- Early partner call, sync with Dave, then Ben, then Patrick & Kevin.
- E's maths progress review call. Interview, weekly sales call, sync with Philippe.
- All Saints band practice in the evening.
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.
This new version of the native LibreOffice document format standard marks the 20th anniversary of the only open document format for office applications Berlin, December 3, 2025 – The Document Foundation announces that OASIS Open (www.oasis-open.org), the global open-source and standards organisation, has approved the Open Document Format (ODF) for
LibreOffice 26.2 will be released as final at the beginning of February, 2026 ( Check the Release Plan ) being LibreOffice 26.2 Alpha1 the first pre-release since the development of version 26.2 started at the beginning of June, 2025. Since then, 4651 commits have been submitted to the code repository and 676 bugs were set to FIXED in Bugzilla. Check the release notes to find the new features included in this version of LibreOffice.
LibreOffice 26.2 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!!
…
Writer recently got a new markdown import option to take styles from a template, leading to much prettier output when converting markdown to PDF, DOCX or ODT.
This work is primarily for Collabora Online, but the templating feature is available in desktop Writer as well.
A previous post mentioned recent improvements to the markdown import/export in Writer.
But if you convert some markdown to e.g. PDF, all the headings just have the default look, wouldn't it be nice to take your organization template and add colors and other formatting there, automatically?
Also, wouldn't it be nice if you could paste as markdown in COOL or copy the current selection as markdown? Which would enable all sorts of interesting use-cases, like using an external API to turn the selection into a summary or translating it to a different language.
Here is a sample input markdown:
# heading 1
body text
Here is how it looks like if you template it using the core.git sw/qa/filter/md/data/template.docx
sample:
curl invocation for this:
PDF result: templatedcurl -k -F "data=@/path/to/test.md" -F "template=@/path/to/template.docx" -F "format=pdf" -o out.pdf https://localhost:9980/cool/convert-to
Or example desktop command-line:
soffice --infilter='Markdown:{"TemplateURL":{"type":"string","value":"./template.ott"}}' test.md
While it would look like this by default:
The other part is the PostMessage API of COOL, if you want to copy and paste as markdown. What's newly possible:
PDF result: defaultAction_Copy and the value to {"Mimetype": "text/markdown;charset=utf-8"}Action_Paste and the value to
something like {"Mimetype": "text/markdown;charset=utf-8", "Data": "foo _bar_ baz"}You can read more about the PostMessage API in the COOL SDK.
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:
Online side:
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 the core of this …
Writer has some support for interdependent (or hierarchical) tracked changes: e.g. the case when you have a delete on top of an insert. See the third post for background.
This work is primarily for Collabora Online, but the feature is available in desktop Writer as well.
Interdependent changes mean that the UI shows one type of change on top of another change, e.g. formatting on top of insert. Writer knows the priority of each type, so in case you have an insert or delete change and on top of that you have a formatting, then the UI will look "through" the formatting and work on the underlying insert or delete when you navigate with your cursor to a position with multiple changes and you press Accept on the Review tab of the notebookbar.
Usually this is what you mean, but what if you want to work on the formatting at the top, directly? You can now open the Manage Changes dialog using the Manage button on the Review tab of the notebookbar and if you go to the formatting change row of the dialog, then pressing Accept there will accept the formatting change, not the insert or delete change. This is possible, because the dialog gives you a way to precisely select which tracked change you want to work with, even if a specific cursor position has multiple tracked changes.
Here is a sample ins-then-format.docx document from the core.git testcases, the baseline has an
insertion, and part of that is covered by an additional formatting change on top:
Interdependent tracked change: baseline
If you just go in the middle of the document and press Accept, that will work with the more important insert change, so the result looks like this:
Interdependent tracked change: default accept result
But now you can also open the Manage Changes dialog, to be more specific by directly selecting the formatting change:
Interdependent tracked change: direct accept via the dialog
And when you accept the formatting change directly, the result will be just the insert change:
Interdependent tracked change: direct accept result
You can save and load the results in both DOCX and ODT, as usual.
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:
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 (26.2).
In LibreOffice C++ code, there are many cases where developers have string literals that should be used in the code. If these are messages in the graphical user interface (GUI), they should be added to the translatable messages. But, there are many cases where the string literals has nothing to do with other languages, and they should be used as they are. In this case, enumarray is helpful. Although they are not limited to string literals, and can be used for any data.
