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
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


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Digital identity has become an integral part of everyday life. We use it to access work tools and sign documents online, and it is even replacing physical identity cards. However, most discussions on the subject focus on authentication systems, encryption and biometrics, ignoring the formats that actually carry our information.


Thursday
18 December, 2025


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  Berlín, 18 de diciembre de 2025 – LibreOffice 25.8.4, la cuarta actualización menor del paquete de oficina gratuito desarrollado por voluntarios para la productividad personal en entornos de oficina en Windows, macOS y Linux, ya está disponible en la página de descargas. Con LibreOffice 25.2 llegando al final de


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Berlin, 18 December 2025 – LibreOffice 25.8.4, the fourth minor update to the free office suite developed by volunteers for personal productivity in office environments on Windows, MacOS and Linux, is now available from the download page. With LibreOffice 25.2 reaching the end of life on 30 November, and the


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Zdeněk Crhonek (aka “raal”) from the Czech LibreOffice community writes: The new version of the LibreOffice Draw Guide 25.8 has been translated, and announced on our social media. The team is almost identical, with translations by Petr Kuběj, Zdeněk Crhonek and Radomír Strnad and technical support from Miloš Šrámek. Download


Wednesday
17 December, 2025


[en] Michael Meeks: 2025-12-17 Wednesday

21:00 UTC

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  • Up early, APELL advisory board call. Sync with Dave.
  • Published the next strip on different approaches to politics (which is what happens when two people meet):
    The Open Road to Freedom - strip#48 - politics is where two people meet
  • Worked on a proposal, all hands call, sync with Olivier & Thorsten, and then Oliver & Thorsten (with Philippe in the middle).
  • Dinner & band practice in the evening, back to work late.

Tuesday
16 December, 2025


[en] Michael Meeks: 2025-12-16 Tuesday

21:00 UTC

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  • Early sync with Lily, planning call, catch up with Laser, snatched lunch, interview, monthly management call. Catch up with Andras, more annual review bits & admin in the evening.

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La comunidad hispana de LibreOffice se complace en anunciar la publicación de la Guía de Writer 25.2 en español, un nuevo aporte construido de manera colaborativa y abierta, reflejo del compromiso de quienes participan activamente en el proyecto. LibreOffice Writer es una potente aplicación de procesamiento de textos que admite


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At the recent Open Source Conference 2025 in Luxembourg there were two talks about LibreOffice. The first was Lessons learned from 13 years at The Document Foundation and LibreOffice, where Florian Effenberger, Executive Director of the foundation, talks about the legal setup of The Document Foundation and how its statutes


Monday
15 December, 2025


[en] Michael Meeks: 2025-12-15 Monday

21:00 UTC

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  • Mail chew, a day of 1:1's, marketing content call, partner call, somewhat surreal TDF board call, worked late on annual reviews.

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General Activities

  1. LibreOffice 25.8.3 was announced on November 13
  2. 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 after the change from Left/Right to Start/End
  3. Gábor Kelemen (Collabora) fixed crashes related to locked-down options, improved the script for finding unneeded includes in the code and did many code cleanups
  4. Tomaž Vajngerl (Collabora) fixed an issue with borders when changing the document theme and improved pivot table stability and test coverage
  5. Skyler Grey, Méven Car, Dennis Francis, Hubert Figuière, Szymon Kłos, Jaume Pujantell and Nick Wingate (Collabora) worked on LOKit/jsdialog used by Collabora Online. Szymon also made it so Notebookbar style preview shows favourite styles (supported in DOCX files)
  6. Rashesh Padia (Collabora) improved the stability of LanguageTool integration
  7. Miklós Vajna (Collabora) made it possible to use styles from a template when importing Markdown files, fixed inability to transition from a numbered list to a bulleted list in Impress in some cases, made it so the numbering rules are reset when toggling bullets/numbering, added a UNO command parameter to skip the detection of format when pasting and fixed some crashes
  8. Xisco Faulí (TDF) added lzma to the internal Python, added several automated tests, enabled by default the export validation for docx format in tests and upgraded many dependencies
  9. Michael Stahl (Collabora) improved stability when using the JAWS screenreader on Windows, made Writer anchoring code more robust and fixed incorrect line breaking of fields in Writer
  10. Mike Kaganski (Collabora) fixed leap year detection in BCE dates, made it so change tracking correctly handles comments deleted via the Navigator, made the hidden paragraph mark feature more robust, fixed a Windows bitmap pasting issue, added an infobar notification for when active change tracking is hidden in Calc, fixed extensions failing to run, if their folder names contained spaces and fixed an issue with text in a nested section jumping to the next page. He also did many code cleanups and optimisations and wrote automated tests
  11. Caolán McNamara (Collabora) fixed many issues found by static analysers and did code cleanups and optimisations
  12. Stephan Bergmann (Collabora) worked on WASM and Flatpak builds, did build fixes, adapted the code to compiler changes and did code cleanups
  13. Noel Grandin (Collabora) fixed a memory leak in Impress when switching to the Notes view and optimised the export of SVGs with lots of bitmaps. He also did many code cleanups and optimisations, especially in the area of writing OOXML structure
  14. Justin Luth (Collabora) made it easier to select a hyperlink in Writer, made it so comment indicators are no longer hidden behind AutoFilter dropdowns, fixed an anchor offset issue in XLSX import together with Johann Lorber (Linagora) and improved PowerPoint compatibility of .wav file names and dates
  15. Michael Weghorn (TDF) fixed accessibility issues in the Extension Manager

