The Document Foundation Planet

 

July 11, 2025

Official TDF Blog

The Role of XML in Interoperability

When different systems, applications or organisations need to communicate with each other and actually understand what is being said, interoperability is key. It enables a hospital’s software to communicate with an insurance company, for example, or one vendor’s inventory system to synchronise with another’s logistics platform.

At the heart of many of these data exchanges is XML.

XML (Extensible Markup Language) may not be new or flashy, but it remains one of the most powerful tools for achieving reliable, structured interoperability across diverse platforms.

Why is interoperability so hard?

Systems are built using different programming languages, data models and communication protocols. Without a shared format or structure, exchanging data can result in a complex web of custom APIs, ad hoc conversions, and manual adjustments.

To get systems working together seamlessly, you need:

  • A standardised structure for data.
  • A way to validate that structure.
  • A format that is language-agnostic and platform-neutral.

XML ticks all these boxes.

How XML enables interoperability

1. Self-describing structure

XML uses tags to clearly label data:

<customer>
   <name>Maria Ortega</name>
   <id>87234</id>
</customer>

This means that a receiving system doesn’t have to guess what each field means, as it is explicitly defined. This reduces the risk of misinterpretation and supports automated parsing.

2. Schema validation

Using XSD (XML Schema Definition) or DTD (Document Type Definition), you can define the rules that an XML document must adhere to, such as which elements are required, which data types are valid and what the structure must be.

This is critical for:

  • verifying incoming data
  • preventing malformed or incomplete exchanges
  • ensuring consistency across multiple systems

3. Namespaces for avoiding collisions

XML namespaces prevent tag name conflicts when data from different sources is combined.

<doc xmlns:h=”http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/” xmlns:f=”http://www.w3schools.com/furniture”>
   <h:table>…</h:table>
   <f:table>…</f:table>
</doc>

Without namespaces, systems could misinterpret elements with the same name but different meanings.

4. Cross-platform compatibility

XML is plain text. Any system that can read a file can read it, whether it’s written in Java, .NET, Python or COBOL. This makes it ideal for long-term data exchange and integration between legacy and modern systems.

XML in real-world interoperability

Healthcare: HL7 CDA/FHIR

Hospitals, clinics, insurance providers and pharmacies rely on XML-based formats to exchange clinical records, billing data and prescriptions. HL7’s CDA (Clinical Document Architecture) is a strict XML schema that is used worldwide.

In government, XML is used for e-government forms and tax data.

Tax filings, business registrations and compliance documents are often submitted in XML format. This ensures consistent structure across various jurisdictions and software vendors.

Publishing: DITA and JATS

XML standards are used for modular content creation and journal publishing to allow interoperability between authors, editors, publishers, and archive systems, even if they are using different tools.

Finance: XBRL

XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language) uses XML to standardise financial reports, enabling regulators, investors and analysts to automatically process and compare data from thousands of companies.

Summary

Interoperability isn’t just about convenience. It’s about accuracy, consistency and trust. XML’s rigidity helps to enforce that trust.

XML may not be trendy, but it remains the backbone of system-to-system interoperability. Its structured format, validation tools and long track record make it essential wherever precision and compatibility are non-negotiable.

If your systems need to communicate reliably and seamlessly across platforms, XML is one of the best languages they can use.

by Italo Vignoli at July 11, 2025 08:22 AM

July 10, 2025

LibreOffice QA Blog

LibreOffice 25.8 RC1 is available for testing

LibreOffice 25.8 will be released as final at the end of August, 2025 ( Check the Release Plan ) being LibreOffice 25.8 Release Candidate 1 (RC1) the third pre-release since the development of version 25.8 started at the beginning of December, 2024. Since the previous release, LibreOffice 25.8 Beta1, 178 commits have been submitted to the code repository and 101 issues got fixed. Check the release notes to find the new features included in this version of LibreOffice.

LibreOffice 25.8 RC1 can be downloaded for Linux, macOS and Windows, and it will replace the standard installation.

In case you find any problem in this pre-release, please report it in Bugzilla ( You just need a legit email account in order to create a new account ).

For help, you can contact the QA Team directly in the QA IRC channel or via Matrix.

LibreOffice is a volunteer-driven community project, so please help us to test – we appreciate it!

Happy testing!!

Download it now!

by x1sc0 at July 10, 2025 11:00 AM

July 08, 2025

Official TDF Blog

Danish Ministry switching from Microsoft Office/365 to LibreOffice

Flag and text saying Danish Ministry switching from Microsoft Office/365 to LibreOffice

Following the example of the German state of Schleswig-Holstein, which is moving 30,000 PCs from Microsoft Office/365 to LibreOffice, the Danish Ministry of Digitalisation is doing the same.

Caroline Stage Olsen, the country’s Digitalisation Minister, plans to move half of the employees to LibreOffice over the summer, and if all goes as expected, the entire Ministry will be free from Microsoft Office/365 later in the year.

In a LinkedIn post, Olsen summarised the reasons for switching to LibreOffice:

We must never make ourselves so dependent on so few that we can no longer act freely. Because far too much public digital infrastructure is today tied up with very few foreign suppliers. This makes us vulnerable. Also financially.

That is why we are now testing in parallel at the Ministry of Digitization how it works in practice when we work with open source solutions. Several municipalities are doing the same.

Not because we think it’s easy – but because we know it’s necessary to lead the way if we want to create more competition and innovation – and reduce our dependence on the few.

We in the LibreOffice project welcome this move, and look forward to seeing more governments and organisations getting control of their digital sovereignty and using public money for public code.

by Mike Saunders at July 08, 2025 08:50 AM

Miklos Vajna

Interdependent tracked changes improvements in Writer, part 2

Writer has some support for interdependent (or hierarchical) tracked changes: e.g. the case when you have a delete on top of an insert. See the first post for background.

This work is primarily for Collabora Online, but the feature is available in desktop Writer as well.

Motivation

With the already mentioned improvements in place, a few areas were still lacking: we didn't have UI for all cases where the DOCX import was possible already; combining tracked changes (redlines) were not complete (so you don't have to reject all parts of a logical redline one by one) and some of the undo/redo code didn't work as expected.

Results so far

Here is a sample case where the UI was missing to create something that was possible to import from DOCX: a format redline on top of an insert redline.

If you had a document with an insert:

Interdependent tracked change: just insert

And you selected BBB to mark those characters as bold, we just updated the existing insert redline to be bold:

Interdependent tracked change: old, format is not tracked separately

But now we track a format change on top of the insert separately:

Interdependent tracked change: new, format is tracked separately

This is also visible if you open the track changes dialog, which explains that now you have part of the insert redline covered by a format redline:

Interdependent tracked change: UI dialog now showing multiple redlines

How is this implemented?

If you would like to know a bit more about how this works, continue reading... :-)

As usual, the high-level problem was addressed by a series of small changes. Core side:

Want to start using this?

You can get a development edition of Collabora Online 25.04 and try it out yourself right now: try the development edition. Collabora intends to continue supporting and contributing to LibreOffice, the code is merged so we expect all of this work will be available in TDF's next release too (25.8).

by Miklos Vajna at July 08, 2025 06:43 AM

July 07, 2025

LibreOffice QA Blog

QA/Dev Report: June 2025

General Activities

  1. LibreOffice 25.2.4 was announced on June 6
  2. Olivier Hallot (TDF) added help for compact layout Pivot Tables, Writer table formula MOD and improved the help for Writer’s Send menu commands, font colour, text attributes for drawing objects, Calc shortcut keys, Calc’s LOOKUP function, Of-Pie charts and file conversion filters
  3. Pierre F. added help for Writer table formula INT
  4. Gábor Kelemen (Collabora) simplified code for VCL settings and did many other code cleanups
  5. Tomaž Vajngerl (Collabora) continued polishing support for embedded fonts in PowerPoint files
  6. Marco Cecchetti (Collabora) worked on LOKit used by Collabora Online
  7. Jaume Pujantell (Collabora) improved the import of ref fields in DOCX files
  8. Parth Raiyani (Collabora) makde it so the Layouts panel in Impress Sidebar now uses a native IconView widget instead of the ValueSet widget
  9. Miklós Vajna (Collabora) fixed a Writer list indent removal issue, implemented RTF export of section breaks right sections, fixed an issue with images inside shapes being sized incorrectly in RTF files and continued improving the handling of tracked changes that depend on each other
  10. Xisco Faulí (TDF) implemented Writer table formula MOD, added support for transparent fill colour in SVGs, removed the Euro converter wizard, added several new automated tests, upgraded many dependencies and did many code cleanups and optimisations
  11. Michael Stahl (Collabora) continued working on multi-user editing based on a conflict-free replicated data type (CRDT) and improved the stability of handling Writer comments within the Navigator
  12. Mike Kaganski (Collabora) fixed invisible tree view expansion triangles in Python script organizer, fixed an issue with storing selected encodings in the Text Import dialog, fixed a document read error, fixed an issue with accessing VBScript objects in macros, made menu command code more robust, fixed display of Cyrillic text in RTF files, fixed issues with pasting shapes between LibreOffice applications, fixed Manage Changes dialog not enabling Accept / Reject buttons initially, improved the display of Calc’s Number format dialog in the case of a selection containing different number locales, fixed an RTF table width issue, made bracketing of selected text more robust, fixed a Skia/Vulkan rendering issue affecting line numbers in Basic IDE, fixed an issue with Basic IIf function when used with array indexes, reduced console message noise when running LibreOffice from the command line and fixed several crashes. He also did many code cleanups and optimisations
  13. Caolán McNamara (Collabora) helped Heiko with vertical tabs, fixed crashes and many issues found by static analysers and did code cleanups and optimisations
  14. Stephan Bergmann (Collabora) worked on the WASM build
  15. László Németh added an indicator for justified lines with overly large word spacing
  16. Noel Grandin (Collabora) improved rendering speed of transparent shape fills dramatically, fixed a Windows GDI backend resource use issue seen in documents with lots of styles when the style preview is visible, made Skia rendering backend mandatory on macOS and improved the performance of style handling in Calc. He also did many code cleanups and optimisations
  17. Justin Luth (Collabora) fixed a DOCX export issue with mirrored page margins and fixed unwanted spacing in paragraph styles in certain imported DOCX files
  18. Michael Weghorn (TDF) continued cleaning up and reorganising accessibility-related code, fixed UI-related crashes and made Impress Slide pane accessible. He also worked on using native widgets in Qt UIs
  19. Balázs Varga (Collabora) fixed an issue with overly small line spacing in Impress placeholder boxes that shrink text upon overflow and did several improvements to the accessibility checker
  20. Patrick Luby implemented handling of macOS “Reverse Conversion” menu item, which helps users with Japanese keyboards and helped Heiko with vertical tabs
  21. Christian Lohmaier (TDF) fixed many build issues, improved the Windows WSL build setup and expanded Vim and VS Code integration features
  22. Jonathan Clark (TDF) implemented the ODF 1.0 style:script-type text property and made it so manually specifying a language for selected text sets this script-type hint, helping LibreOffice format the text in the expected way, fixed an issue with text pasted from Impress to Writer using a font from the wrong script and fixed mixed-direction text in Calc cells and Writer sometimes becoming overlapped (due to separate issues)
  23. Andreas Heinisch fixed an issue with Calc AutoFilter not showing updated settings after a reset
  24. Julien Nabet fixed a crash with embedded fonts in PPTX files and fixed some smaller errors, including swapped arguments in the help for Fourier function
  25. Bayram Çiçek (Collabora) fixed unwanted display of changes in paragraph numbering when showing tracked changes
  26. Heiko Tietze (TDF) applied vertical tabs to many dialogs while fixing issues, made the preview of line styles use an appropriate colour, fixed incorrect fill displayed in the preview image of Page Style dialog and rearranged Appearance options
  27. Kurt Nordback (Collabora) continued working on support for recent MSO chart types
  28. Sahil Gautam (Collabora) continued polishing the Libreoffice Theme rework
  29. Armin Le Grand (Collabora) did preparatory work for EditEngine rendering revamp
  30. Deepanshu Sharma made it so form properties are disabled when they are not available for changing
  31. Mihai Vasiliu did improvements in icon themes
  32. Asif Mohaideen made it so the default choice in the Image Compression dialog is set per the last used format
  33. Bogdan Buzea fixed issues found by static analysers
  34. Arnaud Versini did some code cleanups and optimisations
  35. Khaled Hosny (Alif Type) fixed saving font weight to documents
  36. Sarper Akdemir (Collabora) fixed spellcheck dialog preventing replacement of the period character
  37. Regina Henschel fixed an issue with PPTX shapes referencing guide elements and fixed an issue preventing deletion of columns in chart data tables
  38. Jim Chen made it possible to sort scripts in the macro object catalog
  39. David Gilbert implemented support for inserting password-protected PDFs as images
  40. Ujjawal Kumar worked on the Markdown import GSoC project

Kudos to Ilmari Lauhakangas for helping to elaborate this list.

