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
17 January, 2025


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  • Up early, sync with Dave, Anuj, lunch with Julia, worked away at contractuals. Onto mail catch-up, and slides.

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LibreOffice 25.2 will be released as final at the beginning of February, 2025 ( Check the Release Plan ) being LibreOffice 25.2 Release Candidate 2 (RC2) the forth and last pre-release since the development of version 25.2 started in mid Juny, 2024. Since the previous release, LibreOffice 25.2 RC1, 104 commits have been submitted to the code repository and 55 issues got fixed. Check the release notes to find the new features included in this version of LibreOffice.

LibreOffice 25.2 RC2 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!


Thursday
16 January, 2025


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  • Up too early; train - with Christian, sky-train, some data analysis on the plane, heathrow-express.
  • Home, read minutes of calls I missed: seems I should miss more calls; text review, dinner with the family. Worked after dinner, missed bible-stidy group, bed early.

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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.


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localwriter screenshot

LibreOffice is a privacy-oriented office suite that runs on your own computer and doesn’t include AI features out-of-the-box. But we know that many users are interested in combining AI tools with the suite, so we talked to John Balis who is working on a (fully optional!) LibreOffice extension called localwriter. Here’s what he had to say…

What does the extension do?

Localwriter is a libreoffice writer extension to allow for inline generative editing with local inference. It can be used with any language model supported by Ollama or text-generation-webui. This extension adds two powerful commands to LibreOffice Writer:

  • Extend Selection – Uses a language model to predict what comes after the selected text. There are a lot of ways to use this. Some example use cases for this include, writing a story or an email given a particular prompt, adding additional possible items to a grocery list, or summarizing the selected text.
  • Edit Selection – A dialog box appears to prompt the user for instructions about how to edit the selected text, then the selected text is replaced by the edited text. Some examples for use cases for this include changing the tone of an email, translating text to a different language, and semantically editing a scene in a story.

When did you start working on it?

I started working on localwriter in July 2024, because I wanted an AI tool to assist with my writing that would benefit from the intrinsic advantages in terms of availability (can’t lose access), confidentiality (doesn’t leak data), and integrity (no surprise model version changes) that come with using a fully open source local AI stack instead of a third-party API. I feel it is really important to embrace learning to benefit from artificial intelligence without sacrificing agency, and this software follows from that line of thinking.

What are the current limitations, and what’s coming next?

localwriter currently only supports LibreOffice Writer, although Calc support is in development and will be offered in the next release. Another limitation is that it does not support streaming, and does not offer a “Chat with document” feature.

How can others help to improve it?

There are a ton of open feature requests in the repository from several users, which should be really easy for an experienced LibreOffice extension developer to complete. I can easily set up anyone interested with a task to work on. Tests would be welcome, as currently it doesn’t have any tests. Also, donating to me helps me allocate my own time towards development.

Get the extension here


Wednesday
15 January, 2025


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  • More meetings & planning - tour of the very well equipped maker-space - and a party to celebrate the awesome work that ZenDiS has been doing in the year since its founding.
  • Had a TDF Advisory Board call in the middle: encouraged by the level of competence of the advice.

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Czech LibreOffice Getting Started Guide cover

Zdeněk Crhonek (aka “raal”) from the Czech LibreOffice community writes:

The Czech team has finished its translation of the LibreOffice Getting Started guide 24.8. As usual it was a team effort, with translations by Petr Kuběj, Zdeněk Crhonek and Radomír Strnad; localized pictures from Roman Toman; and technical support from Miloš Šrámek. Thanks to all the team for their work!

The Czech translation of the Getting Started Guide 24.8 is available for download here.

The team will continue working on a translation of the Math Guide 24.8. We always looking for new translators and correctors. Join us!

Stanislav Horáček cleaned up the bookshelf page and he added an online version of the Math Guide. More online versions are ti come.

Great work everyone! 😊


Tuesday
14 January, 2025


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  • Up early, tram to a meeting - all-day meeting plus dinner with partners & ZenDiS, up late.

Monday
13 January, 2025


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  • Up unpleasantly early: train, train, tube, train, plane, sky-train, train, train - experience to get to Bochum via Dusseldorf for meetings - left my luggage on one of the trains at some point - annoying.
  • Met up with Lily, Frank & out for dinner slowly gathering more partners.

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Helen Borrie, a key figure in the Firebird relational database project and a longtime contributor at IBPhoenix, passed away on January 2, 2025. Her contributions were essential to Firebird’s creation and its development over the past 25 years.Read the rest of the official announcement


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We're happy to announce the first release of Jaybird 6, Jaybird 6.0.0.


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Dione Maddern and The Documentation Team are proud to announce the immediate availability of the LibreOffice Calc Guide 24.8, an update of the existing Calc Guide 24.2 with enhancements taken from the current LibreOffice 24.8 Calc module.

