Digital sovereignty is of vital importance for data freedom. If governments and organisations use proprietary or pseudo-standard formats, they limit the tools that citizens can use to access data.
So we’re happy to see that the IT Planning Council in Germany is committing to move to the Open Document Format – a fully standardised format (and the default used in LibreOffice). The German IT Planning Council is a 17-member committee consisting of representatives of Germany’s federal government and the state governments. They say:
Open formats and open interfaces are an important building block for the necessary transformation process of public administration in Germany on the path to greater digital sovereignty and innovation.
The IT Planning Council is committed to ensuring that open formats such as the Open Document Format (ODF) are increasingly used in public administration and become the standard for document exchange by 2027. It is commissioning the Standardization Board to implement this.
The LibreOffice Conference is the annual gathering of the community, our end-users, developers, and everyone interested in free office software. In 2024, it took place in Luxembourg
(This is part of The Document Foundation’s Annual Report for 2024 – we’ll post the full version here soon.)
This was our third in-person conference after the COVID pandemic, following on from the Milan conference in 2022 and Bucharest conference in 2023, but we also lived-streamed sessions so that participants could watch remotely (and ask questions in our chat channels too).
The conference took place from 10 – 12 October 2024 in Belval, Esch-sur-Alzette, which is around a 20 minute train ride from Luxembourg City. As public transport is free in the whole country, attendees staying in the city didn’t need to buy tickets to attend the event in Belval.
Conference Tracks and extra sessions
Opening sessions were given by Eliane Domingos (chairperson of the Board of Directors at TDF), Serge Linkels (Managing Director of the Digital Learning Hub and 42 Luxembourg), and Stéphanie Obertin (Luxembourg’s Minister for Digitalisation and Minister for Research and Higher Education).
Then there were presentations and talks were given across various “tracks”, or categories: LibreOffice Development; ODF and Interoperability; LibreOffice Design and Accessibility; and LibreOffice Marketing. There were highly technical talks focused on specific areas of LibreOffice and source code, along with more open discussions about community building and recent updates from The Document Foundation.
The conference also had some extra tracks to broaden its scope beyond just LibreOffice, and raise awareness about free and open source software (cybersecurity, EdTech and Open Source Program Office).
A workshop for new developers was held in parallel with the main tracks over the three days of the conference, and many different things around LibreOffice development were discussed, including: bug reporting and triaging; Git and Gerrit basics; building LibreOffice from its source code; and automation via scripting.
Sponsoring and merchandise
Partner sponsors were Collabora Productivity, Passbolt and SnT (University of Luxembourg), while venue sponsors were Digital Learning Hub and 42 Luxembourg. The Luxembourg Media & Digital Design Centre organised the EdTech track, and local supporters were Business Events Luxembourg, LU-CIX, LIST and Luxembourg House of Cybersecurity. Thanks to the sponsors, attendees could get merchandise at the event, including T-shirts with the conference logo.
Full programme and videos
Full details about the event are available on our main conference website. For a quick overview of all the talks, including links to PDF versions of the presentations, see the schedule. 63 videos – covering almost all of the talks are available as a playlist on our YouTube channel:
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In 2024, LibreOffice celebrated its fourteenth birthday. Two new major versions of the suite introduced a variety of new features, while minor releases helped to improve stability as well
(This is part of The Document Foundation’s Annual Report for 2024 – we’ll post the full version here soon.)
LibreOffice 24.2
On January 31, LibreOffice 24.2 was officially released after six months of work. Developers at The Document Foundation, Collabora, allotropia, CIB, Red Hat, NISZ and other companies and organisations – along with volunteers – worked on many new features.
For instance, there were many improvements to the tabbed “NotebookBar” user interface, while styles support was added for comments. A new search field was added to the Functions sidebar deck in Calc, while in terms of accessibility, several significant improvements to the handling of mouse positions and the presentation of dialogue boxes via the Accessibility APIs were made, allowing screen readers to present them correctly. And regarding security, the “Sace with Password” dialogue box now has a password strength meter, which uses zxcvbn-c to determine the password strength.
