Welcome to The Document Foundation Planet

This is a feed aggregator that collects what LibreOffice and Document Foundation contributors are writing in their respective blogs.

To have your blog added to this aggregator, please mail the website@global.libreoffice.org mailinglist or file a ticket in Redmine.


Friday
06 February, 2026


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Unfortunately, I keep reading about open-source software advocates who happily use Microsoft’s proprietary DOCX, XLSX and PPTX formats for their documents and therefore prefer proprietary software such as OnlyOffice to LibreOffice. Others write outrageous things such as: “OOXML is a standard format, and we have to accept it.” I would


Wednesday
04 February, 2026


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La suite ofimática más rápida, más perfeccionada y bajo su total control. Nos complace anunciar el lanzamiento de LibreOffice 26.2, la última versión del paquete ofimático gratuito y de código abierto en el que confían millones de usuarios en todo el mundo. Esta versión hace que sea más fácil que


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We’re pleased to announce the release of LibreOffice 26.2, the newest version of the free and open source office suite trusted by millions of users around the world. This release makes it easier than ever for users to create, edit and share documents on their own terms. Designed for individuals


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If you have a commented text range, which gets deleted while track changes is on and you later save and load this with Writer's DOCX filter, that works now correctly.

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

Motivation

It was already possible to comment on text ranges. Comments were also supported inside deletes when track changes is enabled. These could be already exported to and imported from DOCX in Writer. But you could not combine these.

With the increasing popularity of commenting text ranges (rather than just inserting a comment with an anchor), not being able to combine these was annoying.

Results so far

Here is how a commented text range inside a delete from DOCX now looks like, note the semi-transparent comment hinting it's deleted:

Commented text range, inside a tracked delete, in DOCX, Collabora Online

As a side effect, this also fixes the behavior in desktop Writer, which crosses out deleted comments:

Commented text range, inside a tracked delete, in DOCX, desktop

In the past, the "is this deleted" property was not visible in the render result:

Commented text range, inside a tracked delete, in DOCX, Collabora Online, old bad state

And it was also bad in desktop Writer:

Commented text range, inside a tracked delete, in DOCX, desktop, old bad state

This required changes to both DOCX import and export: a comment could be deleted or could have an anchor which is a text range, but you couldn't have both.

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 (26.8).


Saturday
31 January, 2026


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Hello! We are at FOSDEM 2026 in Brussels – come and say hello, let us know what you think about LibreOffice, and get cool merch…


Saturday
24 January, 2026


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File formats are not usually the subject of philosophical debate because most users just want to open, save and share documents without any problems. However, the Open Document Format (ODF) is based on concepts that are much more important to users than might initially seem the case. ODF is not


Friday
23 January, 2026


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El camino hacia el lanzamiento oficial de LibreOffice 26.2 entra en su etapa final. Acabamos de publicar RC2 (Release Candidate 2), la segunda versión “candidata” a convertirse en la versión oficial. ¿Qué ha cambiado? Desde la primera versión de prueba (RC1), la comunidad ha trabajado intensamente: se incorporaron 137 mejoras


Thursday
22 January, 2026


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FOSDEM es el mayor evento europeo de software libre y de código abierto (FOSS), y se celebrará los días 31 de enero y 1 de febrero en Bruselas, Bélgica. El proyecto y la comunidad de LibreOffice estarán presentes. Visita nuestro stand, conversa con nosotros y llévate material promocional (adhesivos, folletos


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In LibreOffice development, there are many cases where you want to validate some documents against standards: either Open Document Format (ODF) or MS Office Open XML (OOXML). Here I discuss how to do that.

Update: Article updated to reflect that odfvalidator 0.13.0 has just released.

Open Document Format (ODF) Validation

ODF is the native document file format that LibreOffice and many other open source applications use. It is basically set of XML files that are zipped together, and can describe various aspects of the document, from the content itself to the way it should be displayed. These XML files have to conform to ODF standard, which is presented in XML schemas. The latest version of ODF is 1.4, which is yet to be implemented in LibreOffice.

You can find more about ODF in these links:

There are various tools to do the validation, but the preferred one is the ODF Toolkit Validator:

Compiled binaries of ODF Toolkit can be downloaded from the above Github project:

Then, you can use the ODF validator this way:

$ java -jar odfvalidator-0.13.0-jar-with-dependencies.jar test.odt

You may also use the online validator, odfvalidator.org, to do a validation.

odfvalidatorOnline odfvalidator tool

Please read this disclaimer before using:

This service does not cover all conformance criteria of the OpenDocument Format specification. It is not applicable for formal validation proof. Problems reported by this service only indicate that a document may not conform to the specification. It must not be concluded from errors that are reported that the document does not conform to the specification without further investigation of the error report, and it must not be concluded from the absence of error reports that the OpenDocument Format document conforms to the OpenDocument Format specification.