Calc Guide 24.8

The book was reviewed for clarity, readability and content additions, notably the Calc database table referencing in formulas, removal of deprecated JavaScript debugger and refactoring of the Calc’s chart topic – in which the chapter on charts was split in two, one for the chart basics and the second for the chart types. Dione Maddern, Calc editor says:

I took on the challenge of compiling the Calc Guide because I wanted to learn about advanced editing and working with master documents. While I’ve previously worked on large documents in the engineering and insurance industries, documents were often compiled with clunky cut-and-paste techniques which created a lot of errors and labor-intensive rework. Working on the Calc Guide 24.8 was a great opportunity to expand my skills in LibreOffice and document production generally. It was also a wonderful opportunity to work with the LibreOffice Documentation Team. I had a great time working with such a fun and supportive team.

Special thanks to Ed Olson, Lisa Samy and Claire Wood for their review of the contents of the guide. And to B. Antonio F. for his throughout review of formatting the guide and by writing a set of macros, bundled in an LibreOffice extension that allows automatic and assisted fixing of images, tables , styles and more.


Dione Maddern

It was also a wonderful opportunity to work with the LibreOffice Documentation Team. I had a great time working with such a fun and supportive team. (Dione Maddern)


Ed Olson

It has been an honor to share my wordsmithing skills with the LibreOffice documentation team. Replacing verbose paragraphs in the Calc guides with simplified, minimalist text has been both challenging and rewarding. I look forward to continuing my work on other applications in the suite as new releases become available. (Ed Olson)


Lisa Samy

Joining the Calc Guide team marked my first time contributing to an open-source platform. My time working with other team members was both enriching, yet eye-opening to all the facets of document editing. As such, I thoroughly enjoyed my experience with the LibreOffice Community as a whole. (Lisa Samy)


B. Antonio F.

I accepted the challenge of creating mechanisms to harmonize he appearance of chapter text according to the chapter template established by the documentation team. It was an opportunity to delve deeper into macro programming and get to know the LibreOffice API better. SanityCheck macros allow you to correct formatting errors (based on styles), correctly adjust images, tables, and automatically apply descriptions for accessibility. With SanityCheck you can check documentation chapters in English, Spanish and Portuguese. (B. Antonio F.)


Claire Wood

I enjoyed working on the Calc Guide as it gave me the opportunity to work with a truly global team. The content also challenged my knowledge about spreadsheets. I was happy to develop my knowledge, getting new information


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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?…


Sunday
12 January, 2025


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  • All Saints, played violin - home for pizza with J & E. relaxed and watched movies, sermon from All Souls & prayer with J. Collected E. from Cambridge; packed.

Saturday
11 January, 2025


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  • Freezing weather; out for a walk with J. along the dyke - lovely to have some time together.
  • Home; tidied some of the cumulative kitchen / tool pile-up, and after lots of hunting for the smoothing tools got stuck into dunging out mouldering & failed silicone from the family bathroom shower tray until late: got a pain in the neck in the process.

Friday
10 January, 2025


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  • Chat with Dave, partner call, lots of admin, more calls. Out for a drink with the Marquis de Geek in Newmarket - fun.

Thursday
09 January, 2025


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  • Tech planning call, catch up & planning with Lily. Call with Parth, lunch, partner call. Sync with Justin & Andras, slides.

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General Activities

  1. LibreOffice 24.8.4 was announced on December 19
  2. Olivier Hallot (TDF) improved the warning in Help when JavaScript is not active and did many cleanups in help pages
  3. Dione Maddern created a help page for Alignment Sidebar deck
  4. Alain Romedenne improved and updated help for ScriptForge libraries
  5. Bogdan Buzea improved some UI labels, improved help for superordinate object settings and cached spreadsheet formulas and did many code cleanups
  6. Tomaž Vajngerl (Collabora) continued working on PDF 2.0 and PDF/A-4 support
  7. Miklós Vajna, Rashesh Padia, Attila Szűcs, Bayram Çiçek, Szymon Kłos, Marco Cecchetti, Pranam Lashkari, Hubert Figuière (Collabora) worked on LOKit used by Collabora Online
  8. Xisco Faulí (TDF) worked on crash report analysis tools, upgraded many dependencies and did many code stability improvements
  9. Michael Stahl (allotropia) made style name handling more robust, improved the handling of hidden frames after recent changes and improved the correctness of HTML import regarding formatting
  10. Mike Kaganski (Collabora) added an application-wide Viewer mode where all files are opened in read-only state while all editing tools are disabled, dropped all code specific to Windows 7, 8 and 8.1 while also making use of new possibilities such as handling long Windows paths with wildcards, made the Unix document mailer script future-proof in case the attach parameter is disallowed in mailto URLs, fixed an issue with calculating minimum heights for menus, fixed an issue with the number format being reported incorrectly in Writer tables, fixed an issue with multi-selection in Calc showing an incorrect cell format and preventing change of format, fixed inability to edit doubles in Basic IDE’s Watch window and fixed an issue preventing the use of points for custom image height/width in the PNG export dialog
  11. Caolán McNamara (Collabora) improved dark mode support, fixed crashes and fixed many issues found by static analysers and fuzzers and did code cleanups
  12. Stephan Bergmann (allotropia) fixed an issue with emailing multiline messages on Unix and worked on the MAR updater and WASM build. He also adapted the code to compiler changes and did code cleanups
  13. Noel Grandin (Collabora) improved saving time of XLSX files with lots of conditional formatting, improved the speed of processing styles when opening DOCX files and worked alongside Michael Stahl in making style name handling more robust. He also did many code cleanups and optimisations
  14. Justin Luth (Collabora) fixed a DOCX compatibilityMode import and export issue, fixed an issue with imported area fill images not being saved with their associated documents, fixed a Calc comment copying crash and fixed an issue with tables of contents in DOCX files misbehaving when the printer list has been disabled
  15. Michael Weghorn (TDF) did a big reorganisation in accessibility-related code to make it easier to work with, continued working with Cambalache developer (UI editing app) and did various accessibility fixes. He also worked on using native widgets in Qt UIs
  16. Balázs Varga (allotropia) improved and expanded Writer’s accessibility warnings, fixed saving “Fit height to