TDF’s marketing and localisation community produced and translated a video (below) which demonstrated many of the new features in LibreOffice 24.2. This was linked to in the announcement, and embedded into various web news websites that covered the release. The video is also available on PeerTube.
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LibreOffice 24.8
Later in the year, on August 22, TDF released LibreOffice 24.8. Based on the LibreOffice Technology platform for personal productivity on desktop, mobile and cloud, it provided a large number of interoperability improvements with Microsoft’s proprietary file formats.
In terms of features, this release added many improvements to the Navigator in Writer, including ding cross-references by drag-and-drop items, deleting footnotes and endnotes, and indicating images with broken links. In Calc, the functions FILTER, LET, RANDARRAY, SEQUENCE, SORT, SORTBY, UNIQUE, XLOOKUP and XMATCH were added, along with chart types “Pie-of-Pie” and “Bar-of-Pie” which break down a slice of a pie as a pie or bar sub-chart respectively (this also enables import of such charts from OOXML files created with Microsoft Office/365).
Many other features were added as well, and there were a large number of compatibility improvements. As with the previous release, TDF staff worked with the marketing ad localisation communities to make a video (also on PeerTube) to demonstrate some of the new features.
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Up earlyish, played with H. in the morning - lots of Organ
welly - somewhat plagued by a stuck key on the swell organ. A joyful
Easter noise for Mary's last music group appearance.
Back for Pizza lunch with the whole family, slugged in the
sun, tried to get Stiga mower to mow the front garden with rather
limited success. Snoozed.
Prepared evening service music with N. and played together
at Church - lovely; Florence spoke.
Up earlyish, off to Godalming for Chris' 80'th birthday
party. Tried to fit together an ad-hoc schedule of music &
poems to celebrate Chris' life & extensive work. A lovely
day with the extended family - thanks to Barbara & Colin and
others for all their hard work organizing it. Home late.
As a LibreOffice user, you have certainly seen the LibreOffice splash screen. It is displayed when you open LibreOffice, it has a progress bar, and when loading the application is finished it goes away. Here we discuss a suggested improvement for this splash screen.
Current Implementation Approach
Currently, the splash screen is implemented by creating a custom widget with a custom painting mechanism that draws the splash image and also the progress bar and moves the progress indicator.
This has some drawbacks:
1. The splash screen does not always scale to the same size as the main LibreOffice Window.
2. The style of the progress bar is somehow different from other UI elements, looks mostly like gen interface.
3. It needs and uses a custom paint code.
4. It does not conform to the dark/light theme.
5. It is not easily localize-able. In fact, the only text is from the displayed image, in English. When you build from sources, the image file is instdir/program/intro.png.
LibreOffice splash screen bitmap
6. It is a separate binary (oosplash). You may run it with:
$ ./instdir/program/oosplash
LibreOffice dev splash screen
VCL Weld Mechanism
I have previously written about VCL weld mechanism, which is based on creating user interface files (.ui) and loading them inside the application.
The weld mechanism greatly reduces the complexity of creating user interfaces, and also improves other aspects of the user interface, including the consistency.
The SplashScreenWindow class has an custom paint method, SplashScreenWindow::Paint(), which draws the bitmap, and also the progress. A new UI file is needed for this purpose, which should use GtkProgressBar, which will be considered a weld::ProgressBar. VCL then uses appropriate progress bar widget in different graphical plugins of VCL.
You may look into some dialogs like tip of the day to get some insight:
Up early, upgraded mower firmware left and right
during quiet-time sitting by it in the garden. Worked to
try to get the paths right - some tricks of remote control.
Discovered that the 'new' web / PC based path creator
is a disaster, worked around various failures.
Eventually got path setup working, travelling it
nicely, but not actually mowing - amusing, eventually turned
it off and on again: now it mows!
Hauled industrial hoover up three stories on a rope
to clean out roof parapet and down-pipe box with tree growing
in it: how does that much 'stuff' get up there - birds no
doubt.
M&D dropped by in the evening and stayed for
dinner and overnight - lovely to see them.
