberry will just have to struggle to comprehend as best they can," he wrote, but "cult-followers will be in heaven". "The New York Times" Janet Maslin said that the "film's convoluted plot will boggle all but hard-core devotees" of the series, while "Variety"'s Joe Leydon wrote that the film did not require intimate knowledge of the series and that fans and non-fans alike would enjoy the film. While Renzetti considered the lack of old characters from the previous seven movies a welcome change, Maslin said that without the original stars, "The series now lacks [...] much of its earlier determination. It has morphed into something less innocent and more derivative than it used to be, something the noncultist is ever less likely to enjoy." Conversely, Roger Ebert called "First Contact" one of the best "Star Trek" films, and James Berardinelli found the film the most entertaining "Star Trek" feature in a decade; "It has single-handedly revived the "Star Trek" movie series, at least from a creative point of view," he wrote.