Reported Bugs

488 bugs, 80 of which are enhancements, have been reported by 278 people.

Top 10 Reporters

  1. Telesto ( 42 )
  2. Heiko Tietze ( 36 )
  3. Eyal Rozenberg ( 30 )
  4. Mike Kaganski ( 17 )
  5. Gabor Kelemen (allotropia) ( 11 )
  6. Timur ( 9 )
  7. Regina Henschel ( 9 )
  8. Mihai Vasiliu ( 8 )
  9. nobu ( 8 )
  10. Michael H ( 7 )

Triaged Bugs

379 bugs have been triaged by 72 people.

Top 10 Triagers

  1. m_a_riosv ( 55 )
  2. Heiko Tietze ( 54 )
  3. Mike Kaganski ( 39 )
  4. V Stuart Foote ( 34 )
  5. Buovjaga ( 23 )
  6. Telesto ( 15 )
  7. Xisco Faulí ( 14 )
  8. akopf ( 11 )
  9. Saburo ( 8 )
  10. Olivier Hallot ( 8 )

Resolution of resolved bugs

344 bugs have been set to RESOLVED.

Check the following sections for more information about bugs resolved as FIXED, WORKSFORME and DUPLICATE.

Fixed Bugs

180 bugs have been fixed by 30 people.

Top 10 Fixers

  1. Heiko Tietze ( 37 )
  2. Mike Kaganski ( 33 )
  3. Noel Grandin ( 10 )
  4. Xisco Fauli ( 9 )
  5. Michael Weghorn ( 6 )
  6. Balazs Varga ( 6 )
  7. Jonathan Clark ( 5 )
  8. Caolán McNamara ( 5 )
  9. Olivier Hallot ( 4 )
  10. Regina Henschel ( 3 )

List of high severity bugs fixed

  1. tdf#164202 Every time I try to delete an object in a gallery folder that I inserted, LibreOffice crashes in vcl/source/bitmap/bitmap.cxx:212 ( Thanks to Oliver Specht )
  2. tdf#165481 multi GB memory leak caused by “Save AutoRecovery information” since LibreOffice Calc 24.2.7 ( Thanks to Noel Grandin )
  3. tdf#167019 Conditional formatting is not handled properly in 25.8 Beta ( Thanks to Noel Grandin )
  4. tdf#167112 MATH: Elements sidebar is empty ( Thanks to Noel Grandin )
  5. tdf#167114 GtkScrolledWindow not properly sized with vertical tabs ( Thanks to Caolán McNamara )
  6. tdf#167165 Writer crashes when cursor placed over a specific page number in TOC ( Thanks to Mike Kaganski )
  7. tdf#167254 LO crashes when opening a specific RTF file ( Thanks to Mike Kaganski )

List of crashes fixed

  1. tdf#164202 Every time I try to delete an object in a gallery folder that I inserted, LibreOffice crashes in vcl/source/bitmap/bitmap.cxx:212 ( Thanks to Oliver Specht )
  2. tdf#166837 Calc crashed after calculating descriptive statistics and then closing ( Thanks to Michael Weghorn )
  3. tdf#166932 Certain file crashes Writer with Skia off and Tabbed UI on, only on Windows platform ( Thanks to Noel Grandin )
  4. tdf#166939 Saving back a particular document (with a single-character autostyle name) crashes ( Thanks to Mike Kaganski )
  5. tdf#166943 EDITING: Crash on alt+X use on lone combining diacritical mark ( Thanks to Mike Kaganski )
  6. tdf#166996 Switching from tabbed to standard toolbar UI crashes in debug build ( Thanks to Mike Kaganski )
  7. tdf#167006 Trying to open an embedded object crashes ( Thanks to Mike Kaganski )
  8. tdf#167018 CRASH pasting a shape from Writer into draw ( Thanks to Mike Kaganski )
  9. tdf#167066 CRASH in SfxTabDialogController::ResetHdl(weld::Button &) (framedialog) ( Thanks to Heiko Tietze )
  10. tdf#167133 CRASH: Bracketing selected text deletes equation ( Thanks to Mike Kaganski )
  11. tdf#167165 Writer crashes when cursor placed over a specific page number in TOC ( Thanks to Mike Kaganski )
  12. tdf#167214 PPTX with failed embedded fonts crashes on save ( Thanks to Julien Nabet )
  13. tdf#167254 LO crashes when opening a specific RTF file ( Thanks to Mike Kaganski )
  14. tdf#167274 Crash opening Image Map dialog ( Thanks to Michael Weghorn )

List of old bugs ( more than 4 years old ) fixed

  1. tdf#100876 Difficulty to discover the Slide Pane ( Thanks to Michael Weghorn )
  2. tdf#117346 color of Auto-FILTER-▼-Button does not switch back from blue to black after Filter RESET, still shows old filter settings ( Thanks to Andreas Heinisch )
  3. tdf#119192 Text pasted from Impress to Writer switches CTL font to Western font in its style (see comment 5) ( Thanks to Jonathan Clark )
  4. tdf#121493 RTF rendering of tables with different column width fails ( Thanks to Mike Kaganski )
  5. tdf#123384 FILEOPEN DOCX MOD table formula is not working in LO ( Thanks to Olivier Hallot )
  6. tdf#126111 Font fallback is applied to Private Use Area (PUA) characters ( Thanks to Khaled Hosny )
  7. tdf#132286 Preview image on Page Style dialog shows fill applied incorrectly ( Thanks to Heiko Tietze )
  8. tdf#135580 Remove Euro Converter Wizard from Wizard menu ( Thanks to Xisco Fauli )
  9. tdf#136943 TOOLBAR: Can’t see last font name due to font name toolbar combobox having wrong height (Win, Linux kf5/kf6 with X11) ( Thanks to Caolán McNamara )
  10. tdf#56676 EDITING: Tables in databases based on calc are unwriteable – Form Properties show them as writable ( Thanks to Deepanshu Sharma )
  11. tdf#97169 macro object catalog items should be sortable ( Thanks to Jim Chen )

WORKSFORME bugs

39 bugs have been retested by 28 people.

Top 10 testers

  1. Telesto ( 4 )
  2. Regina Henschel ( 4 )
  3. m_a_riosv ( 4 )
  4. Olivier Hallot ( 3 )
  5. Dieter ( 2 )
  6. Timur ( 2 )
  7. Buovjaga ( 2 )
  8. Benoît Thébaudeau ( 1 )
  9. Ari Latvala ( 1 )
  10. Mike ( 1 )

DUPLICATED bugs

75 bugs have been duplicated by 22 people.

Top 10 testers

  1. Mike Kaganski ( 16 )
  2. V Stuart Foote ( 14 )
  3. m_a_riosv ( 8 )
  4. Heiko Tietze ( 7 )
  5. Telesto ( 4 )
  6. Regina Henschel ( 3 )
  7. Julien Nabet ( 3 )
  8. Buovjaga ( 2 )
  9. fpy ( 2 )
  10. BogdanB ( 2 )

Verified bug fixes

16 bugs have been verified by 15 people.

Top 10 Verifiers

  1. Julien Nabet ( 2 )
  2. Jonathan Clark ( 1 )
  3. Eyal Rozenberg ( 1 )
  4. steve ( 1 )
  5. raal ( 1 )
  6. Buovjaga ( 1 )
  7. Patrick (volunteer) ( 1 )
  8. Ming Hua ( 1 )
  9. m_a_riosv ( 1 )
  10. Xisco Faulí ( 1 )

Categorized Bugs

178 bugs have been categorized with a metabug by 24 people.

Top 10 Categorizers

  1. V Stuart Foote ( 37 )
  2. Eyal Rozenberg ( 33 )
  3. BogdanB ( 18 )
  4. Mihai Vasiliu ( 17 )
  5. Heiko Tietze ( 16 )
  6. Roman Kuznetsov ( 9 )
  7. Jonathan Clark ( 8 )
  8. Regina Henschel ( 5 )
  9. Aron Budea ( 4 )
  10. Olivier Hallot ( 4 )

Regression Bugs

48 bugs have been set as regressions by …

by x1sc0 at July 07, 2025 11:33 AM

July 04, 2025

Official TDF Blog

XML: a technology at the heart of our daily lives

In my last article, I mentioned XML several times, perhaps assuming that all users had a basic understanding of it. Rereading it, I realised that an introduction to XML was needed for non-technical users, those who use XML every day without realising it, when they open a document, check the weather, place or receive an order online, or issue a digital invoice. XML works silently behind the scenes.

But what exactly is XML and why should it matter to non-techies? I will try to explain it in simple terms.

XML stands for eXtensible Markup Language, a way of organising information in a format that is easy for both people and computers to understand, helping different applications communicate and exchange data using a common language. Put simply, XML is a digital container that clearly labels information.

For example, this is a shopping list in XML format:


<groceryList>
  <item>
    <name>Bread</name>
    <quantity>1 loaf</quantity>
  </item>
  <item>
    <name>Milk</name>
    <quantity>2 litres</quantity>
  </item>
</groceryList>

Labelling helps computers and software understand exactly what each piece of information means.

In a hyperconnected world like ours, where apps and systems share data, XML allows that data to move between very different systems, such as credit card management apps and online shops. Without a common language like XML, communication between these systems would be much more complicated and slower, or even impossible.

So, XML is integrated into most everyday activities, even though it is completely hidden from users:

  • All documents created by all office suites use XML, in some cases to facilitate transparency and interoperability, and in other cases to create a hidden layer of complexity with the aim of preventing transparency and interoperability.
  • All apps that provide weather forecasts obtain updates by reading XML data issued by weather agencies.
  • Almost all e-commerce applications use XML to manage communication between the website, the payment system, the bank and the shipping service.
  • All blogs and news sites use XML to automatically transmit new content to readers.

XML is clear and easy to read because it organises data in an orderly manner with labels that are understandable to both humans and computers; it is flexible, as it is not limited to a single type of information and can be customised for different scenarios, from cooking recipes to flight schedules; and it is compatible with all platforms.

To appreciate the value of XML, you don’t need to have a deep understanding of the language, just know that it exists and that – when used properly, as in the case of the ODF format – it has the potential to help users achieve and protect their digital sovereignty.

Of course, it is equally important to know that XML can be used in exactly the opposite way, as is the case with Microsoft 365’s OOXML format (and previously Office), to limit users’ digital sovereignty and perpetuate lock-in through artificial file complexity.

In summary, XML is a silent enabler that ensures that users’ apps, services and data all speak the same language.

The next time you open a document, check your favourite news site or follow an online delivery, remember that XML is working silently behind the scenes to ensure that everything runs smoothly. And try to imagine a digital world without XML, where a single company controls the data and, through it, the users.

by Italo Vignoli at July 04, 2025 08:20 AM

July 02, 2025

Official TDF Blog

LibreOffice project and community recap: June 2025

LibreOffice project and community recap banner

Here’s our summary of updates, events and activities in the LibreOffice project in the last four weeks – click the links to learn more…

  • We started the month with Episode 3 of the LibreOffice Podcast – this time looking at Quality Assurance (QA) in Free and Open Source Software. Watch it below – or on PeerTube.

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Annual Report banner

  • The end of Windows 10 is approaching, so it’s time to consider Linux and LibreOffice! That’s the message behind the “End of 10” campaign, which we’re supporting.

Old laptop with new software

Colour wheel being created in LibreOffice Calc

ODF logo

LibreOffice booth at the Linux Arena event in Pordenone, Italy

  • Before LibreOffice there was OpenOffice, and before OpenOffice there was StarOffice. And how was StarOffice developed? We talked to Stefan Soyka, who worked on the suite in the early ’90s, and has some entertaining stories to tell 😊

Stefan Soyka

  • New LibreOffice merchandise is here! We updated our Spreadshirt shop with new designs and many extra items. Buy something and support LibreOffice – some of the proceeds go back to the project!

