- Up early, sync with Dave, Anuj, lunch with Julia, worked away at contractuals. Onto mail catch-up, and slides.
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.
LibreOffice 25.2 will be released as final at the beginning of February, 2025 ( Check the Release Plan ) being LibreOffice 25.2 Release Candidate 2 (RC2) the forth and last pre-release since the development of version 25.2 started in mid Juny, 2024. Since the previous release, LibreOffice 25.2 RC1, 104 commits have been submitted to the code repository and 55 issues got fixed. Check the release notes to find the new features included in this version of LibreOffice.
LibreOffice 25.2 RC2 can be downloaded for Linux, macOS and Windows, and it will replace the standard installation.
In case you find any problem in this pre-release, please report it in Bugzilla ( You just need a legit email account in order to create a new account ).
For help, you can contact the QA Team directly in the QA IRC channel or via Matrix.
LibreOffice is a volunteer-driven community project, so please help us to test – we appreciate it!
Happy testing!!
Happy new year 2025! I wish a great year for you, and the global LibreOffice community. Now that we are now in 2025, I briefly discuss the year 2024 and outlook for 2024 in the development blog.
At The Document Foundation (TDF), our aim is to improve LibreOffice, the leading free/open source office suite that has millions of users around the world. Our work is community-driven, and the software needs your contribution to become better, and work in a way that you like.
My goal here, is to help people understand LibreOffice code easier, and eventually participate in LibreOffice core development to make LibreOffice better for everyone. In 2024, I wrote 22 posts around LibreOffice development in the dev blog (4 of them are unpublished drafts).
Focus of the development blog for 2025 in this blog will be:
I have written about some of these topics in 2024. Therefore, this year I will try to expand the previous writings and provide new articles about them. For example, creating user interfaces using VCL with the help of glade interface designer will be one of important things to discuss.
You can give feedback by writing a comment here, or sending me an email to hossein AT libreoffice DOT org.
We provide mentoring support to those who want to start LibreOffice development. You are welcome to contact me if you need help to build LibreOffice and do some EasyHacks via the above email address. Also, you can always refer to our Getting Involved Wiki page:
Let’s hope a great year for LibreOffice (and the world) in 2025.
LibreOffice is a privacy-oriented office suite that runs on your own computer and doesn’t include AI features out-of-the-box. But we know that many users are interested in combining AI tools with the suite, so we talked to John Balis who is working on a (fully optional!) LibreOffice extension called localwriter. Here’s what he had to say…
Localwriter is a libreoffice writer extension to allow for inline generative editing with local inference. It can be used with any language model supported by Ollama or text-generation-webui. This extension adds two powerful commands to LibreOffice Writer:
I started working on localwriter in July 2024, because I wanted an AI tool to assist with my writing that would benefit from the intrinsic advantages in terms of availability (can’t lose access), confidentiality (doesn’t leak data), and integrity (no surprise model version changes) that come with using a fully open source local AI stack instead of a third-party API. I feel it is really important to embrace learning to benefit from artificial intelligence without sacrificing agency, and this software follows from that line of thinking.
localwriter currently only supports LibreOffice Writer, although Calc support is in development and will be offered in the next release. Another limitation is that it does not support streaming, and does not offer a “Chat with document” feature.
There are a ton of open feature requests in the repository from several users, which should be really easy for an experienced LibreOffice extension developer to complete. I can easily set up anyone interested with a task to work on. Tests would be welcome, as currently it doesn’t have any tests. Also, donating to me helps me allocate my own time towards development.
Zdeněk Crhonek (aka “raal”) from the Czech LibreOffice community writes:
The Czech team has finished its translation of the LibreOffice Getting Started guide 24.8. As usual it was a team effort, with translations by Petr Kuběj, Zdeněk Crhonek and Radomír Strnad; localized pictures from Roman Toman; and technical support from Miloš Šrámek. Thanks to all the team for their work!
The Czech translation of the Getting Started Guide 24.8 is available for download here.
The team will continue working on a translation of the Math Guide 24.8. We always looking for new translators and correctors. Join us!
Stanislav Horáček cleaned up the bookshelf page and he added an online version of the Math Guide. More online versions are ti come.
Great work everyone!
Dione Maddern y el equipo (global) de documentación de LibreOffice se enorgullecen de anunciar la disponibilidad inmediata de Guía de LibreOffice Calc 24.8, una actualización de la Guía de Calc 24.2 existente con las mejoras disponibles en LibreOffice Calc …
Helen Borrie, a key figure in the Firebird relational database project and a longtime contributor at IBPhoenix, passed away on January 2, 2025. Her contributions were essential to Firebird’s creation and its development over the past 25 years.Read the rest of the official announcement
We're happy to announce the first release of Jaybird 6, Jaybird 6.0.0.
Dione Maddern and The Documentation Team are proud to announce the immediate availability of the LibreOffice Calc Guide 24.8, an update of the existing Calc Guide 24.2 with enhancements taken from the current LibreOffice 24.8 Calc module.
The book was reviewed for clarity, readability and content additions, notably the Calc database table referencing in formulas, removal of deprecated JavaScript debugger and refactoring of the Calc’s chart topic – in which the chapter on charts was split in two, one for the chart basics and the second for the chart types. Dione Maddern, Calc editor says:
I took on the challenge of compiling the Calc Guide because I wanted to learn about advanced editing and working with master documents. While I’ve previously worked on large documents in the engineering and insurance industries, documents were often compiled with clunky cut-and-paste techniques which created a lot of errors and labor-intensive rework. Working on the Calc Guide 24.8 was a great opportunity to expand my skills in LibreOffice and document production generally. It was also a wonderful opportunity to work with the LibreOffice Documentation Team. I had a great time working with such a fun and supportive team.
