Jiajun Xu writes, following on from part 1: The annual community event LibreOffice Asia Conference was held on December 13–14, 2025 in Tokyo, Japan. One of the sessions was a panel discussion titled “Lessons from Open Source Business,” moderated by Franklin Weng, featuring three company leaders from different countries sharing
LibreOffice Writer es el procesador de texto de la suite y se puede utilizar para prácticamente cualquier tarea relacionada con… bueno, el procesamiento de textos, por supuesto. Pero, ¿qué pasa con la escritura de guiones? Vimos un hilo interesante en Ask LibreOffice donde el usuario Peter J. compartía su experiencia
LibreOffice Writer is the suite’s word processor, and can be used for virtually any task involving… well, processing words, of course. But how about screenwriting (aka writing screenplays)? We saw a discussion on Ask LibreOffice where user Peter J. talked about his experiences in this field. Initially he described LibreOffice’s
In September 2025, I attended the LibreOffice Conference in Budapest, Hungary, on the 4th and the 5th, and a community meeting on the 3rd. Thanks to The Document Foundation (TDF) for sponsoring my travel and accommodation costs. The conference venue was Faculty of Informatics, Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE).
The conference was planned to be held from the 4th to the 6th, but the program for the 6th of September had to be canceled due to the venue being unavailable because of a marathon in Budapest. So, all the talks got squeezed into just two days, making the schedule a bit hectic.
The TDF had booked my room at the Corvin Hotel. It was a double bedroom with a window. The breakfast was included in the hotel booking. The hotel was walking distance from the conference venue. One could also take a tram from the hotel to reach the venue.
A shot of my room. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.
A tram in Budapest. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.
3rd of September
On the 3rd of September, we had a community meeting at the above-mentioned venue. I walked with my friend Dione to the venue. Upon reaching there, I noticed that the university had no boundaries and gates. This reminded me of the previous year’s conference venue in Luxembourg, which also had no boundaries or gates.
In contrast, Indian universities and institutes typically have walls and gates serving as boundaries to separate them from the rest of the city. Many of these institutes also have security guards at the entrance, who may ask attendees to present proof of admission before allowing them inside. I was surprised to find that institutes in Europe, like the one where the conference was held, did not have such boundaries.
The building where the conference was held was red, which happened to be the same color as the building for the previous year’s conference venue. I remember joking with Dione that the criteria for the conference venue might have been the color of the building.
The red building in the picture served as the conference venue. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.
During the community meeting, we shared ideas on how to spread the word about LibreOffice. The meeting lasted for a couple of hours.
After the community meeting, we went to the hotel for dinner sponsored by the TDF.
These Esterházy cake bites were really yummy. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.
Raspberry Currant cake slices. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.
4th of September
On the first day of the conference, attendees were given swag bags containing a pad, sticky notes, a pen, a conference T-shirt, and a bottle.
Conference swag. Photo by Ravi Dwivedi, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0.
The talks started early in the morning with Eliane Domingos, Chairperson of TDF’s Board of Directors, giving the inauguration talk …
La suite ofimática LibreOffice continúa impulsando mejoras en uno de sus componentes menos desarrollados en los últimos años: Base, su herramienta de gestión de bases de datos. En este contexto, The Document Foundation (TDF), la organización sin fines de lucro responsable del proyecto, anunció la incorporación de Vissarion Fisikopoulos como
Jiajun Xu writes: The annual community event LibreOffice Asia Conference was held on December 13-14 2025 in Tokyo, Japan. One of the sessions was a panel discussion titled “Lessons from Open Source Business,” moderated by Franklin Weng, featuring three company leaders from different countries sharing how they run their businesses
LibreOffice Base is the database component of the suite, and hasn’t seen a lot of development activity in recent years. So The Document Foundation – the non-profit behind the software – wants to change that! Following Neil Roberts, we now have a second new developer, Vissarion Fisikopoulos, so let’s hear
I've been looking fairly closely at the coordinate system of VCL. I understood it fairly well, but as I have a Pro subscription of Gemini, I asked it to look at it for me to tell me how it thinks it works. Here is what it came up with:
If you’ve ever worked on a complex UI rendering engine, you know that placing a single pixel on the screen is rarely as simple as draw(x, y). A single coordinate actually exists in several different "realities" simultaneously.