In old C code, using #define was the preferred way one could give a name to a string literal or other kinds of data. For example, consider this code:
const char[] FRAME_PROPNAME_ASCII_DISPATCHRECORDERSUPPLIER = "DispatchRecorderSupplier"; const char[] FRAME_PROPNAME_ASCII_ISHIDDEN = "IsHidden"; inline constexpr OUString FRAME_PROPNAME_ASCII_LAYOUTMANAGER = "LayoutManager"; const char[] FRAME_PROPNAME_ASCII_TITLE = "Title"_ustr; const char[] FRAME_PROPNAME_ASCII_INDICATORINTERCEPTION = "IndicatorInterception"; const char[] FRAME_PROPNAME_ASCII_URL = "URL";
And also, the relevant states:
#define FRAME_PROPHANDLE_DISPATCHRECORDERSUPPLIER 0 #define FRAME_PROPHANDLE_ISHIDDEN 1 #define FRAME_PROPHANDLE_LAYOUTMANAGER 2 #define FRAME_PROPHANDLE_TITLE 3 #define FRAME_PROPHANDLE_INDICATORINTERCEPTION 4 #define FRAME_PROPHANDLE_URL 5
Although this C code still works in C++, it is not the desired approach in modern C++.
In modern C++ code, you can use enumarry, which is defined in o3tl in LibreOffice. The above code becomes:
enum class FramePropNameASCII
{
DispatcherRecorderSupplier,
IsHidden,
LayoutManager,
Title,
IndicatorInterception,
URL,
LAST=URL
};
And also, the string literal definitions:
constexpr o3tl::enumarray<FramePropNameASCII, OUString> FramePropName = {
u"DispatchRecorderSupplier"_ustr,
u"IsHidden"_ustr,
u"LayoutManager"_ustr,
u"Title"_ustr,
u"IndicatorInterception"_ustr,
u"URL"_ustr
};
The names are much more readable, as they do not have to be ALL_CAPPS, as per convention for symbolic constants in C. Their usage is also quite easy. For example, one can use [] to access the relevant string literal:
- xPropSet->getPropertyValue( FRAME_PROPNAME_ASCII_LAYOUTMANAGER ) >>= xLayoutManager; + xPropSet->getPropertyValue( FramePropName[FramePropNameASCII::LayoutManager] ) >>= xLayoutManager;
In LibreOffice, enumarrays are not limited to string literals, and they can be used with other data. This task is filed as tdf#169155, and if you like, you may try finding some instances in the code and modernize it using enumarrays.
To learn more about LibreOffice development, you can refer to TDF Wiki. You may follow this blog to read about EasyHacks, tutorials and announcements related to LibreOffice development.
Since C++11 when enum class (also named scoped enum) is introduced, it is preferred to plain enum which is inherited from C programming languages. The task here is to convert the old enum instances to enum class.
enum class has many benefits when compared to plain enum, as it provides better type safety among other things. Implicit conversion to integers, lack of ability to define the underlying data type and compatibility issues were some of the problems with plain enum that enum class solved in C++11. Although since then enum has improved and one can specify underlying type in the scoped enumerations.
Plain enums pollute namespace, and you have to pick names that are too long, and have to carry the context inside their names. For example: INETMSG_RFC822_BEGIN inside enum _ImplINetRFC822MessageHeaderState. With an enum class, it is simply written as HeaderState::BEGIN. When placed inside a file/class/namespace that makes it relevant, it is much easier to use: it is more readable, and causes no issues for other identifiers with possible similar names.,
See this change:
You can read more about that in:
You may find some of the instances with:
$ git grep -w enum *.cxx *.hxx|grep -v "enum class"
When you count it with wc -l, it shows something more than 2k instances.
You can see some of the previous conversions here, which is around 1k changes:
$ git log --oneline -i -E --grep="convert enum|scoped enum"
This is a good, but lengthy example of such a conversion:
First of all, please choose good names for the new enum class and values. For example, you may convert APPLICATION_WINDOW_TITLE into Application::WindowTitle. Therefore, do not use the old names as they were.