The Document Foundation is the non-profit entity that coordinates the LibreOffice project and community. In 2024 we had with elections for the foundation’s Membership Committee, along with regular Advisory Board calls, and support for other projects and activities
(This is part of The Document Foundation’s Annual Report for 2024 – we’ll post the full version here soon.)
Election of new Membership Committee (MC)
The mission of the Membership Committee is to administer membership applications and renewals following the criteria defined in the Foundation’s Statutes. Members of the MC are directly elected by community members every two years, and serve for a two-year term. The Board of Directors consists of five members and three deputies.
On July 15, Eliane Domingos – chairperson in the Board of Directors at TDF – announced the election for the next MC, and asked for nominations and self-nominations. On August 27, she then announced that the nomination phase had ended, and that voting would run from 3 – 9 September. Around this time there were also three live “town-hall” Q+A meetings with the candidates, so that community members could ask questions and discuss the responses. We made video recordings from the second and third meetings, and here they are (also available on PeerTube here and here):
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On September 12, Eliane announced the preliminary results, along with a “challenge” phase for people to check their votes and contest the results. And on September 27, TDF announced the final results, with full MC members being Gustavo Buzzatti Pacheco, Stéphane Guillou, Balázs Varga, Pranam Kumarbhai Lashkari and Jona Azizaj; and deputy members being Shinji Enoki, Andreas Mantke and Marco Marinello.
TDF would like to say thank you to all past and new members of the MC for their service to the community, and to all candidates for running. Congratulations to the newly elected MC members and their deputies.
Advisory Board members and meetings
The Document Foundation relies on its Advisory Board Members in order to receive advice and support. The Advisory Board’s primary function is to represent The Document Foundation’s supporters and to provide the Board of Directors with advice, guidance and proposals. Current members are Adfinis, allotropia software GmbH, Collabora, GNOME, CAGE Technologies Inc, City of Munich (Landeshaupstadt München), Open Source Business Alliance (OSBA), Software in the Public Interest (SPI), KDE e.V., and the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE).
Stiga A4 mower arrived, tried to place the
satellite reference base-station; seems they want
£135 for a 15m extension cable. Instead cut
and re-wired various connectors with some cable,
boxes, and errected a ply-wood mount to get out
over the fascia board - to get a perfect view of
the sky.
Up earlyish, lovely day - out to Sandringham
with J. - somewhat nerve-wracking driving on a road that
is below the river-level, and seeing the much lower
lying land below-you.
Enjoyed the Arboretum & wandered through
the woods, on to Hunstanton for lunch, and walked out
to see in the Wash towards Old Hunstanton. Ice-cream
at the Le Strange Arms.
Home via hyper-eclectic antique shop; bought a
chest of drawers - only to discover the woodworm when we
got home; removed affected wood & immediately treated
with a couple of litres of killer.
Petr Valach from the Czech LibreOffice community tells us about feedback from the LibreOffice booth at this event…
InstallFest is a well‑established yet relatively small open‑source conference held annually in the Czech Republic, traditionally at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering building at Karlovo náměstí in Prague. Personally, I prefer these more intimate spaces over the larger venues like the Faculty of Information Technology, where the LinuxDays conference takes place. I highly appreciate the somewhat old‑fashioned and historical atmosphere that fills every corner of the faculty building. It reminds me of English universities and other institutions like museums, where the ambiance of past eras is still preserved. Some may find it irritating, but to me, such a place has far more character than modern buildings devoid of history.
Building E of the Faculty of Electrical Engineering (FEL), or perhaps the shared building of the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and the Faculty of Nuclear Sciences and Physical Engineering (FJFI) on Trojanova Street, which I used to visit as a student – and even more so the main building of FJFI on Břehová Street, or the joint workplace of FJFI and the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics (MFF) of Charles University on Karlova Street – all of these buildings naturally have their own history; and with even older buildings, history seems to radiate from them, evoking a sense of mystery and unattainability.