LibreOffice T-shirts, bags and more

  • Registration is now open for the LibreOffice Conference 2025. Join us from 4 – 6 September in Budapest – we’ll have technical talks, workshops, social events and more…

LibreOffice Conference 2025 logo

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Keep in touch – follow us on Mastodon, X (formerly Twitter), Bluesky, Reddit and Facebook. Like what we do? Support our community with a donation – or join our community and help to make LibreOffice even better!

by Mike Saunders at July 02, 2025 02:12 PM

July 01, 2025

Official TDF Blog

📣 The New LibreOffice 25.2 User Guides Are Here!

The LibreOffice community has great news: the Writer, Calc, Impress, Draw, and Math User Guides are now available for version 25.2! 🎉

Yes, you read that right! With every new LibreOffice release, our Documentation Team works hard to keep up — and this time, we’ve shortened the gap between the software launch and the guides’ publication even more.

📚 These user guides are the ultimate reference for anyone using LibreOffice — whether at home, at work, or at school. From spreadsheets to presentations, from text documents to complex equations: it’s all covered, clearly and accessibly.

🙌 The work is 100% community-driven! Jean Weber led the Writer guide, Peter Schofield coordinated the Impress, Draw, and Math guides, and Olivier Hallot headed the Calc guide.

Big thanks also to Dione Maddern, Celia Palacios, Ed Olson, B. Antonio F., Mike Kaganski, and Vasudev Narayanan for their valuable contributions.

💡 Each new edition is more than just an update — it’s a chance to improve clarity, add the latest features, and deliver the best experience possible for end users. These guides complement the built-in LibreOffice Help and are perfect for deepening your knowledge.

📥 The guides are available now for free download in PDF, ODT (OpenDocument format), and HTML (for online reading). And soon, you’ll be able to order printed copies via LuLu Inc. 😉

🔗 Get your guides now:

Artwork: Eliane Domingos

by Olivier Hallot at July 01, 2025 07:43 AM

June 25, 2025

Michael Meeks

2025-06-25 Wednesday

  • Catch up with H. with some great degree news, poke at M's data-sets briefly, sync with Dave, Pedro & Asja. Lunch.
  • Published the next strip around the excitement of setting up your own non-profit structure:
    The Open Road to Freedom - strip#23 - A solid foundation
  • Partner sales call.

June 25, 2025 02:04 PM

June 24, 2025

Michael Meeks

2025-06-24 Tuesday

  • Tech planning call, sync with Laser, Stephan, catch up with Andras, partner call in the evening. Out for a walk with J. on the race-course in the sun. Catch up with M. now returned home.

June 24, 2025 09:00 PM

June 23, 2025

Michael Meeks

2025-06-23 Monday

  • Mail chew, sync with Miklos, Thorsten, Collabora intro call for allotropians, sync with Pedro, some XWIKI'ites, and Eloy.
  • Extraordinary All Saints PCC meeting in the evening.

June 23, 2025 09:00 PM

June 22, 2025

Michael Meeks

2025-06-22 Sunday

  • All Saints in the morning, caught up with people, back for a fine BBQ lunch, E. out driving with J. improving rapidly it seems.
  • Catch up with M&D and T.

June 22, 2025 09:00 PM

June 21, 2025

Michael Meeks

2025-06-21 Saturday

  • Poked at this & that in the morning, out after lunch to Holkham beach with J.&E. swum in the sea, admired the sky. Walked into Wells for dinner, bus back to the car, home.

June 21, 2025 09:00 PM

June 13, 2025

LibreOffice QA Blog

LibreOffice 25.8 Beta1 is available for testing

LibreOffice 25.8 will be released as final at the end of August, 2025 ( Check the Release Plan ) being LibreOffice 25.8 Beta1 the second pre-release since the development of version 25.8 started at the beginning of December, 2024. Since the previous release, LibreOffice 25.8 Alpha1, 782 commits have been submitted to the code repository and 154 issues got fixed. Check the release notes to find the new features included in this version of LibreOffice.

LibreOffice 25.8 Beta1 can be downloaded for Linux, macOS and Windows, and it can be installed alongside the standard version.

In case you find any problem in this pre-release, please report it in Bugzilla ( You just need a legit email account in order to create a new account ).

For help, you can contact the QA Team directly in the QA IRC channel or via Matrix.

LibreOffice is a volunteer-driven community project, so please help us to test – we appreciate it!

Happy testing!!

Download it now!

by x1sc0 at June 13, 2025 03:47 PM

June 10, 2025

LibreOffice QA Blog

QA/Dev Report: May 2025

General Activities

  1. LibreOffice 24.8.7 was announced on May 8
  2. Olivier Hallot (TDF) added a help page for Page Layout, expanded help for paragraph justification, updated menu paths in Help, added help pages for newly-added Calc functions and of-pie charts, updated help for Business cards and Labels, improved extended tooltips and error messages for Manage Names dialog, corrected an example spreadsheet used for Calc Data Statistics help and improved help for IsNull BASIC function among many other Help cleanups and updates
  3. Gábor Kelemen (allotropia) did many code cleanups
  4. Tomaž Vajngerl (Collabora) continued polishing support for embedded fonts in PowerPoint files and fixed unexpected changing of background images upon saving and reloading in Draw
  5. Darshan Upadhyay, Szymon Kłos, Michael Meeks and Jaume Pujantell (Collabora) worked on LOKit used by Collabora Online. Szymon also implemented saving checkbox state to XLSX files
  6. Gökay Şatır (Collabora) fixed an issue in Draw with connector text disappearing when “Adjust to contour” option was active
  7. Marco Cecchetti (Collabora) added a feature to select colour palettes for chart data series
  8. Pranam Lashkari (Collabora) fixed an issue with unwanted expansion of reference mark fields after insertion and typing
  9. Miklós Vajna (Collabora) continued improving the handling of tracked changes that depend on each other
  10. Xisco Faulí (TDF) implemented new Calc functions TEXTSPLIT, TEXTBEFORE and TEXTAFTER, made it so glue points in PowerPoint shapes are imported, fixed an issue with connectors in PPTX files becoming misaligned due to negative rotation, added some new automated tests, upgraded many dependencies, fixed crashes and did many code cleanups and optimisations
  11. Michael Stahl (allotropia) worked on multi-user editing based on a conflict-free replicated data type (CRDT) leveraging yrs, a Rust port of Yjs
  12. Mike Kaganski (Collabora) fixed an error when accessing cells via BASIC methods after deleting cells with the RemoveRange method, made it so BASIC’s Time() function returns a Date type, greatly improved the loading time of Writer documents with lots of bookmarks and lots of tables, made it so empty Writer paragraphs correctly follow proportional line spacing smaller than 100%, fixed an issue preventing the export of Draw / Impress documents to SVG from Basic IDE context, improved BASIC error messages, fixed incorrect width in SVG text with “fit-to-size” attribute, fixed an issue with macros not pausing for the duration of executing dialogs and helped Heiko with the new Welcome dialog
  13. Caolán McNamara (Collabora) fixed an issue with expanding the list of events in the Events tab of Customize dialog, fixed crashes and many issues found by static analysers and did code cleanups and optimisations
  14. Stephan Bergmann (allotropia) worked on the WASM build. He also adapted the code to compiler changes and did code cleanups
  15. Noel Grandin (Collabora) improved the loading speed of XLSX files with lots of customFormat attributes in rows, dramatically improved the rendering speed of documents with large page fills when hardware acceleration is used, greatly improved the loading speed of XLSX files with lots of formulas, conditional formatting and comments and improved the performance of working with spreadsheets with lots of comments. He also did many code cleanups and optimisations
  16. Justin Luth (Collabora) improved MS Word compatibility with paragraph spacing in multiple ways
  17. Michael Weghorn (TDF) continued cleaning up and reorganising accessibility-related code, fixed Save As dialog sometimes freezing with kf6 UI under X11, made Impress’s Presenter Console more robust with right-to-left UI, refactored report designer code and fixed an issue preventing moving slides in the preview pane by dragging and dropping when using qt6-based UIs under Wayland. He also worked on using native widgets in Qt UIs
  18. Balázs Varga (allotropia) fixed an issue preventing the formatting of text in shapes in certain scenarios
  19. Patrick Luby fixed issues with UI refresh when using Skia/Metal on macOS by coalescing mouse dragged events and fixed an issue causing the floating Full Screen toolbar to drift when switching between full screen and normal mode
  20. Oliver Specht (CIB) fixed endnotes and footnotes becoming corrupted when saving to RTF and improved extended tooltips related to page breaks and page range fields
  21. László Németh continued polishing customisable word spacing in Writer and fixed a DOCX Kashida justification issue
  22. Christian Lohmaier (TDF) continued tweaking the build configuration after the addition of Meson support for HarfBuzz and added features to the VS Code integration
  23. Jonathan Clark (TDF) fixed an MS Word compatibility issue with CJK text grid and tables, fixed wrong cursor placement when moving from a left-to-right paragraph to a right-to-left one, fixed overlapping CJK characters in in vertical justified layouts, fixed Apply button in Text Grid settings sometimes failing to update the changes, fixed the cursor disappearing when switching from CJK layout on Windows and fixed unwanted rotation in Japanese IME on Windows with vertical text
  24. Andreas Heinisch fixed row height issues when importing tables from Base to Calc, fixed an issue with pinned documents not being immediately displayed in the Start Center after clearing the list of recent documents and made it so the complete list of Recent Documents is shown in BASIC IDE, query result dialog and Base subdialogs
  25. Jean-Pierre Ledure worked on the ScriptForge library
  26. Sahil Gautam (allotropia) continued polishing the Libreoffice Theme rework
  27. Áron Budea (Collabora) fixed Excel interoperatibility issues with conditional formatting and database properties and fixed DrawingML elements in DOCX files sometimes being saved with non-unique identifiers
  28. Karthik Godha added a feature for redacting images in the Automatic Redaction dialog
  29. Julien Nabet fixed the logic of the shutdown check of Firebird databases, fixed a button focus issue in record search of Base forms and did some cleanups in Help
  30. Bayram Çiçek (Collabora) fixed an issue with page height in DOCX import
  31. Heiko Tietze (TDF) continued polishing the new first-run wizard, fixed a Start Center button toggle issue and made it possible to customise toolbar visibility from the UI picker dialog
  32. Juraj Šarinay continued improving support for digital signatures
  33. David Hashe made it so ODF files are no longer created with useless subdirectories and did cleanups in XLSX import code
  34. Kurt Nordback (Collabora) continued working on support for recent MSO chart types
  35. Andras Timar (Collabora) did cleanups in license files
  36. Eike Rathke (Red Hat) fixed a Calc LOOKUP function issue related to external file references
  37. Samuel Mehrbrodt (allotropia) did cleanups in file picker code
  38. Attila Szűcs (Collabora) made it possible to change font properties of chart elements via the Sidebar
  39. Tibor Nagy (allotropia) optimised the size of exported tagged PDFs and worked on multi-user editing based on a CRDT
  40. Akshay Dubey continued working on supporting zstd decompression
  41. Ilmari Lauhakangas (TDF) improved the dark mode of Help and fixed an issue with localising module links in Help
  42. Laurent Balland added help for the Context option in numerals and made it so OLE objects, such as Charts, can be resized proportionally with or without the Shift key in edit mode. With the change, moving OLE objects in edit mode by dragging the border is forced to 45° direction if Shift is pressed
  43. Armin Le Grand (Collabora) optimised the rendering of Calc’s editing view and comments
  44. Deepanshu Sharma added an automated test for numbering rules
  45. Marius-Ionut Militaru made it so a warning is shown when the display of field names is activated
  46. Mihai Vasiliu added a missing icon to all dark themes
  47. Mohit Marathe (allotropia) polished the Comments Sidebar deck
  48. Guilhem Moulin (TDF) fixed an issue in the script that compares crash report statistics

Kudos to Ilmari Lauhakangas for helping to elaborate this list.

Reported Bugs

387 bugs, 55 of which are enhancements, have been reported by 250 people.

Top 10 Reporters

  1. Telesto ( 20 )
  2. nobu ( 13 )
  3. Justin L ( 11 )
  4. Buovjaga ( 10 )
  5. Eyal Rozenberg ( 9 )
  6. Regina Henschel ( 8 )
  7. Mike Kaganski ( 8 )
  8. Aron Budea ( 6 )
  9. raal ( 6 )
  10. Alfio Littletree ( 5 )

Triaged Bugs

453 bugs have been triaged by 66 people.