In LibreOffice’s VCL (Visual Components Library), a coordinate has to travel through up to five distinct spatial dimensions to get from the mathematical purity of a document model to the physical LED pixels on your monitor.
If you get an offset wrong or apply a scaling factor out of order, your text disappears off the page, your borders render fuzzy, or your PDF exports break entirely. To fix these issues and modernize the rendering stack, we have to establish a strict, predictable pipeline.
Here is a deep dive into the five coordinate spaces of the LibreOffice VCL, and the math required to traverse them.
The 5 Coordinate Spaces
Think of these spaces as a series of nested Russian dolls. To get to the center (the document), you have to open them one by one.
1. Absolute Logic (Document Space)
This is the pure, mathematical space of the document itself.
Units: Defined by the MapMode (e.g., 1/100th of a millimeter for high-precision printing).
Origin (0,0): The absolute top-left corner of the page or document canvas.
The Variable: Represented simply as nX or nY.
2. Logic Units (Pipeline Space)
This is an intermediate staging area. The coordinate is still in logical document units, but it has been intentionally shifted.
The Shift:mnOutOffLogic.
Why it exists: This is an artificial shift applied to the document origin. It is frequently used when VCL needs to render a specific sub-section or "tile" of a document without actually changing the underlying coordinates of the objects themselves.
3. View Space (Viewport Space)
Welcome to the realm of pixels—specifically, pixels relative to the viewport (the scrollable area of the application).
The Transformation: To get here, we multiply the Logic Units by the DPI and Zoom scale (mfMapScX / mfMapScY).
The Shift:mnMapOfsX / mnMapOfsY (The Mapping Offset).
Why it exists: The origin (0,0) here is the top-left of your current scroll position. As you scroll down a Writer document, the mapping offset changes, shifting the view without altering the document.
4. Window Space (Client Space)
These are pixels relative to the GUI window frame itself.
The Shift:mnOutOffOrigX / mnOutOffOrigY (The VCL Pixel Offset).
Why it exists: The origin (0,0) is the top-left corner of the specific LibreOffice window or UI widget you are interacting with. VCL uses this offset internally to account for things like scrollbars, widget borders, or docking areas inside a window. This is the coordinate space where your mouse click events …
The Document Foundation se creó en 2010 con una premisa única e innegociable: que una suite ofimática libre y con todas las funciones, basada en estándares abiertos y gestionada en interés público, es una infraestructura para la democracia. No es un producto. No es una posición en el mercado. Infraestructura,
The Document Foundation was created in 2010 with a single, non-negotiable premise: that a free, fully-featured office suite, built on open standards and governed in the public interest, is infrastructure for democracy. Not a product. Not a market position. Infrastructure, the kind that belongs to everyone and can be taken
What are we doing in the LibreOffice project? Where are we going, and how can all users (yes, even non-programmers) help to improve the software? We answered these questions – and more – at the recent Grazer Linuxtage event. Click here to watch the talk
General Activities LibreOffice 25.8.6 and LibreOffice 26.2.2 were announced on March 26 Olivier Hallot (TDF) added a help page for drag & drop features for items in text documents, updated help for Text Grid in Writer and PDF export General page and improved the help for Calc’s advanced filter options
Ravi Dwivedi from the Indian LibreOffice community writes: On the 29th of March 2026, we celebrated Document Freedom Day in Noida India. Thanks for Essentia.dev for the venue and sflc.in for sponsoring snacks and the cake. sflc.in is a donor-supported legal services organisation in India. The event featured a few
The Chemnitzer Linux-Tage (English page) is a yearly event in Germany for fans of free and open source software. This year, the LibreOffice project was present, as Karl-Heinz Gruner describes: LibreOffice had an information booth at the event. Stickers and flyers were very popular. An excerpt from their extensive video
The annual LibreOffice conference 2025 was held in Budapest, Hungary, from the 3rd to the 6th of September 2025. Thanks to the The Document Foundation (TDF) for sponsoring me to attend the conference.
As Hungary is a part of the Schengen area, I needed a Schengen visa to attend the conference. In order to apply for a Schengen visa, one needs to get an appointment at VFS Global and submit all the required documents there, which are then forwarded to the embassy.