I’ve had this deep respect for historic landmarks since my school years, when I first encountered the epochal Jaroslav Foglar trilogy set in the mysterious world of Stínadla (The Mystery of the Puzzle, Stínadla in Revolt, The Secret of the Great Vont). These books have not lost their charm even after all these years (this year marks the 85th anniversary of The Mystery of the Puzzle), and that’s because you can actually touch the buildings described in them. That’s the true magic of Foglar’s stories – they’re part fiction, part grounded in reality, whether it’s the locations, characters, or structures, and that makes them more believable and realistic.
And even the InstallFest conference has something in common with them. After all, it takes place right in the area where Stínadla is set, and the building itself stands just a few hundred meters from the birthplace of Jaroslav Foglar. In the conference venue, you can even find a poster for a course titled Planning the Movement of 3D Objects in a Complex Environment, featuring the iconic hedgehog in a cage – hiding the epoch-making invention of fourteen-year-old Jan Tleskač: a flying bicycle! Coincidence? I don’t think so.
And now, on to the actual course of the conference.
Changes
Last year, InstallFest was saved by a new team led by Jan Langmaier. Once again, they did an excellent job – everything ran smoothly, without confusion or chaos. They deserve recognition for organizing and executing the conference in such a limited space.
This year saw an increase in the number of booth exhibitors …
Realized hot water is running out and not being
replaced, debugged heating system is dead: apparently
unbelievably expensive simple relay TS721Si has
failed due to toaster tripping events: the season of
rasins in hot cross buns; Fuse the world, let them
know it's Easter time?. Replaced the £150 timer
with a £10 light-switch temporarily: showering is
once again possible.
Out for a walk with J. and bought some bits
for a BBQs with David & Christina.
Interesting Tech.
Talk from Hubert on the new wordpress plugin.
Backed-up and transplanted SSD innards to old laptop,
now mended by Lenovo - faster but more fan noise; please to
see zcfan doing a great job of better fan mgmt.
Designated Survivor in the evening with the babes.
LibreOffice 25.2.2 and LibreOffice 24.8.6 were announced on March 27
Stanislav Horáček updated and improved UI and help texts
Gábor Kelemen (allotropia) documented a new field that displays the page count for a range until the next numbering reset
Alain Romedenne expanded help for ScriptForge and other scripting topics
Tomaž Vajngerl (Collabora) reworked slideshow rendering code for robustness and simplicity
Gökay Şatır, Marco Cecchetti and Szymon Kłos (Collabora) worked on LOKit used by Collabora Online
Miklós Vajna (Collabora) implemented per-user change tracking in Writer and fixed unexpected list level change on inserting a new bullet in Writer
Olivier Hallot (TDF) improved the UI and help pages for Calc’s Data Provider and improved help for Calc’s Duplicates command
Xisco Faulí (TDF) added a bunch of new automated tests, upgraded many dependencies and did some code cleanups
Michael Stahl (allotropia) improved the Accessibility Checker, improved MS Word compatibility with hiding empty paragraphs before tables in certain scenarios and fixed an issue with installing custom default templates via extensions
Mike Kaganski (Collabora) greatly improved the performance of font preview in Calc, fixed Calc’s COUNTA() function returning 1 for empty ranges, fixed integer overflow in Writer’s Find & Replace match count, improved the loading speed of Writer documents with lots of bookmarks and tables and made the code for Underline Trailing Spaces compatibility option more robust
Caolán McNamara (Collabora) improved spellchecking performance in multi-language spreadsheets, fixed many issues found by static analysers and did code cleanups and optimisations
Stephan Bergmann (allotropia) worked on the WASM build. He also adapted the code to compiler changes and did code cleanups
Noel Grandin (Collabora) made canvas rendering in Draw more robust, updated Skia through several versions, fixed slow switching of sheets in Calc when lots of drawing objects or lots of formatted cells are involved, improved spellchecking speed in Writer, made it faster to load complex XLSX spreadsheets, made it faster to delete very large tables in Writer, made it faster to load Writer documents with change tracked moves and improved the loading time of certain DOC files. He also did many code cleanups and optimisations
Justin Luth (Collabora) fixed a line spacing issue in table cell content in PPTX files and fixed endnotes and footnotes data becoming lost when roundtripping glossary relations to DOCX
Michael Weghorn (TDF) continued cleaning up and reorganising accessibility-related code, made Quick Find more accessible and made gtk4 file dialog show all the extra controls. He also worked on using native widgets in Qt UIs
Balázs Varga (allotropia) worked on the WASM build, fixed unwanted table border lines in PPTX export, added an accessibility check for links and references in header/footer, fixed Quickstarter being visible in options even if the feature is not installed and made it so the Online Update page is not visible, if the feature was not selected to be installed
Patrick Luby made the macOS Start Center displaying logic more …
Tech. planning call - lots going on, bit of testing in
the community call: much improved rendering performance is
encouraging. Lunch in the sun with the babes.