Top 10 Triagers

  1. Buovjaga ( 82 )
  2. m_a_riosv ( 54 )
  3. V Stuart Foote ( 26 )
  4. jnorvell ( 26 )
  5. akopf ( 24 )
  6. Olivier Hallot ( 24 )
  7. Heiko Tietze ( 20 )
  8. Mike Kaganski ( 19 )
  9. Mateusz Wlazłowski ( 17 )
  10. Xisco Faulí ( 13 )

Resolution of resolved bugs

297 bugs have been set to RESOLVED.

Check the following sections for more information about bugs resolved as FIXED, WORKSFORME and DUPLICATE.

Fixed Bugs

134 bugs have been fixed by 32 people.

Top 10 Fixers

  1. Mike Kaganski ( 14 )
  2. Xisco Fauli ( 11 )
  3. Olivier Hallot ( 8 )
  4. Heiko Tietze ( 7 )
  5. Jonathan Clark ( 7 )
  6. Justin Luth ( 7 )
  7. Noel Grandin ( 7 )
  8. Michael Weghorn ( 5 )
  9. Julien Nabet ( 4 )
  10. Caolán McNamara ( 4 )

List of critical bugs fixed

  1. tdf#164033 Crash in: SwNodeIndex::SwNodeIndex(SwNode *) ( Thanks to Justin Luth )

List of high severity bugs fixed

  1. tdf#165858 pdf export – pdf form option not available ( Thanks to Tomaž Vajngerl )
  2. tdf#166520 Cells far from [A1] only showing first character while typing into cell ( Thanks to Armin Le Grand (Collabora) )
  3. tdf#47479 LibO Calc Macro .getCellRangeByName with named range ( Thanks to Mike Kaganski )

List of crashes fixed

  1. tdf#164033 Crash in: SwNodeIndex::SwNodeIndex(SwNode *) ( Thanks to Justin Luth )
  2. tdf#165980 Libreoffice built with “–with-help” crashes when launching help ( Thanks to Julien Nabet )
  3. tdf#166055 Crash when inserting .mp4 videos in Impress (kf6) ( Thanks to Michael Weghorn )
  4. tdf#166436 Crash in: tools::SvRef::SvRef(tools::SvRef const &) ( Thanks to Xisco Fauli )
  5. tdf#166637 Crash when clicking a dot in the control pane of a built-in dialog ( Thanks to Mike Kaganski )
  6. tdf#166767 Crash quiting LibreOffice with something on the clipboard (Win) ( Thanks to Xisco Fauli )

List of performance issues fixed

  1. tdf#161372 Spreadsheets with comments are unreasonably slow ( Thanks to Noel Grandin )
  2. tdf#163015 FILEOPEN: Opening specific XLSX file takes long time ( Thanks to Noel Grandin )
  3. tdf#165918 Quadratic complexity when loading a document with lots of bookmarks and lots of tables ( Thanks to Mike Kaganski )
  4. tdf#166684 Loading XLSX file with complex formula and comments slow ( Thanks to Noel Grandin )

List of old bugs ( more than 4 years old ) fixed

  1. tdf#121133 Adobe Reader DC claims that the PDF has been modified after signing ( Thanks to Juraj Šarinay )
  2. tdf#136112 Basic Time function returns inconsistent datatype ( Thanks to Mike Kaganski )
  3. tdf#137931 Show the UI selection dialog on first start-up ( Thanks to Heiko Tietze )
  4. tdf#139331 Option to redact/ anonymizing file by replacing images by dummy or make them black (Sanitize media) ( Thanks to Karthik )
  5. tdf#47479 LibO Calc Macro .getCellRangeByName with named range ( Thanks to Mike Kaganski )
  6. tdf#60700 de-cruftify ODF files … ( Thanks to David Hashe )
  7. tdf#76029 Impress with 2 display : Slides view doesn’t auto-scroll in presenter console with navigation by Next or with arrow key (out of screen if enough slides so non-visible) ( Thanks to Michael Weghorn )
  8. tdf#88752 DOC DOCX import: text grid is (wrongly?) applied to table thus the page content flow is not the same as in MS Word ( Thanks to Jonathan Clark )
  9. tdf#97390 Menu item ‘Recent Documents’ not available when Query result window is in front ( Thanks to Andreas Heinisch )

WORKSFORME bugs

52 bugs have been retested by 26 people.

Top 10 testers

  1. Buovjaga ( 20 )
  2. m_a_riosv ( 3 )
  3. Dieter ( 2 )
  4. Timur ( 2 )
  5. fpy ( 2 )
  6. Andreas Heinisch ( 2 )
  7. Telesto ( 2 )
  8. Olivier Hallot ( 2 )
  9. akopf ( 2 )
  10. Robert ( 1 )

DUPLICATED bugs

75 bugs have been duplicated by 27 people.

Top 10 testers

  1. m_a_riosv ( 12 )
  2. V Stuart Foote ( 9 )
  3. Mike Kaganski ( 9 )
  4. Buovjaga ( 9 )
  5. Gabor Kelemen (allotropia) ( 3 )
  6. Mateusz Wlazłowski ( 3 )
  7. Saburo ( 3 )
  8. Michael Weghorn ( 3 )
  9. Hossein ( 2 )
  10. Heiko Tietze ( 2 )

Verified bug fixes

16 bugs have been verified by 11 people.

Top 10 Verifiers

  1. steve

by x1sc0 at June 10, 2025 11:29 AM

June 02, 2025

Miklos Vajna

Interdependent tracked changes improvements in Writer

Writer has some support for interdependent (or hierarchical) tracked changes: e.g. the case when you have a delete on top of an insert. While there were some working cases, handling of many combinations were missing. I started to make systematic improvements in this area in the recent past, this post gives you an overview what's done so far.

This work is primarily for Collabora Online, but the feature is available in desktop Writer as well.

Motivation

DOCX files in Word can often have overlapping tracked changes: Writer tries to split these up to make sure there is only one tracked change under the cursor at the same time. Still, it's possible that you have a tracked change with multiple types: e.g. a delete on top of an insert.

The focus in on 3 combinations which appear in DOCX files a lot: "insert, then delete", "insert, then format" and "delete, then format".

This mostly affects the UI and import/export filters of ODT and DOCX.

Results so far

Given an insert, then delete:

Interdependent tracked change: insert, then delete

Most operations worked nicely here, but in case your cursor was in the middle of AAA and you did a reject, followed by an undo, proper handling of that was missing, now implemented.

But then given an insert, then a format:

Interdependent tracked change: insert, then format

Then a handling of more actions were missing:

  1. DOCX import is now implemented.
  2. ODT import is now implemented.
  3. Accepting when you're inside AAA is now implemented: the insert is accepted for BBB but the format stays unchanged.
  4. Rejecting when you're inside AAA is now implemented: the insert is rejected and BBB is also removed, together with the format on top of it.
  5. Accepting the BBB now correctly operates on the insert type, so the format type remains after accept.
  6. If you accept BBB, now the surrounding AAA and CCC also get accepted as well, as expected.
  7. Now if you reject BBB, then it gets removed from the document, since you rejected an insert.
  8. When you reject BBB, the surrounding AAA and CCC also get rejected.

The combined implementation of these should give you a smooth feeling in case you're used to how Word works: if there is a format redline combined with an insert, then the operations act on the insert type, and format is only accepted/rejected when there is no insert "under" the format.

Similarly: it's a bit of an implementation detail that Writer splits redlines on DOCX import: so if you e.g. accept AAA then we combine that with BBB and CCC when it makes sense, so you need to click a lot less.

Finally, given a delete, then a format:

Interdependent tracked change: delete, then format

Then again handling of some actions were missing:

  1. DOCX import is now implemented.
  2. ODT import is now implemented.
  3. ODT export is now implemented.
  4. Accepting AAA now correctly operates on the delete type of BBB.
  5. Rejecting AAA now correctly operates on the delete type of BBB.
  6. Accepting BBB now correctly works with the delete type.
  7. Accepting BBB now correctly tries to also accept AAA and CCC, too.

The current state is not yet complete, but it's a big improvement over what we had in the past, which was mostly focusing on just "insert, then delete".

You may wonder what about some other cases: if you insert some content with change tracking, that always creates a new tracked change, so "insert" is never on top of something else. Similarly, format is always on top of something. Finally the same type is never on top of itself.

How is this implemented?

If you would like to know a bit more about how this works, continue reading... :-)

As usual, the high-level problem was addressed by a series of small changes. Core side:

Want to start using this?

You can get a development edition of Collabora Online 25.04 and try it out yourself right now: try the development edition. Collabora intends to continue supporting and contributing to LibreOffice, the code is merged so we expect all of this work will be available in TDF's next release too (25.8).

by Miklos Vajna at June 02, 2025 11:54 AM

May 28, 2025

allotropia

Collabora and allotropia merge

This deal unites the largest team of corporate Office engineers to deliver on Collabora Productivity’s mission to restore Digital Sovereignty to its users, while making Open Source Office Rock. It supercharges Collabora’s Online Office products and services portfolio with rich German language capability, deeper experience of vertical applications, new Web Assembly skills, and a wider unified partner ecosystem. Through improved product richness this sharpens the competitive edge of FLOSS Office productivity against mass-market proprietary alternatives.

CAMBRIDGE, UK – May 28th 12:00 CEST – 2025

Collabora Productivity, the world’s leading provider of collaborative Open Source Office editors have completed a merger with allotropia. Collabora has invested heavily in building Collabora Online (COOL) – a market leading, on-premise, secure, interoperable, open-source solution for document editing and collaboration deployed to any modern browser. This is complemented by desktop and mobile apps across Linux, Windows, Mac, Android, iOS and Chrome-OS. Collabora provides support subscriptions to enterprise customers worldwide via a network of hundreds of trusted partners. This is now augmented by allotropia’s partner and customer base. Together with our partners we deliver document and productivity excellence integrated with our partners product and service offerings.

allotropia’s expertise around Web Assembly combined with Collabora Online will we expect, in time, enable customer use-cases such as well as office-as-component embedding scenarios in vertical applications as well as off-line and end-to-end encrypted editing, and. This work builds on some visionary prototype funding from the Bundesministerium des Inneren (BMI) for a collaboration between the companies to enable the use of Collabora Online off-line in the browser.

Further details of product investment, and direction will be announced and decided in workshops with our key customers and partners at our annual COOL Days conference in Budapest next week where staff, community and our customer and partner-ecosystem meet, swap ideas, and hear about the latest work in our upcoming major release featuring improved performance, usability, interoperability and much more.

“Collabora is excited to welcome each member of the allotropia team today!” said Michael Meeks, CEO, Collabora Productivity, “We are excited to work together to accelerate our product development, enjoy our first COOL Days together, and plan the next features and possibilities to delight our customers.”

Collabora has invested in building a network of hundreds of partners and is approaching one hundred million docker image downloads of its document editing server software, with millions of paying users of its products, all of whom will start to benefit from this merger from today.We expect to bring the experience that allotropia has from it’s relationship with CIB around vertical desktop applications (Fachverfahren) to help partners and customers migrate their Windows & Microsoft Office based business process to easy to deploy multi-platform web applications.

“With our awesome team of engineers, and our WebAssembly know how, we can add significantly to Collabora’s powerhouse of Office engineering prowess & their product offerings”, says Thorsten Behrens, CEO of allotropia, “we’ve worked with them as partners for many years, and align perfectly in our goals to make Open Source office rock!”

allotropia’s skills in supporting and contributing to the LibreOffice code-base in Germany strengthens and unifies popular shared partner products such CIB Office and Nextcloud Office. A larger team will accelerate development and improvement of Collabora Office based products, while providing an even deeper pool of support resources to rapidly respond to customers’ needs.

Together we want to pay tribute to the vast legacy of those who have worked so hard to preserve and improve the source code that we depend on from Sun Microsystems, Oracle, SUSE, RedHat, IBM, TDF, Canonical, and many more, as well as the innumerable volunteer community contributors who make the Collabora Online and LibreOffice ecosystem so rich and interesting: thank you allowing us the privilege of working alongside you as we revolutionize the office productivity world together.All of our code is open source and available to the public on GitHub. Join the Collabora Online Community, take part in easy hacks and discussions in the forum.