Converting enum to enum class is not always straightforward. You should try to understand the code using the enum, and then try to replace it with enum class. You may need to add extra state/values for situations where 0 or -1 or some default value was used. There are cases where a numerical value is used for different conflicting purposes, and then you have to do some sort of conflict resolution to separate those cases.
You may end up modifying more and more files, and a few static_casts where they are absolutely necessary because you are interpreting some integer value read from input. These are the places where you should check the values yourself in the code. You have to make sure that the numerical value is appropriate before casting it to the enum class.
If you want to do bitwise operations, you should use o3tl::typed_flags, for example:
enum class FileViewFlags
{
None = 0x00,
MultiSelection = 0x02,
ShowType = 0x04,
ShowNone = 0x20,
};
template<> struct o3tl::typed_flags : o3tl::is_typed_flags<FileViewFlags, 0x26> {}
Then, you may use it like this:
if (nFlags & FileViewFlags::MULTISELECTION)
mxTreeView->set_selection_mode(SelectionMode::Multiple …
Writer recently got a Markdown import & export filter and there were a number of improvements to that.
This work is primarily for Collabora Online, but the feature is available in desktop Writer as well.
Ujjawal Kumar contributed a markdown import to Writer, as part of Google Summer of Code (GSoC) this summer. Mike Kaganski of Collabora also created a minimal markdown export in Writer. I looked at the feature differences between the two, and filled in various gaps in the markdown export. I also added a few general markdown import/export improvements relevant for normal Writer documents, like embedded image support.
Here is a sample case of a document using inline code spans:
Exporting this to markdown & loading back to Writer, the code span was lost:
And now it's preserved:
This also works with code blocks.
Second, here is a document with lists:
Exporting this to markdown & loading back to Writer, the lists were lost:
And now they are preserved:
This also works with nested lists.
Third, here is a document with an image:
Exporting this to markdown & loading back to Writer, the image was lost:
And now it's preserved:
This also works with embedded and anchored images.
Fourth, here is a document with a table:
Exporting this to markdown & loading back to Writer, the table was lost:
And now it's preserved:
This also works with table alignments and nested tables (to the extent the markdown markup allows that).
Fifth, here is a document with a quote block:
Exporting this to markdown & loading back to Writer, the quote's paragraph indentation was lost:
And now it's preserved:
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:
If you are working with LibreOffice code, trying to understand the code, fix bugs, or implement new features, you will need to debug the code at some point. Here are some general tips for a good debugging experience. Let’s start from the platform
Choosing a platform to debug usually depends on the nature of the problem. If the problem is Windows-only, you need a Windows environment to build and debug the problem. But, if the problems can be reproduced everywhere, then you can choose the platform of your choice with the debugging tools that you prefer to debug the problem.
On Linux, it matters if you are running X11 or Wayland. Also, as there are multiple graphical back-ends available for LibreOffice, it matters if you are using X11, GTK3/4, or Qt5/6 back-end for your debugging. Some bugs are specific to GTK, then you should use GTK3 UI for testing. In 2025, GTK4 UI of LibreOffice is still experimental, so it is better to work with GTK3. For making the debugging easier, many developers work on X11 (gen) UI for debugging.
Various debugging tools can be used to debug the soffice.bin/soffice.exe LibreOffice binary that you have built. For the common debuggers, you can use GDB on Linux, lldb on macOS, and WinDbg or Visual Studio on Windows.
For using the above debuggers, you can use the IDE or front-end that support them. Various IDEs are usable with LibreOffice code. For a detailed explanation, refer to this Wiki article:
Make sure that you can build and debug a simple program before trying to build and debug LibreOffice.
To have a better debugging experience, or to avoid problems you may have to customize the debugging session with environment variables. A complete article of the TDF Wiki is dedicated to discuss the environment variables that can be used with LibreOffice:
Here is some of the most important ones:
1) Using the X11 user interface:
If you want to use the X11 back-end that is simpler, and usually easier to work with on debug sessions, you have to set SAL_USE_VCLPLUGIN environment variable:
export SAL_USE_VCLPLUGIN=gen
That is specially useful when you are debugging graphical problems. But in some cases, you may need to avoid it or at least customize it. For example, while debugging mouse-related problems you may need to tell LibreOffice to avoid mouse grabbing this way:
export SAL_NO_MOUSEGRABS=1
2) Using GTK user interface
If you are using GTK user interface, then you may use GTK inspector to interactively debug LibreOffice GUI. You can use it this way:
export GTK_DEBUG=interactive
In solenv/gdb/ inside LibreOffice source code, you may find pretty printers for GDB. This is helpful when debugging LibreOffice with GDB, to be able to see data in a more readable way.