I got an appointment for a Hungary visa at VFS Global in New Delhi for the 24th of July. There were many appointment slots available for the Hungary visa. One could easily get an appointment for the next day at the Delhi center. There were some technical problems on the VFS website, though, as I was unable to upload a scanned copy of my passport while booking the appointment. I got an error saying, “Unfortunately, you have exceeded the maximum upload limit.”
The problem didn’t get fixed even after contacting the VFS helpline. They asked me to try in the Firefox browser and deleting all the cache, which I already did.
So I created another account with a different email address and phone number, after which I was able to upload my passport and book an appointment. Other conference attendees from India also reported facing some technical issues on the VFS Hungary website.
Anyway, I went to the VFS Hungary application center as per my appointment on the 24th of July. Going inside, I located the Hungary visa application counter. There were two applicants ahead of me.
When it was my turn, the VFS staff warned me that my passport was damaged. The “damage” was on the bio-data page. All the details could be seen, but the lamination of the details page wore off a bit. They asked me to write an application to the Embassy of Hungary in New Delhi stating that I insist VFS to submit my application along with describing the “damage” on my passport.
I got a bit worried about my application getting rejected due to the “damage.” But I decided to gamble my money on this one, as I didn’t have time (and energy) to apply for a new passport before this trip.
Moreover, I had struck down a couple of fields in my visa application form which were not applicable to me, due to which the VFS staff asked me to fill out another visa application.
After this, the application got submitted, and it was 11,000 INR (including the fee to book the appointment at VFS). Here is the list of documents I submitted:
My passport
Photocopy of my passport
Two photographs of myself
Duly filled visa application form
Return flight ticket reservations
Payslips for the last three months
Invitation letter from the conference organizer (in Hungarian)
La comunidad de LibreOffice presentó una versión renovada de su sitio web destinado al acceso de la documentación oficial del proyecto. La denominada “Bookshelf” (biblioteca) fue rediseñada con mejoras tanto en su estética como en su experiencia de usuario. El rediseño estuvo a cargo de Juan José González, ingeniero de
Maybe I’m silly. Maybe I just can’t read what they write to me (and to other Collaborans).
I read this:
The Document Foundation and the LibreOffice project are open by definition and principle to all developers. Our doors have never been closed to any of you, and they never will be.
… and I somehow feel that this means: “we at TDF have kicked you off of membership, but you are welcome to keep contributing, and to have a warm feeling about it after that”.
Open doors? I can’t even apply for membership for more than three years from now. They have officially informed me about that – this is a link to the EML with the notice from MC; it includes my reply to their original “notification”. They write:
the Membership Committee expels you from the board of trustees with immediate effect. Because you didn’t relinquished your membership immediately, we decided also considering all circumstances to block membership for at least three calendar years, thus at least up to December, 31 2029.
If I had relinquished my membership as the MC asked, I would have lost my right to challenge this “temporary inconvenience” – and I am puzzled by the claim by a board member that “in the meantime … [I] can reapply for membership as soon as the legal matters have been settled.” (https://community.documentfoundation.org/t/comment-about-collabora-blog-post-tdf-community-blog/13626/9). I can re-apply, but – it is clear I will not be accepted until 2030 (the earliest possibility). After that the “bylaws” they invented this January will prevent me from e.g. nominating to BoD for two more years. Definitely honest and welcoming. (No idea how the remaining TDF members feel about the amazing fact that the board could decide and implement a restriction like that, limiting you without asking your opinion.)
Well, enough of that. No more posts about TDF. It was nice, and I met many people during that period, that I hope I can continue to call friends; but the current policy of that thing claiming nice goals and high standards is so disgusting, that I am even glad to not have relation to that anymore. Let’s do some hacking instead!
The LibreOffice Community has now a reshaped website to access the LibreOffice official literature. Thanks to Juan José Gonzalez (TDF Web Technology Engineer), the bookshelf website has been redesigned to carry new aesthetics and user interface. Web visitors have now a summary of each guide and easy way to
por Italo Vignoli Sí, deberíamos haber publicado esta entrada hace tiempo. Queremos agradecer a Mike Kaganski, quien se vio afectado por la reciente suspensión de su membresía, por recordarnos tan amablemente nuestro descuido: mikekaganski.wordpress.com/2026/04/05/the-post-they-managed-to-avoid/. Si hubiéramos publicado la entrada antes, probablemente habríamos evitado parte de la indignación expresada en ciertos
Yes, we should have published this blog post some time ago. We would like to thank Mike Kaganski, who was affected by the recent suspension of membership, for reminding us so politely of our oversight: mikekaganski.wordpress.com/2026/04/05/the-post-they-managed-to-avoid/. Had we published the post earlier, we would probably have avoided some of the
After nearly 10 years, it’s time to start contributing to Open Source again.