Wednesday
08 January, 2025


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  • Catch up with Dave, chat with Italo, mail admin, sync with Philippe, catch-up with Frank.
  • Band practice in the evening.

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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).


Tuesday
07 January, 2025


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  • Planning call, catch up with Karen & Andras, customer sales call, partner group call in the afternoon.
  • Jigsaw puzzling in gaps, with H. straining at Laplace transforms next-door. Replaced all car key batteries in a batch.

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Hazard LibreOffice template screenshot

Marcial Machado recently posted on Reddit about his “fully-featured LibreOffice Impress template for creating Jeopardy-style games. Just add your questions and categories, and you’re good to go!” So let’s find out more…

What does the template do?

At its core, the template is meant to emulate what a game of Jeopardy is like. You can click on any of the squares on the game board and it will send you to the slide with the associated question, where you can either return to the board in the case of a misclick, or reveal the answer to the question. Returning to the board from the revealed answer slide will erase the square you clicked on to clearly show which questions are left to be answered.

You can also use the green and red arrows at the top to give and remove points to up to 6 teams in increments of 100, in order to keep track of everyone’s correctly- and incorrectly-guessed answers. Once the board’s cleared, you can click the pink button at the bottom right to clearly display the top three teams and the points they earned. I made sure to include details on how to edit, and use, the template in the first two slides!

Why did you develop it?

The simple reason for why I developed this template was because: I use LibreOffice, I wanted a Jeopardy presentation that worked in LibreOffice, and I couldn’t find one. The more verbose reason is that there is a comparative dearth of visually-appealing presentation templates in the OPT world than there is in the PPTX world; this is no fault of the creators of OPT templates, but rather because the proprietary nature of something like PowerPoint incentivizes templates made for profit, whereas most people who create LibreOffice Impress templates do it out of interest.

This necessarily means that there are just less people making LibreOffice Impress templates in total, without mentioning the much smaller userbase LibreOffice has compared with Microsoft Office. Now, some PowerPoint files do work in Impress, and the work done by the dev team and contributors is commendable, but a converted document is still a converted document. Formatting might be slightly off, and macros are almost always a bust. Since I realized I wanted this Jeopardy project to exist, and realizing my own frustration with the fact that such a project didn’t exist already, I went ahead and tried it out myself, and then released it to the public!

Hazard LibreOffice template screenshot

Do you have any tips for other people interested in creating templates in LibreOffice?

I have a few:

  • Focus on a problem you, yourself, have. You’ll be much more eager to bring a project to completion and to a high level of quality if you have a vetted interest in the final product.
  • Tell yourself that no one, ever, is going to make what you want to be made. The problem with a community of like-minded contributors is that everyone thinks everyone

Monday
06 January, 2025


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  • Up early, run, 1:1's with Miklos & Pedro, Justin, lots of people still on holiday. Started catching up with E-mail & patch review backlog.
  • Minuted worship committee meeting in the evening.

Sunday
05 January, 2025


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  • Bid farewell to M. sad to see the babes leaving. J. dropped her at the station. All Saints - an engaging all-age service - great, home for Pizza lunch.
  • Applied slugging in the afternoon, movies and rest.

Saturday
04 January, 2025


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  • Up earlyish, filled the bin with garden waste with J. re-calibrated extractor fan timer, pottered around mending things. Poked at some work backlog.
  • David over in the afternoon - good to catch up; managed to get a brush-seal on the bottom of the pantry door: how can you get a big draft, from a room with no windows or vents ? played games in the evening.

Friday
03 January, 2025


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  • Mail chew, chat with Dave, Matthias, Pranam, Italo, and a group of partners. Rescued J. from Tesco and a flat car key battery. Plugged away at some pre-loading investigation.

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LibreOffice 25.2 will be released as final at the beginning of February, 2025 ( Check the Release Plan ) being LibreOffice 25.2 Release Candidate 1 (RC1) the third pre-release since the development of version 25.2 started in mid Juny, 2024. Since the previous release, LibreOffice 25.2 Beta1, 175 commits have been submitted to the code repository and 76 issues got fixed. Check the release notes to find the new features included in this version of LibreOffice.

LibreOffice 25.2 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!


Thursday
02 January, 2025


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  • Helped N. pack and set off; mail chew, catch up with Thorsten, customer sales call, chat with Anuj, Matthias and Christopher.

Tuesday
31 December, 2024



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