Please also see our new parent company’s mirror announcement!

by allotropiasoft at May 28, 2025 10:20 AM

May 26, 2025

Mike Kaganski

How could QA catch this in advance?

Yesterday I merged a fix for Writer’s tdf#165094. Not that it was something exceptional; something that often happens when we change the huge code: a regression. Something that we try to do for them: a fix. Why mention it here?

It happens to show something, that people underestimate. The complexity of what they call “proper testing” – you know, that “I found a bug! Do you even try to test your software???” rant you often see in discussions. Let’s look at this case.

The problem was, that in some specific document, where there was a manually inserted page break, that page break, defined in a hidden paragraph, disappeared after an upgrade. Sounds easy? Should be caught immediately in the release testing? But other page breaks weren’t lost.

Debugging showed, that the bug would only occur when all of the following happened:

  • The page break was defined in a hidden paragraph (something already known from the reporter – thank you Gabor!), and
  • There were at least 26 paragraphs before that hidden paragraph, all on the same page, and
  • The page break defined a paragraph style, and
  • That page break defined a page number, and
  • That assigned new page number happened to be the same “oddity” as the current one (i.e., either the number of that page with 26+ paragraphs was odd, and the new page number was odd; or the number of that page with 26+ paragraphs was even, and the new page number was even), and
  • After the hidden paragraph (which defined the page break), a table immediately followed.

I suppose, that’s a combination of factors, that any QA engineer would naturally test first, don’t you agree? (Disclaimer: no I don’t think so.)

Note that the complexity of this constellation of causing factors is, again, not uncommon in our codebase. In fact, it only needed less than ten features to take their specific forms, from thousands of features and options that the suite offers.

But it is completely unsurprising, that the bug, that requires such a constellation of factors, actually appeared in our bug tracker. Given the tens of millions of users, who work with who knows how many documents, every low-probability event will happen, sooner or later. This is good; and we are thankful to everyone who files bugs.

And let me say, that we at Collabora Productivity are glad to do many good things to make the office suite better for everyone.

by mikekaganski at May 26, 2025 09:59 AM

May 20, 2025

LibreOffice QA Blog

LibreOffice 25.8 Alpha1 is available for testing

LibreOffice 25.8 will be released as final at the end of August, 2025 ( Check the Release Plan ) being LibreOffice 25.8 Alpha1 the first pre-release since the development of version 25.8 started at the beginning of December, 2024. Since then, 3918 commits have been submitted to the code repository and 533 bugs were set to FIXED in Bugzilla. Check the release notes to find the new features included in this version of LibreOffice.

LibreOffice 25.8 Alpha1 can be downloaded for Linux, macOS and Windows, and it can be installed alongside the standard version.

In case you find any problem in this pre-release, please report it in Bugzilla ( You just need a legit email account in order to create a new account ).

For help, you can contact the QA Team directly in the QA IRC channel or via Matrix.

LibreOffice is a volunteer-driven community project, so please help us to test – we appreciate it!

Happy testing!!

Download it now!

by x1sc0 at May 20, 2025 12:10 PM

May 08, 2025

Miklos Vajna

Reinstate for tracked changes in Writer

Writer has the concept of rejecting tracked changes: if a proposed insertion or deletion is not wanted, then one can reject it to push back on the proposal. So far such an action left no trace in the document, which is sometimes not wanted. Calling reinstate on a change behaves like reject, but with history: it reinstates the original state, with the rejected change preserved in the document.

This work is primarily for Collabora Online, but the feature is available in desktop Writer as well.

Motivation

When Alice works on a document to insert e.g. new conditions for a contract, then perhaps Bob is not happy with the proposal. But just rejecting the change "silently" would not be polite: the tracked change then disappears, so possibly Alice thinks it was accepted and Bob didn't communicate the pushback explicitly in the resulting document, either.

Reinstate is meant to improve this interaction: if an insert is reinstated, then an explicit delete is created on top of the insert, so Alice can see that Bob was not happy with the proposal. Or in case Alice proposed a delete, Bob can reinstate that by adding the same content again to the document, without typing the text manually after the delete.

This is a UI feature: the resulting model still only contains inserts and deletes, so it works even with DOCX files.

Results so far

Given an insert:

Reinstate: an insert

Now you can easily create a delete on top of the insert:

Reinstate: a reinstated insert

And given a delete:

Reinstate: a delete

Now you can easily create an insert right after the delete, preserving complex content:

Reinstate: a reinstated delete

As you can see, this creates the opposite of the original change as a new tracked change, so it will in the end still reject the change, but without deleting the original change.

How is this implemented?

If you would like to know a bit more about how this works, continue reading... :-)

As usual, the high-level problem was addressed by a series of small changes. Core side:

Online side:

Want to start using this?

You can get a development edition of Collabora Online 25.04 and try it out yourself right now: try the development edition. Collabora intends to continue supporting and contributing to LibreOffice, the code is merged so we expect all of this work will be available in TDF's next release too (25.8).

by Miklos Vajna at May 08, 2025 06:44 AM

April 30, 2025

Marius Popa Adrian

FirebirdSQL introduces support for Windows ARM64 builds

This FirebirdSQL pull request introduces support for Windows ARM64 builds to the Firebird project. The changes cover updates to build scripts, configuration files, and Visual Studio solution/project files to accommodate ARM64 architecture, ensuring compatibility and enabling compilation and functionality on Windows ARM64 platforms.

by Popa Adrian Marius (noreply@blogger.com) at April 30, 2025 11:36 AM

SQL-compliant aliases GREATEST and LEAST for the existing MAXVALUE and MINVALUE functions.

This FirebirdSQL pull request introduces SQL-compliant aliases GREATEST and LEAST for the existing MAXVALUE and MINVALUE functions. These aliases align with the SQL:2023 standard and provide a more intuitive and widely recognized syntax. The changes include updates to documentation, keywords, parser tokens, and system function definitions to support these new aliases.

by Popa Adrian Marius (noreply@blogger.com) at April 30, 2025 07:24 AM

April 18, 2025

LibreOffice Dev Blog

Splash screen with VCL weld – difficultyInteresting EasyHack

As a LibreOffice user, you have certainly seen the LibreOffice splash screen. It is displayed when you open LibreOffice, it has a progress bar, and when loading the application is finished it goes away. Here we discuss a suggested improvement for this splash screen.

Current Implementation Approach

Currently, the splash screen is implemented by creating a custom widget with a custom painting mechanism that draws the splash image and also the progress bar and moves the progress indicator.

This has some drawbacks:

1. The splash screen does not always scale to the same size as the main LibreOffice Window.

2. The style of the progress bar is somehow different from other UI elements, looks mostly like gen interface.

3. It needs and uses a custom paint code.

4. It does not conform to the dark/light theme.

5. It is not easily localize-able. In fact, the only text is from the displayed image, in English. When you build from sources, the image file is instdir/program/intro.png.

LibreOffice splash screen bitmap

LibreOffice splash screen bitmap

6. It is a separate binary (oosplash). You may run it with:

$ ./instdir/program/oosplash
LibreOffice dev splash screen

LibreOffice dev splash screen

VCL Weld Mechanism

I have previously written about VCL weld mechanism, which is based on creating user interface files (.ui) and loading them inside the application.

The weld mechanism greatly reduces the complexity of creating user interfaces, and also improves other aspects of the user interface, including the consistency.

Code Pointers

Most of the code for the current implementation resides in:
desktop/source/splash/splash.cxx.

The SplashScreenWindow class has an custom paint method, SplashScreenWindow::Paint(), which draws the bitmap, and also the progress. A new UI file is needed for this purpose, which should use GtkProgressBar, which will be considered a weld::ProgressBar. VCL then uses appropriate progress bar widget in different graphical plugins of VCL.

You may look into some dialogs like tip of the day to get some insight:

It would be interesting to avoid a separate binary, but it is fine to keep things as is, and just change to use .ui file.

Final Words

The above issue is tdf#166128. If you would like to work on fixing it, you can just follow the Bugzilla link to see more information.

You may also use ideas from a minimal weld application here:

VCL weld: create LibreOffice GUI from design files

by Hossein Nourikhah at April 18, 2025 01:37 PM

April 08, 2025

Marius Popa Adrian

New FirebirdSQL engine feature : Range-based FOR statement

Here is the description : "The range-based FOR statement is used to iterate over a range of numeric values. The iteration is performed in increasing order when used with TO clause and in decreasing order when used with DOWNTO clause"Syntax[<label> :]  FOR <variable> = <initial value> {TO | DOWNTO} <final value> [BY <by value>] DO      &

by Popa Adrian Marius (noreply@blogger.com) at April 08, 2025 09:17 AM

April 07, 2025

Marius Popa Adrian

Jaybird 6.0.1 and Jaybird 5.0.7 released

We are happy to announce the release of Jaybird 6.0.1 and Jaybird 5.0.7. Both releases provide a number of performance improvements to blob handling, and some bug fixes.We plan to offer more blob performance improvements in upcoming releases of Jaybird 5 and 6, for Firebird 5.0.3 and higher (see also New Article: Data access methods used in Firebird).

by Popa Adrian Marius (noreply@blogger.com) at April 07, 2025 11:11 AM

April 02, 2025

Miklos Vajna

Per-user track changes recording in Writer

Writer has the concept of recording tracked changes or not: if recording, typing into a document or deleting content will create tracked changes of type insertion or deletion. So far this was a per-document setting, but now individual users can enable or disable this as they wish.

This work is primarily for Collabora Online, but the feature is available in desktop Writer as well.

Motivation

When Alice keeps typing and Bob enables change tracking, then surprisingly the typed characters of Alice will form a tracked insertion, which is surprising, since that was not the case a second ago and Alice didn't do anything other than typing.

Giving users a choice if they enable recording for just this user or for all users fixes this problem.

Results so far

Here is how the per-user (technically per-view) tracked changes recording looks like:

Per-view tracked changes recording

As you can see, the user on the left has recording turned on and this doesn't influence the user on the right, while this was not possible before.

How is this implemented?

If you would like to know a bit more about how this works, continue reading... :-)

As usual, the high-level problem was addressed by a series of small changes. Core side:

Online side:

Want to start using this?

You can get a development edition of Collabora Online 25.04 and try it out yourself right now: try the development edition. Collabora intends to continue supporting and contributing to LibreOffice, the code is merged so we expect all of this work will be available in TDF's next release too (25.8).

by Miklos Vajna at April 02, 2025 11:33 AM

March 06, 2025

allotropia

ZetaJS: Combining Writer & Calc

We’ve added a great new Vue.js-3 ZetaJS demo (source)! It showcases word processing and spreadsheets inside a single web app. Calc is being used as a data source for an HTML app, filling letter templates in Writer. You can even upload custom data spreadsheets or document templates! And have you seen the nice Writer toolbar, all done with Vue.js?

We’ve also updated the existing demos, showcasing Chrome PWA support with the Ping Monitor demo – just click the little install button at the top-right of the address bar, to get the Ping Monitor “installedâ€� on your desktop!

new demo combining Writer, Calc and the complete toolbar

Talks

Meanwhile, our team was giving some great talks about our work for ZetaOffice and LibreOffice. Why not check out the recordings during your lunch break?

ZetaJS & ZetaOffice

FOSDEM LibreOffice DevRoom talks

News clippings

Look, we made some headlines! TheRegister was following up some earlier coverage about the WebAssembly port, after Thorsten gave Liam a demo during FOSDEM. Read up the full article here.

Next up

In case you’re around, meet us in two weeks at the FOSSAsia Summit in Bangkok, where Sarper Akdemir will give an update over our work. Dates are March 13-15.

If you’re based in Europe, you might instead enjoy Thorsten’s talk at the Chemnitz Linux Days (Germany) from March 22-23.

Looking forward to meet you there!

Feedback appreciated!

Please subscribe to our Newsletter or on Mastodon and let us know how you liked ZetaJS and the demos! If you’re playing with the code leave a star at the ZetaJS repo or if you hit any issues please file a report on GitHub.

Or just leave a comment and let us know directly – thanks for reading! 🙂

by Moritz Duge at March 06, 2025 10:30 AM

March 03, 2025

LibreOffice Design Blog

New Templates For You – Your Feedback Matters!

By Ndidi Folasade Ogboi

For the past two months, I’ve been working on adding more templates to LibreOffice Writer as part of my Outreachy project. My goal has been to create functional templates that users need the most.