Special thanks to Ed Olson, Lisa Samy and Claire Wood for their review of the contents of the guide. And to B. Antonio F. for his throughout review of formatting the guide and by writing a set of macros, bundled in an LibreOffice extension that allows automatic and assisted fixing of images, tables , styles and more.
It was also a wonderful opportunity to work with the LibreOffice Documentation Team. I had a great time working with such a fun and supportive team. (Dione Maddern)
It has been an honor to share my wordsmithing skills with the LibreOffice documentation team. Replacing verbose paragraphs in the Calc guides with simplified, minimalist text has been both challenging and rewarding. I look forward to continuing my work on other applications in the suite as new releases become available. (Ed Olson)
Joining the Calc Guide team marked my first time contributing to an open-source platform. My time working with other team members was both enriching, yet eye-opening to all the facets of document editing. As such, I thoroughly enjoyed my experience with the LibreOffice Community as a whole. (Lisa Samy)
I accepted the challenge of creating mechanisms to harmonize he appearance of chapter text according to the chapter template established by the documentation team. It was an opportunity to delve deeper into macro programming and get to know the LibreOffice API better. SanityCheck macros allow you to correct formatting errors (based on styles), correctly adjust images, tables, and automatically apply descriptions for accessibility. With SanityCheck you can check documentation chapters in English, Spanish and Portuguese. (B. Antonio F.)
I enjoyed working on the Calc Guide as it gave me the opportunity to work with a truly global team. The content also challenged my knowledge about spreadsheets. I was happy to develop my knowledge, getting new information …
LibreOffice Writer has long been a trusted tool for users worldwide, offering an open-source solution for documents. But what happens when we take a step back and look at the user experience? How do templates fit into the workflows of users, what makes a great template and where do users want LibreOffice writer to improve?…
Writer has the concept of paragraph margins and page margins, but what happens when you combine the two? It turns out the expectation is that sometimes the top paragraph margin is ignored in this case. We'll see two cases where the behavior of Writer is now improved to better match Word in this regard.
This work is primarily for Collabora Online, but the feature is available in desktop Writer as well.
As described in a previous bugreport, there was a first problem where Word ignored the top paragraph margin of a document, but Writer did not. A recent bugreport then pointed out that the first implementation went too far and now a wanted top margin was ignored. This lead to a set of conditions which now does a decent emulation of Word's rules in this regard.
Here is the old Writer render result for a document where the top margin should be ignored:
And here is the new Writer render result for a document where the top margin is ignored:
Finally, the reference render result, showing the ignored top paragraph margin:
As you can see, now the unwanted top paragraph margin is omitted at page top.
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 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).
Marcial Machado recently posted on Reddit about his “fully-featured LibreOffice Impress template for creating Jeopardy-style games. Just add your questions and categories, and you’re good to go!” So let’s find out more…
At its core, the template is meant to emulate what a game of Jeopardy is like. You can click on any of the squares on the game board and it will send you to the slide with the associated question, where you can either return to the board in the case of a misclick, or reveal the answer to the question. Returning to the board from the revealed answer slide will erase the square you clicked on to clearly show which questions are left to be answered.
You can also use the green and red arrows at the top to give and remove points to up to 6 teams in increments of 100, in order to keep track of everyone’s correctly- and incorrectly-guessed answers. Once the board’s cleared, you can click the pink button at the bottom right to clearly display the top three teams and the points they earned. I made sure to include details on how to edit, and use, the template in the first two slides!
The simple reason for why I developed this template was because: I use LibreOffice, I wanted a Jeopardy presentation that worked in LibreOffice, and I couldn’t find one. The more verbose reason is that there is a comparative dearth of visually-appealing presentation templates in the OPT world than there is in the PPTX world; this is no fault of the creators of OPT templates, but rather because the proprietary nature of something like PowerPoint incentivizes templates made for profit, whereas most people who create LibreOffice Impress templates do it out of interest.
This necessarily means that there are just less people making LibreOffice Impress templates in total, without mentioning the much smaller userbase LibreOffice has compared with Microsoft Office. Now, some PowerPoint files do work in Impress, and the work done by the dev team and contributors is commendable, but a converted document is still a converted document. Formatting might be slightly off, and macros are almost always a bust. Since I realized I wanted this Jeopardy project to exist, and realizing my own frustration with the fact that such a project didn’t exist already, I went ahead and tried it out myself, and then released it to the public!
I have a few:
LibreOffice 25.2 will be released as final at the beginning of February, 2025 ( Check the Release Plan ) being LibreOffice 25.2 Release Candidate 1 (RC1) the third pre-release since the development of version 25.2 started in mid Juny, 2024. Since the previous release, LibreOffice 25.2 Beta1, 175 commits have been submitted to the code repository and 76 issues got fixed. Check the release notes to find the new features included in this version of LibreOffice.
LibreOffice 25.2 RC1 can be downloaded for Linux, macOS and Windows, and it will replace the standard installation.
In case you find any problem in this pre-release, please report it in Bugzilla ( You just need a legit email account in order to create a new account ).
For help, you can contact the QA Team directly in the QA IRC channel or via Matrix.
LibreOffice is a volunteer-driven community project, so please help us to test – we appreciate it!
Happy testing!!
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