Sunday
14 December, 2025


[en] Michael Meeks: 2025-12-14 Sunday

21:00 UTC

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  • Up early, All Saints - played the violin, Rick spoke. Home for a pizza lunch with the babes, rested sluggishly much of the afternoon.

Saturday
13 December, 2025


[en] Michael Meeks: 2025-12-13 Saturday

21:00 UTC

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  • Up early, worked in the car on the way to sit with Bruce for a while in Ipswich; talked to him a little. Out for Toby Carvery with Anne afterwards.
  • Worked in the care on the way home to see the babes, iterated some feedback.

Friday
12 December, 2025


[en] Michael Meeks: 2025-12-12 Friday

21:00 UTC

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  • Sync with Dave, start working back through the E-mail and admin backlog, caught the end of Tor's TTT, lunch.
  • Partner call, annual review / finance meeting, poked at radical TDF community bylaws in more detail.

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I decided to start the current campaign, with one blog post per week focusing on the different aspects of Open Document Format, to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the standardisation by OASIS, which happened in May 2005. My hope was to raise the interest around ODF, which is the document


Thursday
11 December, 2025


[en] Michael Meeks: 2025-12-11 Thursday

21:00 UTC

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  • Up early, packed & lugged more luggage to the venue, bags inside bags.
  • Published the next strip on the difficulty of getting audience sensitive content: conferences & communication
    The Open Road to Freedom - strip#47 - conferences and communication
  • Wandered the show talking to people and handing out stickers and documentation; gave a talk on migrating ministries with Guy-Christian.
  • Bid 'bye to friendly partners. Train to the Eurostar with Meven, managed to bump to the earlier train and stated on the E-mail and admin backlog on the move.

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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 to the code repository and 114 issues got fixed. Check the release notes to find the new features included in this version of LibreOffice.

LibreOffice 26.2 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!


Wednesday
10 December, 2025


[en] Michael Meeks: 2025-12-10 Wednesday

21:00 UTC

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  • Breakfast with the lads; off to the City of Science and Technology (or something) for Open Source Experience.
  • Great to talk to lots of partners, customers, share a booth with Arawa & atol CD, and to catch up with friends old & new.
  • Drinks in the evening with many, learned about some combination of photonic AI, and business updates. Out for a fine dinner with Arawa & atolCD folk.

Tuesday
09 December, 2025


[en] Michael Meeks: 2025-12-09 Tuesday

21:00 UTC

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  • Up too early, breakfast with Eloy, Chris & Meven. Very long taxi ride to the Nextcloud Enterprise Day - arrived late.
  • Enjoyed some great talks & conversation with lots of people, distributed hard-working-beaver mascots left and right, quick-start guides, French handouts etc.
  • Enjoyed some drinks & snacks, and off to the XWIKI party - again meeting all sorts of fun people.

Monday
08 December, 2025


[en] Michael Meeks: 2025-12-08 Monday

21:00 UTC

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  • Up early, fond 'bye to girls. Tried to squeeze lots of 1:1's in, taxi to Cambridge with lots of luggage. Worked in the car & waiting room.
  • Moved up the Eurostar times, did a bit of bug-fix hacking on the train - so fun. Lugged luggage across town.

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As November started, we kicked off a new Month of LibreOffice campaign, celebrating community contributions all across the project. We do these every six months – so how many people got sticker packs this time? Check it out… 297 Excellent work! Hundreds of people, all across the globe, have helped


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por Gustavo Pacheco El Festival Latinoamericano de Instalación de Software Libre (FLISoL) 2025 se llevó a cabo los días 25 y 26 de abril en Montevideo. El FLISoL es el evento descentralizado de Software Libre más importante de América Latina. Como miembro del Membership Committee de The Document Foundation, estuve


Sunday
07 December, 2025


[en] Michael Meeks: 2025-12-07 Sunday

21:00 UTC

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  • All Saints in the morning, played bass. Home for roast lamb lunch, prepped for crib service.
  • Ed & David over to share it with us. Played games variously.
  • Prepped music for evening service, ran that - Florence spoke. Home to relax.