My Open Spurce journey begann with breeze icons for KDE, than I added breeze icons to LibreOffice. After that I made a the complete new colibre icon theme for LibreOffice which is the default for the Windows users.
After Icon stuff I start with pressts, different visuals and User Interface related stuff like Notebookbar. Which bring me to Collabora Online Office were I fast switch to mobile toolbar and dark mode.
After my first Open Source Journey I had a long break. Which show me, that Open Source is great. Other Community members update and improve my work. I can say, it’s awesome to see the work done within the DNA of each OSS.
Now I will start again where I did my last work. Collabora Online (Desktop/Mobil/Tablet …). Why? Because I can! Thats the great benefit of OSS. Everyone can improve ist and I enjoy the Collabora Community a lot. In addition to it’s fast development, it’s that easy to make changes and contribute.
Happy Hacking on any OSS you enjoy. It would be awesome to meet you at the Collabora Community.
Durante la última semana, han aparecido varios artículos en los medios de comunicación y se han publicado comentarios en foros que contienen preguntas -algunas explícitas y otras implícitas- dirigidas a The Document Foundation. Hemos hecho todo lo posible por recopilar todas estas preguntas y ofrecer una respuesta que aclare la
Como se prometió, publicamos la versión actualizada de la presentación “Estado del Proyecto”, basada en datos extraídos del panel de LibreOffice y del repositorio Matomo. Durante los 12 meses, 295 desarrolladores trabajaron en el código fuente, añadiendo 11.098 nuevos commits (Git): 221 desarrolladores voluntarios (75%) aportaron 1.871 commits (17%); 8
por Italo Vignoli La meritocracia es uno de los principios fundacionales del movimiento del software libre y de código abierto. También es uno de los términos más controvertidos, y la brecha entre los diferentes significados que la gente le atribuye es, en algunos proyectos, fuente de conflictos reales y perjudiciales.
“Ideally, we would have preferred to avoid this post.”
When I read those opening words in Italo’s recent statement, “Let’s put an end to the speculation,” they stung. I don’t know if that specific post should have existed or not, but those first few words are a perfect reflection of the current TDF attitude. It is an attitude directed toward the very people who devoted large parts of their lives, their passion, and their hearts to the Foundation’s ideals.
What I am missing is not that specific post that Italo wrote. What I expected—what I felt I earned—was a post that looked me in the eye. I wanted an explanation as to why I am being cast out from the Trustees after everything I’ve honestly given. I wanted to know my specific “guilt,” or why the Foundation now finds “guilt by association” to be an acceptable standard.
And then—I would hope—they would publicly say: “Mike, we appreciate everything you’ve done. We deeply regret the unfortunate decisions we—not you—made over the years. But we feel this is the only path forward, and we are sorry.”
But that is the post they successfully avoided writing.
por Italo Vignoli Lo ideal hubiera sido evitar esta publicación. Sin embargo, los artículos y comentarios publicados en respuesta a las publicaciones sesgadas de Collabora y Michael Meeks nos obligan a ofrecer esta información de contexto sobre los acontecimientos que condujeron a la situación actual. Lamentablemente, tenemos que empezar desde
por Italo Vignoli El anuncio de Euro-Office —en el que IONOS, Nextcloud y otras empresas se unen para crear una alternativa europea al software de productividad de oficina— ha desatado, como era de esperarse, una oleada de comentarios. La mayoría de ellos se centran en la cuestión de las licencias:
PSFirebird is a PowerShell module focused on automating Firebird environments, databases, and common administrative workflows. The main goal is to make Firebird easier to script end-to-end without depending on a manual installer flow or a machine-specific setup.
The problem is trying to solve was simple: working with Firebird in automation often means mixing shell scripts, ad hoc local installs,
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