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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.…
Berlin, 19 December 2024 – LibreOffice 24.8.4, the fourth minor release of the LibreOffice 24.8 family of the free open source, volunteer-supported office suite for Windows (Intel, AMD and ARM), MacOS (Apple and Intel) and Linux, is available at www.libreoffice.org/download.
The release includes over 55 bug and regression fixes over LibreOffice 24.8.3 [1] to improve the stability and robustness of the software, as well as interoperability with legacy and proprietary document formats.
LibreOffice is the only office suite that respects the privacy of the user, ensuring that the user is able to decide if and with whom to share the content they create. It even allows deleting user related info from documents. As such, LibreOffice is the best option for the privacy-conscious office suite user, while offering a feature set comparable to the leading product on the market.
Also, LibreOffice offers a range of interface options to suit different user habits, from traditional to modern, and makes the most of different screen sizes by using all the space available on the desktop to put the maximum number of features just a click or two away.
The biggest advantage over competing products is the LibreOffice Technology engine, the single software platform on which desktop, mobile and cloud versions of LibreOffice – including those from ecosystem companies – are based.
This allows LibreOffice to produce identical and fully interoperable documents based on two ISO standards: the open and neutral Open Document Format (ODT, ODS, ODP) and the closed and fully proprietary Microsoft OOXML (DOCX, XLSX, PPTX), which hides a large amount of artificial complexity, and can cause problems for users who are confident that they are using a true open standard.
End users looking for support can download the LibreOffice 24.8 Getting Started, Writer, Impress, Draw and Math guides from the following link: books.libreoffice.org/. In addition, they can get first-level technical support from volunteers on mailing lists and the Ask LibreOffice website: ask.libreoffice.org.
LibreOffice for Enterprise
For enterprise-class deployments, TDF strongly recommends the LibreOffice Enterprise family of applications from ecosystem partners, with three or five year backporting of security patches, other dedicated value-added features and Service Level Agreements: www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-in-business/.
Every line of code developed by ecosystem companies for enterprise customers is shared with the community on the master code repository and improves the LibreOffice Technology platform. Products based on LibreOffice Technology are available for all major desktop operating systems (Windows, macOS, Linux and ChromeOS), mobile platforms (Android and iOS) and the cloud.
The Document Foundation’s migration protocol helps companies move from proprietary office suites to LibreOffice, by installing the LTS (long-term support) enterprise-optimised version of LibreOffice, plus consulting and training provided by certified professionals: www.libreoffice.org/get-help/professional-support/.
In fact, LibreOffice’s mature code base, rich feature set, strong support for open standards, excellent compatibility and LTS options make it the ideal solution for organisations looking to regain control of their data and break free from …
We’ve finished editing and uploading another batch of videos from our recent conference in Luxembourg. Now the playlist has a total of 51 videos and is almost entirely complete! (There are a couple more that we’re chasing up.)
So, enjoy watching and learning about the technology and community behind the suite. Use the icon in the top-right to choose videos from the playlist:
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Our team member Peter Schofield just updated the Impress, Draw and Math guides to the latest LibreOffice 24.8 release.
The Impress, Draw and Math guides are the authoritative guides for the end user. They cover presentation, drawings and equation documents. These guides are part of the LibreOffice community offering for the public in general that needs to close the knowledge gap in using LibreOffice.
The guides can be downloaded from the LibreOffice Bookshelf as well as from the Documentation website.
LibreOffice 25.2 will be released as final at the beginning of February, 2025 ( Check the Release Plan ) being LibreOffice 25.2 Beta1 the second pre-release since the development of version 25.2 started in mid Juny, 2024. Since the previous release, LibreOffice 25.2 Alpha1, 450 commits have been submitted to the code repository and 105 issues got fixed. Check the release notes to find the new features included in this version of LibreOffice.
LibreOffice 25.2 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!!
…
Our Czech community provides insights from the LinuxDays 2024 conference, which took place over the weekend of 12 – 13 October in Prague:
At the LibreOffice booth, there was a very large group of people (with a few exceptions) of satisfied LibreOffice users, of which young people (primary and secondary school students) were represented in surprisingly large numbers. This means that even the youngest generation, who prefer a different approach to data processing than office software, can be reached by LibreOffice.
This year we had a special treat for conference visitors: printed manuals for LibreOffice Base and Writer. The printing of these manuals was provided by Zdeněk Crhonek. They are printed in colour on high quality paper and probably attracted the most interest – they caught the eye at first sight.
Users overwhelmingly expressed satisfaction with LibreOffice. The features are sufficient, the user interface is easy to get used to, and so is the way of working. For some users, the interface is seen as “old school” – but one such good thing is the implementation of alternative layours. It’s fair to say that few users know about the option to change the user interface layout, despite the fact that this option is offered in the very first dialog after installing the package.
This means that users don’t read these tips (which is a big mistake – they contain very useful and practical advice), and furthermore that LibreOffice lacks a wizard to guide the user through the various setup options. There are a lot of them, but they are hidden, so “nobody” knows about them. Such a guide would be a very useful addition indeed.
Most users use LibreOffice to write text, create spreadsheets, and some even make presentations. In this regard, it should be noted that LibreOffice is a really extensive package; it is not a better typewriter. A word processor is not Notepad. So it is a pity that LibreOffice’s features remain unused. Users often create texts that require formatting in, for example, TeX, Markdown and so on. This is also a possible way to go, but they can equally (and better) take advantage of Writer’s extensive range of features. The same applies to Calc: this application is not just for creating spreadsheets, but also for computational operations and visualizations.