Sometimes when you debug a LibreOffice application, it is easier to …
Once upon a time, there was a girl, who used WhatsApp in her iPhone. She was rather active there, and collected quite some important data in the app over time. But some things in her iPhone were inconvenient; and the phone was slowly aging. So she wanted to change her phone some day.
For her birthday, a fairy, who learned somehow about the girl’s wish, presented her a new Android phone. That was a nice new phone, and the girl was so happy! She decided to move everything from the old phone to the new one immediately.
She was worrying about how to move the precious data between the devices; but she felt a huge relief, when the phone spoke: “The fairy told me how important your data is to you; and I have magic powers to handle it all. Just connect the old phone to me with a cord”. So she did.
The new phone started its work; and the girl could see how the progress bar was gradually moving to completion; but suddenly it stopped; minutes passed, but the bar was motionless. The girl was impatient to start using her new shiny device, but she knew that she needs to wait. And she waited; and waited; but after an hour passed, she noticed something horrible: the old phone was sucking the life out of the new device through the cable!
The scared girl could only hope that the process would resume, and finish before the new phone is out of power. She searched and learned, that iPhones are known for their insatiable hunger, and whenever they are connected to anything with energy, they start sucking it. She couldn’t even ask the new phone to shine less brightly to save the energy – because it wasn’t ready for such things yet. She used her wireless charger, but its powers were fewer than the hunger of iPhone, combined with the hard work done by Android. The energy level still decreased too fast.
In the end, when the hope almost vanished, the progress resumed moving! But immediately, the new phone said: “When I collected your data from your old phone, something bad happened, and I failed to collect something. I will continue, but please check later, what’s missing!”.
Only a couple of energy drops were remaining in the new phone, when it finished its task, and could be disconnected from the vampire. But the girl was terrified, when she opened WhatsApp, connected to it (using a magic SMS confirmation), only to see that all her data is lost! She tried to open WhatsApp on the old phone to check if something is still there, and saw that the app had disconnected her. So she used the SMS magic again, and – to her great relief – everything was there!
She askes WhatsApp, how to move the data; and it answered, that if she moved from iPhone to iPhone, or from Android to Android, she could use a backup; but from …
C++ Standard library, which resides in std:: namespace provides common classes and functions which can be used by developers. Among them, Standard Template Library (STL) provides classes and functions to better manage data through data structures named containers. Here I discuss how to use STL functions for better processing of data, and avoid loops.
To iterate over a container to see if some specific condition is valid for all, any, or none of the elements in that container, C/C++ developers traditionally used loops.
On the other hand, since C++11, there are functions that can handle such cases: all_of, any_of and none_of. These functions process STL containers, and can replace loops. If you want to know if a function returns true for all, any, or none of the items of the container, then you can simply use these functions. This is the EasyHack dedicated to such a change:
Here is an example patch which uses any_of instead of a loop:
- bool bFound = false; // convert ASCII apostrophe to the typographic one const OUString aText( rOrig.indexOf( '\'' ) > -1 ? rOrig.replace('\'', u'’') : rOrig ); - size_t nCnt = aVec.size(); - for (size_t i = 0; !bFound && i < nCnt; ++i) - { - if (aVec[i] == aText) - bFound = true; - } + const bool bFound = std::any_of(aVec.begin(), aVec.end(), + [&aText](const OUString& n){ return n == aText; });
As you can see, the new code is more concise, and avoids using loops.
If you want to copy, remove or simply find a value in a container which conforms to a specific functions, you may use copy_if, remove_if or find_if.
Again, this is an example patch:
- for ( size_t i = 0; i < SAL_N_ELEMENTS( arrOEMCP ); ++i ) - if ( arrOEMCP[i] == codepage ) - return true; - - return false; + return std::find(std::begin(arrOEMCP), std::end(arrOEMCP), codepage) != std::end(arrOEMCP);
Refactoring code is a good way to improve knowledge on LibreOffice development. The above EasyHacks are among EasyHacks that everyone can try.