Office Open XML (OOXML) Validation

MS Office Open XML (OOXML) is the native standard for Microsoft documents format. It is also a set of XML files zipped together, and conform to some XML schemas.

You can find out more about OOXML here:

There are tools to do the validation, and the one is used in LibreOffice is Office-o-tron. One can use it with below command to validate an example file, test.docx:

$ java -jar officeotron-0.8.8.jar ~/test.docx

Office-o-tron can be downloaded from dev-www.libreoffice.org server of LibreOffice, and this is currently the latest version:

It is worth noting that Office-o-tron can be also used to validate ODT files.

Extensions to ODF Standard

To go beyond the current ODF standard, new features are sometimes introduced as “ODF extensions”, then are gradually added to the standard. You can read more in TDF Wiki:

In these cases, you may see validation errors for such extensions. For example:

test.odt/styles.xml[2


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FOSDEM is the biggest free and open source software (FOSS) event in Europe, and will take place on 31 January and 1 February in Brussels, Belgium. And the LibreOffice project and community will be there! Come to our stand, have a chat, and grab some cool merchandise (stickers, flyers, and


Wednesday
21 January, 2026


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The Document Foundation (TDF) es la entidad sin fines de lucro que respalda el proyecto LibreOffice. Recauda donaciones de los usuarios y cuenta con un pequeño equipo que da soporte y coordina a la comunidad mundial que desarrolla el software. TDF cuenta con varios órganos, entre los que se incluyen


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Starting in January 2026, at the beginning of each quarter, i.e. in January, April, July and October, I will publish a slide deck with updated statistics on the LibreOffice project. Unless there are specific requirements, the statistics will refer to the last 12 calendar months. Therefore, the January statistics will


Tuesday
20 January, 2026


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LibreOffice 26.2 will be released as final at the beginning of February, 2026 (check the Release Plan). LibreOffice 26.2 Release Candidate 2 (RC2) brings us closer to the final version, which will be preceded by Release Candidate 3 (RC3). Since the previous release, LibreOffice 26.2 RC1, 137 commits have been


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por Italo Vignoli Cada vez que hablo con otros usuarios de tecnología —incluidos CTO, CSO y responsables de TIC, que en teoría deberían tener cierto nivel de conocimiento— me doy cuenta de que la mayoría nunca piensa en los estándares cuando utiliza aplicaciones, dispositivos o sitios web. Los usuarios solo


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The Document Foundation (TDF) is the non-profit entity behind the LibreOffice project. It collects donations from users, and employs a small team to support and coordinate the worldwide community that makes the software. In TDF there are various bodies including the Board of Directors, Membership Committee, and the Board of


Friday
16 January, 2026


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Happy new year 2026! I hope that this year will be great for you, and the global LibreOffice community, and the software itself! I hereby discuss the past year 2025, and the outlook for 2026 in the development blog.

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 via EasyHacks and tutorials, and eventually participate in LibreOffice core development to make LibreOffice better for everyone. In 2025, I wrote 14 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 2026 in this blog will be:

  • Introducing new EasyHacks
    • Using new C++20 constructs
    • Difficulty Interesting EasyHacks
  • Describing user interface creation with VCL
    • VCL weld mechanism
    • Various weld widgets
  • Describing UNO Components

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

We provide mentoring support to the individuals 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. You may also refer to our Getting Involved Wiki page:

Let’s hope a better year for LibreOffice (and the world) in 2026.


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Whenever I talk to other technology users — including CTOs, CSOs and ICT managers, who in theory should have a certain level of expertise — I realise that most of them never consider standards when using applications, devices or websites. Users just want everything to work, but they don’t realise


Thursday
15 January, 2026


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por Italo Vignoli Los estándares abiertos no suelen ocupar titulares. En cambio, trabajan silenciosamente en segundo plano para definir cómo se crea, comparte y almacena la información. Sin embargo, a medida que los ecosistemas digitales se vuelven más complejos y centralizados, los estándares abiertos adquieren una importancia cada vez mayor.