1:1 with Lily, COOL days content planning - so many
good talk submissions, and so much work done that it's hard to
know how to fit them all in.
Partner call / interview.
Home group Easter dinner - lots of roast lamb, and
nice people; caught up with Simon happily.
For this year’s LibreOffice Conference we had two location proposals: Luxembourg and Budapest. Members of The Document Foundation voted to choose the final location, and we can announce that Budapest is the winner.
Currently, the expected date for the conference is September 1 – 5, but this is still subject to change. We will confirm the final dates soon, then the fun begins: the call for papers, building up the schedule, planning social events and more…
Quickish planning call, partner sales call. Kate,
James & Penelope over for lunch - caught up with them.
Multi-partner call later in the afternoon, dinner,
mail chew - feeling somewhat unwell oddly.
Richard published the first pod-cast, Open Matters -
around Document Formats featuring yours truly geeking out on
some technical details underneath documents:
Here is the description : "The range-based FOR statement is used to iterate over a range of numeric values. The iteration is performed in increasing order when used with TO clause and in decreasing order when used with DOWNTO clause"Syntax[<label> :] FOR <variable> = <initial value> {TO | DOWNTO} <final value> [BY <by value>] DO &
We are happy to announce the release of Jaybird 6.0.1 and Jaybird 5.0.7. Both releases provide a number of performance improvements to blob handling, and some bug fixes.We plan to offer more blob performance improvements in upcoming releases of Jaybird 5 and 6, for Firebird 5.0.3 and higher (see also New Article: Data access methods used in Firebird).
Writer has the concept of recording tracked changes or not: if recording, typing into a document or
deleting content will create tracked changes of type insertion or deletion. So far this was a
per-document setting, but now individual users can enable or disable this as they wish.
This work is primarily for Collabora Online, but the feature is
available in desktop Writer as well.
When Alice keeps typing and Bob enables change tracking, then surprisingly the typed characters of
Alice will form a tracked insertion, which is surprising, since that was not the case a second ago
and Alice didn't do anything other than typing.
Giving users a choice if they enable recording for just this user or for all users fixes this
problem.
You can get a development edition of Collabora Online 25.04 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 (25.8).
On March 26, we celebrated Document Freedom Day. Mike Saunders from The Document Foundation, the non-profit behind LibreOffice, gave an online talk about the importance of open standards and free software:
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On March 26 we celebrated Document Freedom Day 2025, which raises awareness about the problems of proprietary standards, and encourages people to move to open standards like the Open Document Format.
In terms of the suite, there were two minor updates to LibreOffice in March – 25.2.2 and 24.8.6. All users are recommended to stay up-to-date.
The Document Foundation is not responsible for the content on planet.documentfoundation.org. However - if you have any concerns about content please contact act Uwe Altmann for moderation. Copyright information: Unless otherwise specified in the author's blog, all text and images on this website are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. This does not include the source code of LibreOffice, which is licensed under the "Mozilla Public License v2.0". "LibreOffice" and "The Document Foundation" are registered trademarks of their corresponding registered owners or are in actual use as trademarks in one or more countries. Their respective logos and icons are also subject to international copyright laws. Use thereof is explained in our trademark policy.
Per-view tracked changes recording