More information about EasyHacks, and how to start working on them can be found on TDF Wiki:
Writer has some support for interdependent (or hierarchical) tracked changes: e.g. the case when you have a delete on top of an insert. See the second post for background.
This work is primarily for Collabora Online, but the feature is available in desktop Writer as well.
With the already mentioned improvements in place, the area of format redlines with character style or direct formatting changes were still lacking: Writer's original model here was just marking a text range as "formatted" and then either accept the format redline as-is, or reject reverting back to the paragraph style (default formatting), losing the old character style or old direct formatting.
Here is a sample case of a document where the old character style is Strong (~bold) and the font size is 24pt, while the new character style is Quote (~italic) and the font size is 36pt. The rest of the document uses no specific character styles and has the font size of 12pt:
Interdependent tracked change: improved format, after document load
Rejecting that format redline resulted in just the defaults, i.e. no character style and 12pt font size:
Interdependent tracked change: old reject, lost character style / direct format
But now we track the old character style & direct format:
Interdependent tracked change: new reject, handled character style / direct format
This required changes in the DOCX import, ODF import and ODF export, too.
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:
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 (26.2).
LibreOffice handles different input and output formats, and also displays text and graphics alongside inside the GUI on computer displays. This requires LibreOffice to understand various different measurement units, and convert values from one to another.
Unit selection
The unit conversion can be done by writing extra code, where one should know the units, and calculate factor to convert them to each other.
For example, consider that we want to convert width from points into 1/100 mm, which is used in page setup.
We know that:
1 point = 1/72 inch
1 inch = 25.4 mm = 25400 microns
factor = 25400/(72*10) ≈ 35.27777778
Then, it is possible to write the conversion as:
Code span: baseline
Code span: old result
Code span: new result
Lists: baseline
Lists: old result
Lists: new result
Image: baseline
Image: old result
Image: new result
Table: baseline
Table: old result
Table: new result
Quote: baseline
Quote: old result
Quote: new resultstatic int PtTo10Mu( int nPoints )
{
return static_cast<int>((static_cast<double>(nPoints)*35.27777778)+0.5);
}
A separate function that casts integer nPoints to double, then multiplies it by the factor which has 8 decimal points, and then rounds the result by adding 0.5 and then truncates it and stores it in an integer. This approach is not always desirable. It is error-prone, and lacks enough accuracy. For big values, it can calculates values off by one.
Another approach is to use o3tl (OpenOffice.org template library) convert function. It is as simple as writing:
int nResult = o3tl::convert(nPoint, o3tl::Length::pt, o3tl::Length::mm100)
As you can see, it is much cleaner, and gives the output, properly rounded as an integer!
You need a double? No problem! You can use appropriate template to achieve that:
double fResult = o3tl::convert<double>(nPoint, o3tl::Length::pt, o3tl::Length::mm100)
These are the supported units, defined in the header include/o3tl/unit_conversion.hxx:
mm100 – 1/100th mm = 1 micron
mm10 – 1/10 mm
mm – millimeter
cm – centimeter
m – meter
km – kilometer
emu – English Metric Unit (1/360000 cm)
twip – Twentieth of a point (1/20 pt)
pt – Point (1/72 in)
pc – Pica (1/6 in)
in1000 – 1/1000 in
in100 – 1/100 in
in10 – 1/10 in
in – inch
ft – foot
mi – mile
master – PPT Master Unit (1/576 in)
px – Pixel unit (15 twip, 96 ppi)
ch – Char unit (210 twip, 14 px)
line – Line unit (312 twip)
If you are doing a conversion, it is possible that the result overflows. With o3tl::convert() you can handle it this way:
sal_Int64 width = o3tl::convert(nPoint, o3tl::Length::pt, o3tl::Length::mm100, overflow, 0);
if (overflow)
{
...
}
To to find instances to change, one can try finding some magic numbers listed here. For example, consider measuring a line based on twips:
line – Line unit (312 twip)
If you search for 312, you may find some examples:
$ git grep -w 312 *.cxx
The task described here is filed as tdf#168226:
EasyHacks are well-defined small tasks that are designed to help newcomers begin LibreOffice programming. If you like it, you can start working on it!
Using o3tl::convert() not only simplifies the …
This post is part of a series to describe how Writer now gets a feature to handle tables that are both floating and span over multiple pages.
