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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
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.
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.
Online odfvalidator toolPlease 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.
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.
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 …
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
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
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
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
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).
Focus of the development blog for 2026 in this blog will be:
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.
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
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
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
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
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
Here’s our summary of updates, events and activities in the LibreOffice project in the last month of last year – click the links to learn more… At the start of December, we announced a new Code of Ethics and Fiduciary Duties for The Document Foundation’s Board of Directors. Also early
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.
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?
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.
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:
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