I created these templates based on what you told us in our survey and your response was incredible!…

by Heiko Tietze at March 03, 2025 01:33 PM

February 26, 2025

Marius Popa Adrian

Firebird 5.0.2 minor release is available

Firebird Project is happy to announce general availability of Firebird 5.0.2 — the latest minor release in the Firebird 5.0 series.This minor release offers bug fixes as well as a few improvements, please refer to the Release Notes for the full list of changes.Binary kits for Windows, Linux, MacOS and Android platforms are immediately available for download.

by Popa Adrian Marius (noreply@blogger.com) at February 26, 2025 10:57 AM

February 17, 2025

LibreOffice Dev Blog

Understanding the existing code to provide better patches

LibreOffice inherits a gigantic code base from its ancestors, StarOffice and OpenOffice. Here I discuss some notes for the newcomers on how to better understand the existing LibreOffice code, and improve the patches.

Studying the Existing Code

As said, LibreOffice is a huge code base, containing ~10 million lines of mostly C++ code. There are different assumptions, conventions and coding styles across ~200 modules that LibreOffice has.

Therefore, it is important to first, study the existing code, through reading and debugging LibreOffice source code, to understand the things that it does, and the way you can implement your ideas, including bug fixes and adding new features.

And although implementing some ideas seem to be straightforward at first sight, it is meaningful to study the details.

Quality Assurance Point of View

First of all, you should understand the thing that you want to implement. No matter if it is a bug, a new feature, or just an EasyHack, you should understand what is requested, what works and what does not work. This requires careful reading of the Bugzilla pages.

User Point of View

Then, you should try to run LibreOffice to understand the exact place in the application where you want to change. LibreOffice user interface has thousands of dialog boxes, so you need to make sure that you understand the thing that you want to do.

Developer Point of View

And at last, you get into implementing something in the code. Here are some questions that you can ask yourself about the details, when reading the existing code:

  • Why this statement is here, in the first place? (detail-oriented view)
    • You can use git blame to see the last author of a specific line
    • You can use git log to study the details by knowing the commit hash
    • What can this part of code actually does?
    • Can I see its effect?
git log

git log

Or, you may be interested in the code behavior in the big picture:

  • What does the code do as a whole? (holistic view)
  • There are many other statements, functions and other constructs in the code. What do they do?
  • What is the overall goal of the code?
  • Can I test that in action?

You can do some small changes, before even getting into implementing your idea:

  • What happens if I remove it? (small changes)
  • Does the removal prevent the code from working?
  • Is it incomplete, or does it actually do something useful, which
  • will be absent if I remove it?

Then, you can work on the actual implementation. Ask yourself:

  • How can I implement the idea in its simplest form? (straightforward change)
  • Does it have side effects?
  • How can I make sure every thing else works as before?
  • How can I write a test for it?

After understanding some of the basic details about the way things work, you may go into improving your implementation.

  • How can I make it better? (sophisticated change)
  • Can I make the code more robust where it is brittle?
  • Can I complete the code where it is incomplete?

Final Notes

These were the questions to give you some ideas of some of the underlying complexities in the code. You can start from small changes to become familiar with these complexities, and then grow to do more complex stuff in the code.

We have various different EasyHacks in LibreOffice, with different difficulty levels. If you are interested in coding, you can always find something that fits you, and grow gradually.

You can read more in these links:

by Hossein Nourikhah at February 17, 2025 10:17 AM

January 30, 2025

LibreOffice Dev Blog

Custom message boxes using VCL Weld

When you want to interact with users, sometimes simple dialog boxes are sufficient: a simple yes or no, or some info box. But in other cases, you may need more complex message boxes. Here I discuss how to use VCL Weld to create a custom one.

Simple Message Box

You can create a simple message box, using predefined templates like Info box using a code snippet like this:

std::unique_ptr<weld::MessageDialog> xInfoBox(Application::CreateMessageDialog(pParent, VclMessageType::Question, VclButtonsType::YesNo, u"Are you sure?"_ustr));
xInfoBox->run();

And, this is the result, which is very simple, without any title bar:

Yes / No message box

Yes / No message box

There are other predefined types, which can be used in different scenarios:

enum class VclMessageType
{
    Info,
    Warning,
    Question,
    Error,
    Other
};

But, if you want custom message boxes, you should be using weld mechanism, with its CreateBuilder function.

Custom Message Boxes

Below is the code from the source code sfx2/source/doc/QuerySaveDocument.cxx, which is inside sfx2 (framework) module. This dialog box is accessible across different modules, including Writer, Calc and Draw/Impress.

Let’s look into the code:

short ExecuteQuerySaveDocument(weld::Widget* _pParent, std::u16string_view _rTitle)
{
    ...
    std::unique_ptr<weld::Builder> xBuilder(
        Application::CreateBuilder(_pParent, u"sfx/ui/querysavedialog.ui"_ustr));
    std::unique_ptr<weld::MessageDialog> xQBox(
        xBuilder->weld_message_dialog(u"QuerySaveDialog"_ustr));
    xQBox->set_primary_text(xQBox->get_primary_text().replaceFirst("$(DOC)", _rTitle));
    return xQBox->run();
}

The code is using a UI file, named sfx/ui/querysavedialog.ui to create a message dialog, and then change the title of it.

QuerySaveDialog

QuerySaveDialog

If you look into the include file, include/vcl/weld.hxx inside Builder class, you may see functions like weld_… that are suitable to find various different UI elements from the UI, by mentioning the element ID. For example, to find a label with the ID equal to lable_id, you do this:

std::unique_ptr<weld::Label> m_pTextLabel label = m_xBuilder->weld_label(u"label_id"_ustr)

Result

This is the result, when you try to close an unsaved document.

QuerySaveDialog running

QuerySaveDialog running

Alternative Ways

This is not the only way you can create nice dialog boxes using VCL weld mechanism. There are some predefined message boxes that look nice which use weld mechanism, and are available for use via relevant C++ classes.

An interesting one here, is the QueryDialog, which is created by a factory method design pattern.

It uses a predefined dialog, using cui/uiconfig/ui/querydialog.ui as the UI file, and it contains a nice stock image! You can test it easily, by modifying a LibreOffice example, minweld.

IMPL_LINK_NOARG(TipOfTheDayDialog, OnNextClick, weld::Button&, void)
{
    VclAbstractDialogFactory* pFact = VclAbstractDialogFactory::Create();
    auto pDlg = pFact->CreateQueryDialog(getDialog(), u"Tips"_ustr, u"Tip of the day"_ustr, u"Are you sure you want to see the next tip of the day?"_ustr, false);
    sal_Int32 nResult = pDlg->Execute();
    pDlg->disposeOnce();

    if(nResult == RET_YES)
    {
        ++m_nCounter;
        m_pTextLabel->set_label(u"Here you will see tip of the day #"_ustr
+ OUString::number(m_nCounter) + ".");
    }
}

Assuming that you have a working build of LibreOffice, you can simply run the minweld workbench by invoking:

./bin/run minweld

The result looks much more interesting:

QueryDialog

QueryDialog

Final Words

The possibilities are endless! It only depends on your ideas and understanding of the user’s needs and requirements. It would be good if you look into what design team does to understand the design process:

by Hossein Nourikhah at January 30, 2025 03:01 PM

January 16, 2025

LibreOffice Dev Blog

Outlook for the new year 2025

Happy new year 2025! I wish a great year for you, and the global LibreOffice community. Now that we are now in 2025, I briefly discuss the year 2024 and outlook for 2024 in the development blog.

LibreOffice Conference 2024, Luxembourg

LibreOffice Conference 2024, Luxembourg

At The Document Foundation (TDF), our aim is to improve LibreOffice, the leading free/open source office suite that has millions of users around the world. Our work is community-driven, and the software needs your contribution to become better, and work in a way that you like.

My goal here, is to help people understand LibreOffice code easier, and eventually participate in LibreOffice core development to make LibreOffice better for everyone. In 2024, I wrote 22 posts around LibreOffice development in the dev blog (4 of them are unpublished drafts).

Outlook For the New Year

Focus of the development blog for 2025 in this blog will be:

  • Introducing new EasyHacks
  • Describing user interface creation with VCL
  • Explaining LibreOffice architecture
  • Explaining Python interaction with LibreOffice

I have written about some of these topics in 2024. Therefore, this year I will try to expand the previous writings and provide new articles about them. For example, creating user interfaces using VCL with the help of glade interface designer will be one of important things to discuss.

You can give feedback by writing a comment here, or sending me an email to hossein AT libreoffice DOT org.

We provide mentoring support to those who want to start LibreOffice development. You are welcome to contact me if you need help to build LibreOffice and do some EasyHacks via the above email address. Also, you can always refer to our Getting Involved Wiki page:

Let’s hope a great year for LibreOffice (and the world) in 2025.

by Hossein Nourikhah at January 16, 2025 02:29 PM

January 13, 2025

LibreOffice Design Blog

Results from a survey about Writer templates

By Ndidi Folasade Ogboi

LibreOffice Writer has long been a trusted tool for users worldwide, offering an open-source solution for documents. But what happens when we take a step back and look at the user experience? How do templates fit into the workflows of users, what makes a great template and where do users want LibreOffice writer to improve?…

by Heiko Tietze at January 13, 2025 10:06 AM

January 08, 2025

Miklos Vajna

Ignoring the paragraph margin at the top of pages in Writer

Writer has the concept of paragraph margins and page margins, but what happens when you combine the two? It turns out the expectation is that sometimes the top paragraph margin is ignored in this case. We'll see two cases where the behavior of Writer is now improved to better match Word in this regard.

This work is primarily for Collabora Online, but the feature is available in desktop Writer as well.

Motivation

As described in a previous bugreport, there was a first problem where Word ignored the top paragraph margin of a document, but Writer did not. A recent bugreport then pointed out that the first implementation went too far and now a wanted top margin was ignored. This lead to a set of conditions which now does a decent emulation of Word's rules in this regard.

Results so far

Here is the old Writer render result for a document where the top margin should be ignored:

Bugdoc: old Writer render

And here is the new Writer render result for a document where the top margin is ignored:

Bugdoc: new Writer render

Finally, the reference render result, showing the ignored top paragraph margin:

Bugdoc: reference render

As you can see, now the unwanted top paragraph margin is omitted at page top.

How is this implemented?

If you would like to know a bit more about how this works, continue reading... :-)

As usual, the high-level problem was addressed by a series of small changes:

Want to start using this?

You can get a development edition of Collabora Online 24.04 and try it out yourself right now: try the development edition. Collabora intends to continue supporting and contributing to LibreOffice, the code is merged so we expect all of this work will be available in TDF's next release too (25.2).

by Miklos Vajna at January 08, 2025 08:53 AM

December 20, 2024

LibreOffice Design Blog

LibreOffice Themes will replace the color customization

Since the first implementation of a dark color theme we continuously improved the customization of LibreOffice. In a GSoC projects this year, Sahil Gautam made it possible to not only change the application colors but also what is defined by the operating system respectively the desktop environment.…

by Heiko Tietze at December 20, 2024 12:55 PM

November 29, 2024

Chris Sherlock

The mess that is the VCL

 Let me count the ways, in no particular order and in no way exhaustive:

  • OutputDevice is the base class for printing, windowing and PDFs. It doesn't just do output. 
  • OutputDevice has GetOutDevType() because the base class needs to know what child class is using it. Ugh. 
  • OutputDevice drawing primitives not only draw, but they record a metafile. There are literally functions that turn off drawing and just let it record the metafile. I made an attempt at seperating the concerns, but it got nowhere. 
  • VCL relies on DrawingLayer and DrawingLayer relies on the VCL. 
  • There is a concept of a VirtualDevice, which is derived from OutputDevice. VirtualDevice does a bunch of things, but one of which is alpha-handling. In OutputDevice, there is a member which is a VirtualDevice. Each drawing function in Outputdevice calls upon the correlated drawing function in this member VirtualDevice.
  • Bitmaps don't get modified via the Bitmap class. Instead, you have to use BitmapInfoAccess, BitmapReadAccess and BitmapWriteAccess. I'm still puzzling out why these are seperate classes. 
  • Bitmaps are transformed in SalGraphics indirectly via OutputDevice. Except when they aren't, in which case it fails, whereby OutputDevice tries an alternative way via SalGraphics. Otherwise, it tries its own poor man approach at drawing the bitmap. Consequently, often times you bypass the platform optimized ways of doing things, because its not been implemented.
  • Fonts are lazy loaded from OutputDevice. There is no central font manager. To get the fonts, you have to go through SalGraphics. To get a SalGraphics, you need to initialize a lot of stuff not related to fonts. 
  • Font caching is done from OutputDevice. Lazily. Font data is updated for all frames. Frames are a concept needed for Windows. Frames are not a concept needed by Printers and VirtualDevices, or even PDFs. Note that Printers, VirtualDevices and PDFs all inherit from OutputDevice. 
  • OutputDevice converts between "logical" units and display units. It's a nightmare to know what each function needs what sort of units. For the mapping between units, I refer you to vcl/source/gdi/mapmod.cxx and vcl/source/outdev/map.cxx
  • There is tools and basegfx. They do the same thing, though basegfx is considerably better written. You have Size and B2DSize, Point and B2DPoint, Polygon and B2DPolygon, PolyPolygon and B2DPolyPolygon. OutputDevice must handle it all. 
  • Gradient handling is sort of half baked in OutputDevice, much of gradient handling is done in other modules. 
  • Font substitution is truly, truly weird. PhysicalFontSelect::FindFontFamilyByAttributes() has clearly got a bug in it - (e.g. ImplFontAttrs::None == ((nSearchType ^ nMatchType) & ImplFontAttrs::Rounded an XOR?) and it is a truly strange weighting scheme. Yes, I did try to untangle that beast with proper unit tests, but gave up after being told I was being unreasonable. 
  • There is VCL, canvas, cppcanvas and drawinglayer. drawinglayer is way better than VCL, but we are stuck with VCL for everything. 
  • Consider the following Window hierarchy: WorkWindow inherits from SystemWindow, which inherits from Window. Window holds an OutputDevice to do stuff. WindowOutputDevice derives from OutputDevice. This is needed because OutputDevice often needs to know if it is doing Window operations, via WindowOutputDevice. Try untangling this in your head.
  • Text layout is its own beast, and has its own set of classes. A lot of text layout is worked out in OutputDevice. 
  • Text layout is done via OutputDevice::ImplLayout(). I present to you the ImplLayout function signature:

        std::unique_ptr<SalLayout> ImplLayout(
            const OUString&, sal_Int32 nIndex, sal_Int32 nLen, const Point& rLogicPos = Point(0, 0),
            tools::Long nLogicWidth = 0, KernArraySpan aKernArray = KernArraySpan(),
            std::span<const sal_Bool> pKashidaArray = {}, SalLayoutFlags flags = SalLayoutFlags::NONE,
            vcl::text::TextLayoutCache const* = nullptr, const SalLayoutGlyphs* pGlyphs = nullptr,
            std::optional<sal_Int32> nDrawOriginCluster = std::nullopt,
            std::optional<sal_Int32> nDrawMinCharPos = std::nullopt,
            std::optional<sal_Int32> nDrawEndCharPos = std::nullopt) const; 
     

by Chris Sherlock (noreply@blogger.com) at November 29, 2024 10:58 PM

November 26, 2024

allotropia

Precision-engineering for JavaScript

This post is about recent improvements for ZetaJS, the JavaScript wrapper library for ZetaOffice’s WebAssembly version of LibreOffice:

There is something of a mismatch between the UNO type system and the JavaScript types used by zetajs. For example, JavaScript only has a single number type for both integer and floating point values, while UNO has a whole slew of different numeric types (BYTE, SHORT, UNSIGNED SHORT, LONG, UNSIGNED LONG, FLOAT, DOUBLE) that all map to that one JavaScript type. Similarly, the different UNO sequence<T> types all map to JavaScript arrays, where information about the UNO element type T is lost.

Normally, that’s not an issue. When you call a UNO method that returns a LONG, you get a number just like when you call a UNO method that returns a DOUBLE, and your JavaScript code then has a number to work with, and that’s all. Similarly, when you call a UNO method that returns a sequence<LONG>, you get an array of numbers you can work with, just like when you call a UNO method that returns a sequence<DOUBLE>. And when you then call a UNO method that takes a seaquence<LONG> as an argument, you pass in an array of numbers, and the zetajs runtimes figures out how to dress that array up as a UNO sequence<LONG>, and all is well.

However, one place where UNO’s insistance on more precise typing gets in the way is the UNO ANY type. It is not just a means to transport any kind of UNO value, it also carries precise type information. A UNO ANY value that contains a LONG of value 1 is something different than a UNO ANY vlaue that contains an UNSIGNED LONG of value 1. And a UNO ANY value that contains a reference of type css.uno.XInterface to some UNO object is something different than a UNO ANY value that contains a reference of type css.lang.XComponent to the same UNO object.

Again, most of the time, those precise distinctions are irrelevant to most of the code. When you call a UNO method that returns an ANY, and you know that that ANY value must contain a LONG, you just want to get a JavaScript number out, regardless of what precise numeric UNO type was encoded in that ANY value. Similarly, when you call a UNO method that returns an ANY that must contain a css.uno.XInterface reference, you just want to get some JavaScript object that you can do further UNO method calls on (or null), regardless of what precise UNO interface type was encoded in that ANY value. And when you then call a UNO method that takes an ANY that must contain a LONG, you want to just pass in a JavaScript number, and the zetajs runtime shall figure out how to dress that up as a UNO ANY containing a LONG (or throw an exception, if you passed something that just can’t be dressed up accordingly).

But, sometimes, you need more fine-grained control. There might be a UNO method that takes an ANY argument and behaves completely differently when you pass it a LONG of value 1 or an UNSIGNED LONG of value 1. But when you call that UNO method with the JavaScript number 1, zetajs will always dress that up as a UNO ANY of type LONG for you, never as an UNSIGNED LONG. To solve that issue, the zetajs UNO binding also has the notion of a zetajs.Any JavaScript type, which records a value along with its precise UNO type. You can thus pass either a new zetajs.Any(zetajs.type.long, 1) or a new zetajs.Any(zetajs.type.unsigned_long, 1) when you call that picky UNO method.

Now, when a UNO method returns an ANY value, the zetajs binding used to be conservative: You might want to know exactly what UNO type it contains (even though, most of the time you don’t actually care), so it always returned those wrapped zetajs.Any objects that carry the precise contained UNO type. But that lead to awkward code. When you call e.g. x.nextElement() to get a UNO ANY that contains a reference to another UNO object, you had to unwrap that first (with zetajs.fromAny) before you could do any further calls on the obtained UNO object: zetajs.fromAny(x.nextElement()).doSomething(). But you know that this call to x.nextElement() will return an ANY containing an interface reference, and you don’t care about the exact UNO interface type—you just want to do another method call on the obtained object.

So, recently (in Let zetajs return unwrapped ANY representations), the zetajs binding was changed so that it now always returns unwrapped UNO ANY values: x.nextElement() no longer returns a zetajs.Any wrapper (on which you would need to call zetajs.fromAny first), it directly returns the relevant JavaScript object. And the resulting overall code looks way better: x.nextElement().doSomething().

When, in the other direction, you pass something into a UNO method that takes an ANY argument, you still have the same options you had before: Either, you simply pass the JavaScript number 1, and zetajs figures out for you that that should be dressed up as a UNO ANY of type LONG, or you want to be picky and pass in either a new zetajs.Any(zetajs.type.long, 1) or a new zetajs.Any(zetajs.type.unsigned_long, 1).

And when it comes time that you do want to be picky about the ANY values that you obtain as return values from UNO method calls, there’s now a $precise way to do that: x.$precise.nextElement() (and same for any other UNO method call) will always give you back a wrapped zetajs.Any value. See the updated The zetajs UNO Mapping for all the details.

by allotropiasoft at November 26, 2024 09:00 AM

November 22, 2024

LibreOffice Dev Blog

VCL weld: create LibreOffice GUI from design files

LibreOffice uses VCL (Visual Class Library) as its internal widget toolkit to create the graphical user interface (GUI) of LibreOffice. Here I discuss how to use UI files designed with Glade interface designer to create LibreOffice user interfaces with a framework called weld, which is part of LibreOffice core source code.

Creating a Minimal VCL Weld Application

In my previous blog post, you can find out about the structure of a minimal VCL application. Please refer to the below blog post to see how a Window is created in VCL, and how it can be used as a test workbench called minvcl. You can run it with ./bin/run minvcl after you build LibreOffice.

VCL application in its minimal form

Here I discuss how to go further, and create user interface with Glade interface designer, and do most of the things without writing code.

VCL Weld Mechanism

In order to simplify user interface creation in LibreOffice, experienced LibreOffice developer, Caolán, has introduced a mechanism to load UI files created with Glade interface designer, and use them as if they are UI files for each and every GUI framework that LibreOffice supports: from GTK itself to Qt, Windows, macOS and even the so-called gen backend that only requires the X11 library on Linux.

To illustrate how the VCL weld mechanism works, I have added a minimal example, minweld, as a test workbench. The structure of the code is very similar to the previous example, minvcl, but there are some changes in the code. In the new code, UI is created from a .ui file that is designed visually with Glade interface designer. The .ui file is an XML file which contains placement of widgets that should be displayed on the screen.

The complete code for minweld is available in the LibreOffice core source code repository, which can also be viewed online:

Glade UI File

In minweld, I have used an existing Glade UI file, tipofthedaydialog.ui. This is the user interface for displaying a tip of the day in LibreOffice at startup. Heiko, the TDF design mentor, has discussed this dialog box in detail before:

Easyhacking: How to create a new “Tip-Of-The-Day” dialog

But, you can assume that it is a simple .ui file, that one can create with Glade. Here, we use it to create our own user interface in C++. You may use any other .ui file that you have created with almost the same code.

Tip of the day displayed at LibreOffice startup

Tip of the day displayed at LibreOffice startup

This UI file is found in cui/uiconfig/ui/tipofthedaydialog.ui, and minweld loads it. This is how it looks when you open it in Glade interface designer:

tipofthedaydialog.ui in Glade user interface designer

tipofthedaydialog.ui in Glade user interface designer

Let’s look into the specifics of minweld.cxx.

Header Includes

Headers are almost the same, but here we use vcl/weld.hxx instead of vcl/wrkwin.hxx. Therefore, you can see this line in the code:

#include <vcl/weld.hxx>

Then we have the C++ code for the application. The TipOfTheDayDialog class is defined with:

class TipOfTheDayDialog : public weld::GenericDialogController
{
public:
    TipOfTheDayDialog(weld::Window* pParent = nullptr);
    DECL_LINK(OnNextClick, weld::Button&, void);

private:
    std::unique_ptr<weld::Label> m_pTextLabel;
    std::unique_ptr<weld::Button> m_pNextButton;
    sal_Int32 m_nCounter = 0;
};
...
}

As you can see, TipOfTheDayDialog inherits from weld::GenericDialogController, and not Application class as before. Also, TipOfTheDayDialog constructor receives a parent of type weld::Window*, which is nullptr now. The reason is that there is no parent window in this example. Using weld:: prefix is also done for other types of widgets that we use in LibreOffice. For example, we use weld::Button to denote a push button in LibreOffice, or in any application that is created with the vcl::weld mechanism.

Class Constructor

This is the code for the TipOfTheDayDialog constructor. Here, we initialize two member variables, m_pTextLabel and m_pNextButton which point to a label and a button, respectively. We will interact with these two in our code. There are string literals like lbText and btnNext , which are the IDs of those widgets in Glade. The IDs should be unique for linking to specific variables in the code.

TipOfTheDayDialog::TipOfTheDayDialog(weld::Window* pParent)
: weld::GenericDialogController(pParent, u"cui/ui/tipofthedaydialog.ui"_ustr,
u"TipOfTheDayDialog"_ustr)
, m_pTextLabel(m_xBuilder->weld_label(u"lbText"_ustr))
, m_pNextButton(m_xBuilder->weld_button(u"btnNext"_ustr))
{
    m_pNextButton->connect_clicked(LINK(this, TipOfTheDayDialog, OnNextClick));
}

One last step is linking the events with functions in the code. You may do that with the LINK macro. In the last line, connect_clicked activates OnNextClick from the class TipOfTheDayDialog, whenever m_pNextButton is clicked.