This work is primarily for Collabora Online, but is useful on the desktop as well. See the 11th post for the previous part.
Previous posts described the hardest part of multi-page floating tables: making sure that text can wrap around them and they can split across pages. In this part, we'll look at a conflicting requirement. On one hand, headings want their text to not split across pages (and shapes anchored into paragraphs are considered part of the paragraph, too). On the other hand, it should be OK to have a floating table at the bottom of a page and the following heading to go to the next page.
It turns out, Writer gave "keep together" a priority, while Word gave "floating tables are OK to split to a previous page" a priority.
Note that if you have a shape (e.g. a triangle) and not a floating table, then both Word and Writer prevents the move of that shape to a previous page (if the shape is anchored in a heading); this difference was there just for floating tables.
Here is how the tdf#167222 bugdoc looks like now in Writer:
Floating table, followed by heading: new Writer render
And here is how it used to look like:
Floating table, followed by heading: old Writer render
And here is the reference rendering:
Floating table, followed by heading: reference render
This means that we leave layout for shapes unchanged in general: shapes anchored in headings are still considered to be part of headings and don't split. But for floating tables, we now allow them to split and use space at a previous page if they fit there.
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:
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 (26.2).
LibreOffice 25.8 will be released as final on August, 20, 2025 (check the Release Plan). LibreOffice 25.8 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 25.8 RC1, 70 commits have been submitted to the code repository and 34 issues got fixed. Check the release notes to find the new features included in this version of LibreOffice.
LibreOffice 25.8 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 your contribution! Happy testing!!!
…
You know what: Microsoft became miserably incompetent in IT.
I develop open-source code. But that never made me one of the “I hate proprietary software or IT giant corporations” types. I always saw the nice things that Microsoft offered to its users; I saw not only downsides in its products. And I also used (and continue to use) things created by it: Windows to start with (and I develop there, being able to debug and address issues specific to the platform that most of our users use); but also its email service for personal mail.
This Monday, I decided to send something to LibreOffice dev mailing list. Something I do from time to time, you know. Not too fascinating, right?
Well, this time, it turned out, Microsoft decided to teach me to fear them. Thunderbird shown me a message, that the mail couldn’t be sent (well, not a problem: will re-try again…), but then I found myself logged off, with “Your account has been blocked” message. They decided, that I violated their service agreement!
FTR: here is the mail. I was able to send it using another tech giant’s mail service. You may see that it’s full of links. Yes, that’s true; I prefer to provide references to my words. But tell me where was it violating anything in MS agreement?
OK, they have a stupid AI that is worse than good old filters. OK, they made it react immediately, as an undoubted authority. But that’s not a big problem, right? They provide a way to appeal! Let me do that.
And of course, they ask for the phone, and I provide it, just to get a nice reply:
And guess what: there is no other method!
OK! Let’s ask their support. (I am approaching to the point that fascinated me most.) I found a link to “Contact Microsoft Support” on the “Troubleshooting verification code issues” page; and after some automatic answers there, which didn’t answer my problem, I finally got a button telling me … tada …
Yes, you got it right. “Here is a page where we discuss problems signing in. You attempted our FAQ suggestions? You still can’t sign in? No problem! Contact our Support team, and we will solve your problem is a minute! But first, please sign in to continue.”
Heh. I used my wife’s account to contact support. And then I was given a very secret link to an appeal form, where I could file a support ticket. And the next morning, I got a message! Yay! It told me to do something! Let me try! What is that they tell me to do? Reading… hmm… go to sign-in page, and when they tell me that my account is blocked, provide a phone number? Wasn’t it exactly the thing I attempted and failed, and told them about that? But hey, they obviously fixed that problem overnight, they couldn’t just send me the useless instructions, right …
LibreOffice 25.8 will be released as final at the end of August, 2025 ( Check the Release Plan ) being LibreOffice 25.8 Release Candidate 1 (RC1) the third pre-release since the development of version 25.8 started at the beginning of December, 2024. Since the previous release, LibreOffice 25.8 Beta1, 178 commits have been submitted to the code repository and 101 issues got fixed. Check the release notes to find the new features included in this version of LibreOffice.
LibreOffice 25.8 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!!
…
Writer has some support for interdependent (or hierarchical) tracked changes: e.g. the case when you have a delete on top of an insert. See the first post for background.