Saturday
06 December, 2025


[en] Michael Meeks: 2025-12-06 Saturday

21:00 UTC

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  • Up earlyish, out to All Saints to play Guitar for a fun Local Houses of Prayer (LHOP) kick-off meeting. Home early.
  • Plugged away at E-mail, lunch with H. and E., slugged a bit. Back to the mail & admin backlog.
  • J. returned home, hair-cut, prepared music for evening service tomorrow.

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La Conferencia Global de LibreOffice 2026 se llevará a cabo en Pordenone, Italia, organizada por el PNlug (Grupo de Usuarios de Linux de Pordenone) y la Universidad de Pordenone, dentro del campus universitario. El evento comenzará el jueves 9 de septiembre y finalizará la mañana del sábado 11 de septiembre,


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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 Modern C++: Uses C++20 features for type safety and performanceRAII: Automatic resource management with smart pointersType Safety:


Friday
05 December, 2025


[en] Michael Meeks: 2025-12-05 Friday

21:00 UTC

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  • Mail chew, worked through a growing admin backlog. Great TTT from Kendy on Collabora Office on Mac.
  • Published the next strip on trying to please everyone:
    The Open Road to Freedom - strip#46 - trying to please everyone
  • Couple of partner calls, sync with Miklos, worked late.

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LibreOffice Conference 2026 in Pordenone, Italy, and LibreOffice Conference 2027 in Gothenburg, Sweden LibreOffice Conference 2026 will be organised by PNlug (Pordenone Linux User Group) and the University of Pordenone in the city of Pordenone, on the university campus. The conference will begin on Thursday, 10 September and will end


Thursday
04 December, 2025


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After submitting a patch to LibreOffice Gerrit, one has to wait for the continuous integration (CI) to build and test the changed source code to make sure that the build is OK and the tests pass successfully. Here we discuss the situation when one or more CI builds fail, and how to handle that.

Why Build and Test on CI?

After you submit code to LibreOffice Gerrit, reviewers have to make sure that it builds, and the tests pass with the new source code. But, it is not possible for the reviewers to test the code on each and every platform that LibreOffice supports. Therefore, Jenkins CI does that job of building and testing LibreOffice on various platforms.

This can take a while, usually 1 hour or so, but sometimes can take longer than that. If everything is OK, then your submission will get     Verified +1    .

CI Platforms for LibreOffice

Currently, these are the platforms used in CI:

  • Linux / GCC:  gerrit_linux_gcc_release
  • Linux / Clang: gerrit_linux_clang_dbgutil
  • Android Viewer: gerrit_android_x86_64 and gerrit_android_arm
  • Windows: gerrit_windows_wsl
  • macOS: gerrit_mac

Some of the tests are more extensive, for example Linux / Clang also performs additional code quality checks with clang compiler plugins. Also, UITests are not run on each and every platform.

Jenkins LibreOffice CI

LibreOffice CI uses Jenkins

Why Failures Happen and How to Fix?

There can be multiple reasons for why a CI build fails, and give your submission    Verified -1   . These are some of the reasons, and depending on the reason, solution can be different.

1. Your code’s syntax is wrong and compile fails

In this case, you should fix your code, and then submit a new patch set. You have to wait again for a new CI build.

2. The code’s syntax is OK, but it is not properly formatted

You should refer to the below TDF Wiki article and use clang-format tool to format your code properly.

3. Your code’s syntax is OK, but it logically not OK and fails some tests.

In this case, you should try fixing your code logic, and run the tests that fail and make sure they pass. After that, you may send a new patch set and wait for a new CI build.

4. Your code’s syntax and logic is OK, but some machine fails for other reasons like their disk being full or other software/hardware failures or hiccups

In this case, usually resuming the build can be a good option. You may ask on #libreoffice-dev or #tdf-infra IRC rooms for such a resume, or request access, if you submit many patches.

Resume CI build

Resume build in LibreOffice CI

5. Your code’s syntax and logic is OK, but there are issues from other patches.

In this case, intervention from other LibreOffice developers is needed. Informing people on #libreoffice-dev can help, and then you have to re-base your submission in case new patches fix the build issue.

Final Notes

The best way to know the reason of the build failure is to look into


[en] Michael Meeks: 2025-12-04 Thursday

21:00 UTC

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  • Mail chew, tech. planning call, new Collabora Office launch retrospective call. Lunch.
  • Sync with Lily, Laser, partner slide sync, drove to Cambridge, good to catch-up with people, finance team call. Christmas dinner with lots of the wider Collabora team, good to meet Tina.

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