Event Handler

This is the implementation of the event handler. It should be started with IMPL_LINK macro, in the form of IMPL_LINK_NOARG(Class, Member, ArgType, RetType). The code is straightforward: It increases a counter which is initially zero, and displays it alongside a text:

IMPL_LINK_NOARG(TipOfTheDayDialog, OnNextClick, weld::Button&, void)
{
    ++m_nCounter;
    m_pTextLabel->set_label(u"Here you will see tip of the day #"_ustr
+ OUString::number(m_nCounter) + ".");
}

With a call to set_label function, m_pTextLabel is updated every time that you click on “Next Tip” button.

Running the Example

You may run the example after you have built LibreOffice from sources. Then, you may simply invoke:

./bin/run minweld

The result is a little bit different from the tipoftheday dialog in LibreOffice, as it does not use a picture. But, it has a nice feature: if you click on “Next Tip”, it will show a text and a counter that goes up whenever you click on it again.

Final Notes

You may look into the original “tip of the day” dialog box in cui/source/dialogs/tipofthedaydlg.cxx, which is more complex than the one that we created here, as it reads some data from the configuration and uses images. But, the idea is the same. Inherit a class from GenericDialogController, define and link variables to the widgets with their IDs, add event handlers. Now, the application with VCL graphical user interface is ready to use!

This is somehow similar to the way one creates dialog boxes with Qt and other widget toolkits. On the other hand, the VCL weld mechanism is different in the way that it uses such a toolkit to create UI on the fly. Therefore, if you choose a desired VCL UI plugin, then it will use that specific library for creating user interface. For example, you can run minweld example with Qt this way:

export SAL_USE_VCLPLUGIN=qt5

./bin/run minweld
The minweld example in Qt (light theme)

The minweld example in Qt (light theme)

You may also run it with GTK3 UI, this way:

export SAL_USE_VCLPLUGIN=gtk3

export GTK_THEME=Adwaita:light # For light/dark theme

./bin/run minweld
The minweld example in GTK3 (light theme)

The minweld example in GTK3 (light theme)

I hope that this explanation was helpful for you to understand the basics of GUI design and implementation in LibreOffice. You can try doing small improvements in LibreOffice GUI by looking into the EasyHacks that with the tag “Design“:

TDF Wiki: EasyHacks categorized by “Design” as the required skill

We welcome your code submissions to improve LibreOffice. If you would like to start contributing to LibreOffice, please take a look at our video tutorial:

Getting Started (Video Tutorial)

by Hossein Nourikhah at November 22, 2024 05:07 PM

November 08, 2024

allotropia

Announcing ZetaOffice, a new LibreOffice Technology product for web, mobile & desktop

Hamburg and Bolzano, November 8th, 2024 – During the two-day annual South Tyrol Free Software Conference, allotropia software GmbH today announces beta versions of its new product line “ZetaOffice”.

ZetaOffice is a new set of applications, libraries and services, all powered by the LibreOffice Technology stack. Featured among its products is ZetaJS, an innovative browser-based plugin, with unique programmability & embeddability – the perfect tool for complex office editing, process automation and line-of-business applications in the web.

Additionally, leveraging the unique portability and flexibility of the LibreOffice Technology stack, ZetaOffice will be available in bit-by-bit identical versions (allowing for perfect interoperability and feature parity) also for open-source-based mobile operating systems (Android, and derived OS), as well as for all relevant desktop operating systems (Windows, macOS, Linux – via flatpak and snapcraft).

“We’re very excited being able to offer powerful, data-sovereign Open Source office functionality on even more platforms today”, says Thorsten Behrens, owner and managing director of allotropia software. “In particular our innovative, WASM-based browser version of LibreOffice will be a game-changer for every web developer in need of processing, analysing or integrating with office documents.”

“This could not have come at a better time”, says Michiel Leenaars, director of strategy at philanthropic investor NLnet Foundation. “It is long overdue but certainly in the wake of the recent geo-political developments, we all recognise the urgent need for Europe to regain its technological independence when it comes to core technologies – as boring as these may seem. ZetaOffice shows that Europe has the talent and capacity to break with the past and create new paradigms and use innovation and collaboration to save the day.”

“ZetaOffice is the perfect addition to our portfolio of tools for document and business process automation”, says Uli Brandner, CEO and owner of CIB Group. “With solutions like CIB flow for workflow modeling and CIB coSys for high-quality template management, CIB Group already offers powerful digitalization tools. As demand grows to bring proven applications to the web and stay on the cutting edge of technology, ZetaOffice stands out as an innovative solution precisely tailored to our customers’ needs.”

A detailed blog post, including links to beta versions of the software, is available here.

For the products, please refer to our website at zetaoffice.net.

ZetaOffice and the team at allotropia thanks the European Commission’s Next Generation Internet initiative/NGI Zero for its financial contribution to the development of this software.

About ZetaOffice:

ZetaOffice is a product line based on LibreOffice Technology, comprising of desktop LTS products for classical office productivity requirements; a browser-native version based on WebAssembly for fast, client-side integration and automation of office technology; and an
upcoming mobile app widget, for deep integration in mobile line-of-business applications. ZetaOffice is focused on speed, superb embeddability, excellent inter-product as well as Office compatibility, and geared towards digital-sovereign & data protection needs.

About ZetaJS:

ZetaJS is a JavaScript library, available via the npm package manager, to enable developers to quickly & conveniently embed ZetaOffice WebAssembly in web applications. ZetaJS makes available the entire gamut of the LibreOffice programmability interfaces, providing a web-native component for JavaScript developers to deeply embed an office suite into their web apps. In contrast to classical cloud-office setups, ZetaJS can be used as an integral, client-side part of any web application – permitting users to interact with office documents as part of a larger application framework, with very low latency. That way, e.g. direct integration for editing, suggestions or running calculations in complex spreadsheets can be provided. Similarly, it’s trivially easy to implement direct, client-side rendering and export of office documents into PDF or HTML – all via a self-hostable, digital-sovereign Open Source solution.

About allotropia software GmbH:

The company allotropia software GmbH provides services, consulting and products around LibreOffice and related opensource projects. Founded in 2020 by long-time developers of the project, its stated mission is to make LibreOffice shine – in as many different shapes and forms as necessary to serve modern needs towards office productivity software. allotropia software GmbH is headquartered in Hamburg, Germany at the birthplace of the OpenOffice/LibreOffice project. For more information, visit allotropia.de, or follow fosstodon.org/@allotropia on Mastodon and LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/allotropia-software-gmbh

by allotropiasoft at November 08, 2024 10:59 AM

Launching ZetaJS for ZetaOffice

Today allotropia has launched the ZetaOffice range of products at the SFSCON in South Tyrol. ZetaOffice is a LibreOffice Technology built & designed for professional use in the browser, on the desktop and on mobile.

We are excited to additionally announce a massively improved way for which LibreOffice Technology can be used fully client-side on the web. As an additional building block, we have developed the ZetaJS wrapper, which enables convenient embedding and automating WASM (WebAssembly) builds of ZetaOffice via JavaScript. With that, all of the LibreOffice Technology APIs and features are available to web applications – and by leveraging WASM, which runs ZetaOffice client-side, no server or cloud services are needed. All processing is taking place on the client browser, which minimizes latencies & load (of course, a minimal static delivery of web application code, assets and the WASM binary is still needed, but that’s extremely light-weight). 

Examples

Let’s look at some simple examples to give you an idea, how easy ZetaOffice integration is. All comprise of an HTML and a JavaScript file. A ZetaOffice WASM build will automatically be included from the following URL. To replace it with a custom WASM build see config.sample.js of each demo.

https://cdn.zetaoffice.net/zetaoffice_latest/

Next you need to upload the zetajs/ folder onto a webserver of your choice, which sets the following HTTP headers (see developer.mozilla.org for further details):

Cross-Origin-Opener-Policy "same-origin"
Cross-Origin-Embedder-Policy "require-corp"

So back to the example code. The HTML files for all examples embed ZetaOffice and some JavaScript loading code. Please check the actual JavaScript file for the code interacting with ZetaOffice.

Lets have a look at the simple.html (see live). ZetaOffice displays its content using an HTML canvas. So in line 14 we initialize this canvas. Currently a list of attributes like is needed for the canvas. But we will migrate those attributes to the ZetaJS wrapper, so they won’t be needed anymore in the HTML code.

<canvas
  id="qtcanvas" contenteditable="true"
  oncontextmenu="event.preventDefault()" onkeydown="event.preventDefault()"
  style="height:100%; width:100%; border:0px none; padding:0;"/>

The Module variable on line 30 passes the information needed to initialize WASM binaries. First is the canvas. And second is an array of JavaScript files which will be executed in the main Web Worker running the WASM binary. Web Workers are a process like feature of the browsers WASM runtime environment. We pass the ZetaJS wrapper and a file with custom JavaScript code, in this example the simple.js. You may need to ensure, that the zeta.js is reachable under the given URL path.

Line 33 to 39 preload the soffice.js file to ensure, it’s not being blocked by the browsers origin policy when loaded from a foreign origin. Line 42 triggers a website resize event, to make ZetaOffice display nicely inside the canvas. This can be done more precise, as shown in the more complex demos. But for the start the resize event will be triggered after a fixed interval. And finally the soffice.js document is finally loaded which triggers the start of the WASM binary.

Second is the simple.js file. It’s running inside the same Web Worker as the WASM binary to enable interaction. When running in Chromium / Google Chrome you will find a dropdown list labeled “top” at the upper left of the “Console” tab in the developer tools. There you can select the em-pthread_1 Web Worker to debug code in the simple.js file.

Inside the simple.js you will find pretty much the same code as when controlling a LibreOffice running naively on Linux, Windows or any other native OS. It is using LibreOffice’s UNO interface. Most existing examples using UNO via Python or Basic can be easily moved to JavaScript.

The control flow is being passed by the Module.zetajs.thenwhich gets called as soon as the WASM binary is loaded. It passes the zetajs object from which we first get the common com.sun.star object (do not confuse it’s abbreviation css with HTML CSS). In the lines 11 to 21 we get some control objects via UNO, which allow us to trigger the load of an example office document example.odt which is embedded in the WASM binary.

Module.zetajs.then(function(zetajs) {
  function getTextDocument() {
    const css = zetajs.uno.com.sun.star;
    const context = zetajs.getUnoComponentContext();
    const desktop = css.frame.Desktop.create(context);
    let xModel = desktop.getCurrentFrame().getController().getModel();
    if (xModel === null
      || !zetajs.fromAny(
        xModel.queryInterface(zetajs.type.interface(css.text.XTextDocument))))
    {
      xModel = desktop.loadComponentFromURL(
        'file:///android/default-document/example.odt', '_default', 0, []);
    }
    const toolkit = css.awt.Toolkit.create(context);

Line 27 is where the actual application logic starts. In this simple example we get a cursor object from the document to insert the text string here! at the top. In the final section from line 32 to 38 each paragraph of the office document becomes colored in a random color.

    const xText = xModel.getText();
    const xTextCursor = xText.createTextCursor();
    xTextCursor.setString("string here!");
  }
  {
    const xModel = getTextDocument();
    const xText = xModel.getText();
    const xParaEnumeration = xText.createEnumeration();
    for (const next of xParaEnumeration) {
      const xParagraph = zetajs.fromAny(next);
      const color = Math.floor(Math.random() * 0xFFFFFF);
      xParagraph.setPropertyValue("CharColor", color);
    }

This other simple-examples/ show you a little more interesting tasks you can do with the same basic techniques as shown here. While the HTML files are all the same, the simple_key_handler.js (see live) shows you how to register to ZetaOffice event handlers. And finally rainbow_writer.js (see live) uses this to implement a small tool coloring text as you write it.

More Complex Examples

The next big step is in the standalone/ (see live) example. It adds a nice loading animation and shows you how to pass messages between the WASM Web Worker and the browsers main thread, handling the HTML page. This is being used to implement some simple controls on the HTML page for formatting text inside ZetaOffice. The demo is build as a npm package and can be run according to the contained README.md. Don’t forget to pass an URL to the soffice_base_url variable as explained above!

Additional examples are vuejs3-ping-tool/ (see live) and letter-address-tool/ (see live). The vuejs3-ping-tool/is again a npm package, and show-cases how to automatically fill spreadsheets documents with values, displaying them in nicely animated Calc charts. The other letter-address-tool/ example gives you an impression how to connect ZetaOffice with external data sources to automatically create letters from templates, and export the result as office document or PDF file.

Please share your feedback as a comment in the blog, or use the GitHub issue tracker for suggestions or bugs in the code!

by Moritz Duge at November 08, 2024 10:58 AM