Monday
12 January, 2026


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LibreOffice is available in over 120 languages – but we want to do more! Jonathan Clark recently joined the TDF team to improve LibreOffice’s support for RTL (right-to-left) and CTL (complex text layout) scripts. In this episode, he talks to Mike Saunders about his work, and how users can help


Friday
09 January, 2026


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Open standards don’t make headlines. Instead, they work quietly behind the scenes to define how information is created, shared and stored. However, as digital ecosystems become more complex and centralised, open standards are becoming increasingly important. One of the best examples is the Open Document Format (ODF), the native format


Thursday
08 January, 2026


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General Activities LibreOffice 25.8.4 was announced on December 18 Olivier Hallot (TDF) added a help page for Markdown in Writer, JSON in Calc, updated or improved help for View and Appearance options, accessibility options, sort criteria in Calc, file conversion filters, ODF versions, handling of empty cells in Calc, Data


Monday
05 January, 2026


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The bullet support in Impress got a couple of improvements recently, some of this is PPTX support and others are general UI improvements.

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

Motivation

Probably the most simple presentations are just a couple of slides, each slide having a title shape and an outliner shape, containing some bullets, perhaps with some additional images. Images are just bitmaps, so let's focus on outliner shapes and their outliner / bullet styles.

What happens if you save these to PPTX and load it back? Can you toggle between a numbering and a bullet? Can you return to an outliner style after you had direct formatting for your bullet?

Results so far

The first case was about bullet editing of this document:

Outliner shape with 3 outliner styles

If you pressed enter at the end of 'First level', then pressed <tab> to promote the current paragraph to the second level, nothing happened. The reason for this was that our PPTX export was missing the list styles of shapes, except for the very first list style. And the same was missing on the import side, too. With this, not only the rendering of the bullets are OK, but also adding new paragraphs and using promoting / demoting to change levels work as expected.

The second case was about this document, where the second level had a numbering, not a bullet:

Outliner shape with a numbering on the second level

We only had UI to first toggle off a numbering to no numbering, then you could toggle on bullets. Now it's possible to do this change in one step.

The last case was about styles. Imagine that you had a master page with an outline shape and some reasonably looking configuration for the first and second levels as outline styles:

Outliner shape with two outline styles

Notice how the last paragraph has a slightly inconsistent formatting, due to direct formatting. Let's fix this.

Go to the end of the last bullet, which is currently not connected to an outline style, toggle bullets off and then toggle it on again. Now we clear direct formatting when we turn off the bullet, so next time you turn bullets on, it'll be again connected to the outline style's bullet configuration and the content will look better.

Note how this even improves consistency: Writer was behaving the same way already, when toggling bullets off and then toggle on again resulted in getting rid of previously applied unwanted direct formatting.

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:


Wednesday
31 December, 2025


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Por Italo Vignoli Para ser sincero, no pensaba publicar mi habitual entrada sobre ODF durante las fiestas, ya que la mayoría de la gente está ocupada con otras actividades y el formato de documento no es una prioridad. Los que trabajan se centran en el cierre del trimestre, mientras que


Tuesday
30 December, 2025


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Imagen: Eliane Domingos


Wednesday
24 December, 2025


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Como obsequio de fin de año, el equipo de documentación presenta la Guía de LibreOffice Math 25.8. Esta publicación no es solo una actualización técnica, sino el resultado de un proceso de autoría, traducción, revisión y adaptación realizado íntegramente por B. Antonio Fernández, con el objetivo de poner a disposición


Monday
22 December, 2025


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por Italo Vignoli La identidad digital se ha convertido en una parte integral de la vida cotidiana. La utilizamos para acceder a herramientas de trabajo y firmar documentos en línea, e incluso está reemplazando a las credenciales físicas de identidad. Sin embargo, la mayoría de los debates sobre el tema


Friday
19 December, 2025


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Developers and database administrators often operate under a common assumption: unlocking powerful new software features requires significant, time-consuming, and expensive development work. New capabilities frequently sit on the shelf, waiting for the budget and time to rewrite applications to take advantage of them.This assumption, however, doesn't always hold true. Recent versions of the


Monday
15 December, 2025


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General Activities LibreOffice 25.8.3 was announced on November 13 Olivier Hallot (TDF) improved the help on sort options and keyboard shortcuts, added help for field variable formats, the Slide Properties Sidebar deck, named Calc formulas and Arabic fonts and right-to-left direction for Math. He also updated help for paragraph alignment


Thursday
11 December, 2025


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LibreOffice 26.2 will be released as final at the beginning of February, 2026 ( Check the Release Plan ). LibreOffice 26.2 Beta1 is the second pre-release since development of version 26.2 started at the beginning of June, 2025. Since the previous release, LibreOffice 26.2 Alpha1, 419 commits have been submitted


Saturday
06 December, 2025


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A modern C++ wrapper for the Firebird database API.Documentation | Repositoryfb-cpp provides a clean, modern C++ interface to the Firebird database engine. It wraps the Firebird C++ API with RAII principles, smart pointers, and modern C++ features.Features&nbsp;Modern C++: Uses C++20 features for type safety and performanceRAII: Automatic resource management with smart pointersType Safety:

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