Insights on individual modules:
Here’s our summary of updates, events and activities in the LibreOffice project in the last four weeks – click the links to learn more…
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At the beginning of November, we began 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…
Fantastic work, everyone! Hundreds of people, all across the globe, have helped out in our projects and communities. And those are just community contributions, not including the hundreds more from our ecosystem and certified developers!
We’re hugely thankful for the work – and, of course, everyone who’s listed on the wiki page can get a sticker pack, with the stickers shown above.
If you see your name (or username) on this page, get in touch! Email mike.saunders@documentfoundation.org with:
…and we’ll send you a bunch of stickers for your PC, laptop and other kit. (Note: your address will only be used to post the stickers, and will be deleted immediately afterwards.) If you contributed to the project in November but you’re not on the wiki page, please let us know what you did, so that we can add you!
And we have an extra bonus: ten contributors have also been selected at random to get an extra piece of merchandise – a LibreOffice hoodie, T-shirt, rucksack or snazzy glass mug. Here are the winners (names or usernames) – we’ll get in touch personally with the details:
Impress shape text doesn't have much support for styles, e.g. the default UI in Writer gives you a paragraph style dropdown, and you don't get the same in Impress. Still, a paragraph style is attached to bullets based on their outline level, and Impress has a View → Outline menu item to give you that styled text you can copy. Pasting that to Writer started to lose styles recently and it's now fixed to work again.
This work is primarily for Collabora Online, but the feature is available in desktop Impress as well.
As described in a previous commit, I had a case where lots of not needed paragraph styles were exported to RTF in case an Impress document had enough master pages. The idea was to only export actually used paragraph styles, to avoid wasting CPU power.
Turns out filtering out paragraph styles has to happen at two locations:
The problem was that unused styles were removed from the style table, but not from the style → index mapping, so as soon as you had both used and unused paragraph styles, the declared and the referred style indexes didn't match anymore.
Here is a sample paste result in Writer, where you can see that the text doesn't have a custom paragraph style:
And here is the same paste, now with paragraph styles restored:
As you can see, now the pasted text has paragraph styles.
If you would like to know a bit more about how this works, continue reading... :-)
The bugfix commit was editeng RTF export: fix broken offsets into the para style table.
The tracking bug was tdf#163883.
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).
Here’s a video from our recent LibreOffice Conference 2024. It details the ongoing migration of 30,000 PCs from Microsoft Office/365 to LibreOffice in the northern German state of Schleswig-Holstein. (The video is also available on PeerTube.)
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I live in the north of Germany, in the city of Hamburg. Probably not so far away from where the first lines of what was called StarWriter where written, just a year before I was born.
I remember downloading StarOffice over a 64 kbit/sec line around the year 1997. And since it turned into OpenOffice.org I used it for a lot of home work in high school, student jobs and finally my bachelor thesis in computer science. For StarOffice and OpenOffice I mainly used Windows. But around the time LibreOffice started I had shifted to Linux as a daily driver.
My first contact with the LibreOffice community was when I got into a conversation with a few people at the Chaos Computer Club Congress around 2013. And as most of the last 15 years I’ll be around at the CCC too this year. As a hobby I’m engaged in politics, pushing Open Source, data protection, privacy as well as environmental protection topics. And to calm down I’m cycling, pursuing my interest for astrophysics and recently started doing Yoga.
In summer I’ve reworked some parts of the GPG / OpenPGP and X.509 integration in LibreOffice. Drastically improving the performance for users with large GPG keyrings like me. But also making the GPG and X.509 workflows in the LibreOffice UI more user friendly. Knowing there’s still much work left to do.
Beside I’m mostly working on the web integration of LibreOffice. I’m spending a lot of time with LOWA (LibreOffice Web Assembly) builds, improving them with my colleague Stephan Bergmann, and even committed my first patch to Emscripten to improve LOWA debugging.
My top priority is currently to work on ZetaJS, which wraps UNO into a native JavaScript API.
It’s being used to integrate LibreOffice into web apps without the need for a huge server running server side LibreOffice processes. I’ve also written some nice example use cases like this one.
I’ve worked with Linux for many years. Mainly as Ruby developer and web administrator. But I’ve always had a big interest into more classical technical environments. I really like strong typing. And I’ve collected some experience with big C code bases. Like when bisecting Wine to keep old Star Trek games running, or when debugging the amdgpu Linux driver for my notebook. Although not without great help from the AMD guys!
So when looking for new tasks, I remembered the LibreOffice guys I met at the CCC and I had some talks with Thorsten Behrens who kindly offered me a job at allotropia. For me LibreOffice is one of the flagship projects of Open Source beside the Linux kernel and Firefox. And I’m enthusiastically absorbing all the C++ insider knowledge I can get from my …
Let me count the ways, in no particular order and in no way exhaustive:
LibreOffice 25.2 will be released as final at the beginning of February, 2025 ( Check the Release Plan ) being LibreOffice 25.2 Alpha1 the first pre-release since the development of version 25.2 started in mid Juny, 2024. Since then, 5184 commits have been submitted to the code repository and 710 bugs were set to FIXED in Bugzilla. Check the release notes to find the new features included in this version of LibreOffice.
LibreOffice 25.2 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!!
…
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 …
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.
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.
Here I discuss how to go further, and create user interface with Glade interface designer, and do most of the things without writing code.
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:
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:
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
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
Let’s look into the specifics of minweld.cxx.
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 …
Dive deep into the revolutionary features of Firebird 5.0 with this comprehensive guide written by database expert Denis Simonov and edited by Alexey Kovyazin.This book offers an in-depth exploration of the significant advancements that make Firebird 5.0 a pivotal release in the world of relational databases.Whether you're a seasoned database administrator, a curious developer, or an IT
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Bugdoc: old Writer paste
Bugdoc: new Writer paste