This work is primarily for Collabora Online, but the feature is available in desktop Writer as well.
With the already mentioned improvements in place, a few areas were still lacking: we didn't have UI for all cases where the DOCX import was possible already; combining tracked changes (redlines) were not complete (so you don't have to reject all parts of a logical redline one by one) and some of the undo/redo code didn't work as expected.
Here is a sample case where the UI was missing to create something that was possible to import from DOCX: a format redline on top of an insert redline.
If you had a document with an insert:
Interdependent tracked change: just insert
And you selected BBB to mark those characters as bold, we just updated the existing insert redline to be bold:
Interdependent tracked change: old, format is not tracked separately
But now we track a format change on top of the insert separately:
Interdependent tracked change: new, format is tracked separately
This is also visible if you open the track changes dialog, which explains that now you have part of the insert redline covered by a format redline:
Interdependent tracked change: UI dialog now showing multiple redlines
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:
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).
Writer has some support for interdependent (or hierarchical) tracked changes: e.g. the case when you have a delete on top of an insert. While there were some working cases, handling of many combinations were missing. I started to make systematic improvements in this area in the recent past, this post gives you an overview what's done so far.
This work is primarily for Collabora Online, but the feature is available in desktop Writer as well.
DOCX files in Word can often have overlapping tracked changes: Writer tries to split these up to make sure there is only one tracked change under the cursor at the same time. Still, it's possible that you have a tracked change with multiple types: e.g. a delete on top of an insert.
The focus in on 3 combinations which appear in DOCX files a lot: "insert, then delete", "insert, then format" and "delete, then format".
This mostly affects the UI and import/export filters of ODT and DOCX.
Given an insert, then delete:
Interdependent tracked change: insert, then delete
Most operations worked nicely here, but in case your cursor was in the middle of AAA and you did a reject, followed by an undo, proper handling of that was missing, now implemented.
But then given an insert, then a format:
Interdependent tracked change: insert, then format
Then a handling of more actions were missing:
The combined implementation of these should give you a smooth feeling in case you're used to how Word works: if there is a format redline combined with an insert, then the operations act on the insert type, and format is only accepted/rejected when there is no insert "under" the format.
Similarly: it's a bit of an implementation detail that Writer splits redlines on DOCX import: so if you e.g. accept AAA then we combine that with BBB and CCC when it makes sense, so you need to click a lot less.
Finally, given a delete, then a format:
Interdependent tracked change: delete, then format
Then again handling of some actions were missing:
This deal unites the largest team of corporate Office engineers to deliver on Collabora Productivity’s mission to restore Digital Sovereignty to its users, while making Open Source Office Rock. It supercharges Collabora’s Online Office products and services portfolio with rich German language capability, deeper experience of vertical applications, new Web Assembly skills, and a wider unified partner ecosystem. Through improved product richness this sharpens the competitive edge of FLOSS Office productivity against mass-market proprietary alternatives.
CAMBRIDGE, UK – May 28th 12:00 CEST – 2025
Collabora Productivity, the world’s leading provider of collaborative Open Source Office editors have completed a merger with allotropia. Collabora has invested heavily in building Collabora Online (COOL) – a market leading, on-premise, secure, interoperable, open-source solution for document editing and collaboration deployed to any modern browser. This is complemented by desktop and mobile apps across Linux, Windows, Mac, Android, iOS and Chrome-OS. Collabora provides support subscriptions to enterprise customers worldwide via a network of hundreds of trusted partners. This is now augmented by allotropia’s partner and customer base. Together with our partners we deliver document and productivity excellence integrated with our partners product and service offerings.
allotropia’s expertise around Web Assembly combined with Collabora Online will we expect, in time, enable customer use-cases such as well as office-as-component embedding scenarios in vertical applications as well as off-line and end-to-end encrypted editing, and. This work builds on some visionary prototype funding from the Bundesministerium des Inneren (BMI) for a collaboration between the companies to enable the use of Collabora Online off-line in the browser.
Further details of product investment, and direction will be announced and decided in workshops with our key customers and partners at our annual COOL Days conference in Budapest next week where staff, community and our customer and partner-ecosystem meet, swap ideas, and hear about the latest work in our upcoming major release featuring improved performance, usability, interoperability and much more.
“Collabora is excited to welcome each member of the allotropia team today!” said Michael Meeks, CEO, Collabora Productivity, “We are excited to work together to accelerate our product development, enjoy our first COOL Days together, and plan the next features and possibilities to delight our customers.”
Collabora has invested in building a network of hundreds of partners and is approaching one hundred million docker image downloads of its document editing server software, with millions of paying users of its products, all of whom will start to benefit from this merger from today.We expect to bring the experience that allotropia has from it’s relationship with CIB around vertical desktop applications (Fachverfahren) to help partners and customers migrate their Windows & Microsoft Office based business process to easy to deploy multi-platform web applications.
“With our awesome team of engineers, and our WebAssembly know how, we can add significantly to Collabora’s powerhouse of Office engineering prowess & their product offerings”, says Thorsten Behrens, CEO of allotropia, “we’ve worked with them as partners for many years, and align perfectly in our goals …
Yesterday I merged a fix for Writer’s tdf#165094. Not that it was something exceptional; something that often happens when we change the huge code: a regression. Something that we try to do for them: a fix. Why mention it here?
It happens to show something, that people underestimate. The complexity of what they call “proper testing” – you know, that “I found a bug! Do you even try to test your software???” rant you often see in discussions. Let’s look at this case.
The problem was, that in some specific document, where there was a manually inserted page break, that page break, defined in a hidden paragraph, disappeared after an upgrade. Sounds easy? Should be caught immediately in the release testing? But other page breaks weren’t lost.
Debugging showed, that the bug would only occur when all of the following happened:
I suppose, that’s a combination of factors, that any QA engineer would naturally test first, don’t you agree? (Disclaimer: no I don’t think so.)
Note that the complexity of this constellation of causing factors is, again, not uncommon in our codebase. In fact, it only needed less than ten features to take their specific forms, from thousands of features and options that the suite offers.
But it is completely unsurprising, that the bug, that requires such a constellation of factors, actually appeared in our bug tracker. Given the tens of millions of users, who work with who knows how many documents, every low-probability event will happen, sooner or later. This is good; and we are thankful to everyone who files bugs.
And let me say, that we at Collabora Productivity are glad to do many good things to make the office suite better for everyone.
Writer has the concept of rejecting tracked changes: if a proposed insertion or deletion is not wanted, then one can reject it to push back on the proposal. So far such an action left no trace in the document, which is sometimes not wanted. Calling reinstate on a change behaves like reject, but with history: it reinstates the original state, with the rejected change preserved in the document.
This work is primarily for Collabora Online, but the feature is available in desktop Writer as well.
When Alice works on a document to insert e.g. new conditions for a contract, then perhaps Bob is not happy with the proposal. But just rejecting the change "silently" would not be polite: the tracked change then disappears, so possibly Alice thinks it was accepted and Bob didn't communicate the pushback explicitly in the resulting document, either.
Reinstate is meant to improve this interaction: if an insert is reinstated, then an explicit delete is created on top of the insert, so Alice can see that Bob was not happy with the proposal. Or in case Alice proposed a delete, Bob can reinstate that by adding the same content again to the document, without typing the text manually after the delete.
This is a UI feature: the resulting model still only contains inserts and deletes, so it works even with DOCX files.
Given an insert:
Now you can easily create a delete on top of the insert:
Reinstate: a reinstated insert
And given a delete:
Now you can easily create an insert right after the delete, preserving complex content:
Reinstate: a reinstated delete
As you can see, this creates the opposite of the original change as a new tracked change, so it will in the end still reject the change, but without deleting the original change.
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:
Online side:
You can get a development edition of Collabora Online 25 …
This FirebirdSQL pull request introduces support for Windows ARM64 builds to the Firebird project. The changes cover updates to build scripts, configuration files, and Visual Studio solution/project files to accommodate ARM64 architecture, ensuring compatibility and enabling compilation and functionality on Windows ARM64 platforms.
This FirebirdSQL pull request introduces SQL-compliant aliases GREATEST and LEAST for the existing MAXVALUE and MINVALUE functions. These aliases align with the SQL:2023 standard and provide a more intuitive and widely recognized syntax. The changes include updates to documentation, keywords, parser tokens, and system function definitions to support these new aliases.
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Reinstate: an insert
Reinstate: a delete