The Document Foundation Planet

Tuesday
04 November, 2025

[en] Miklos Vajna: Interdependent tracked changes improvements in Writer, part 4: direct accept/reject

@ 07:11 UTC

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.

Motivation¶

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.

Results so far¶

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:

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:

But now you can also open the Manage Changes dialog, to be more specific by directly selecting the formatting change:

And when you accept the formatting change directly, the result will be just the insert change:

You can save and load the results in both DOCX and ODT, as usual.

How is this implemented?¶

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:

Want to start using this?¶

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).

Saturday
01 November, 2025

[es] Blog de LibreOffice Hispano: ¡Haz algo increíble! Únete al Mes de LibreOffice, noviembre de 2025

@ 23:19 UTC

¿Te gusta LibreOffice? Únete al proyecto y ayuda a mejorarlo aún más: ¡participa en el Mes de LibreOffice, noviembre de 2025! Durante las próximas cuatro semanas, cientos de personas de todo el mundo colaborarán para mejorar el software, y …

[en] Official TDF Blog: Do something awesome! Join the Month of LibreOffice, November 2025

@ 13:56 UTC

Love LibreOffice? Join the project and help to make it even better – get involved in the Month of LibreOffice, November 2025! Over the next four weeks, hundreds of people around the world will collaborate to improve the software – and you can help them. There are many ways to get involved, as you’ll see in a second.

And best of all: everyone who contributes to LibreOffice in November can claim a cool sticker pack, and has the chance to win extra LibreOffice merchandise such as mugs, hoodies, T-shirts, rucksacks and more (we’ll choose 10 participants at random at the end):

How to take part

There are many ways you can help out – and you don’t need to be a developer. For instance, you can be a…

Handy Helper, answering questions from users on Ask LibreOffice. We’re keeping an eye on that site so if you give someone useful advice, you can claim your shiny stickers. We also monitor the users@ mailing list.

First Responder, helping to confirm new bug reports: Go to our Bugzilla page and look for new bugs. If you can recreate one, add a comment like “CONFIRMED on Windows 11 and LibreOffice 25.8.2”.

Drum Beater, spreading the word: Tell everyone about LibreOffice on Mastodon, Bluesky or X (Twitter)! Just say why you love it or what you’re using it for, add the #libreoffice hashtag, and at the end of the month you can claim your stickers.

Globetrotter, translating the user interface: LibreOffice is available in a wide range of languages, but its interface translations need to be kept up-to-date. Or maybe you want to translate the suite to a whole new language? Get involved here.

Code Cruncher, contributing source code: The codebase is big, but there are lots of places to get involved with small jobs. See our Developers page on the website and this page on the wiki to get started.

Docs Doctor, writing documentation: Whether you want to update the online help or add chapters to the handbooks, here’s where to start.

We’ll be updating this page every few days with usernames across our various services, as people contribute. So dive in, get involved and help make LibreOffice better for millions of people around the world – and enjoy your sticker pack at the end as thanks from us! And who knows, maybe you’ll be lucky enough to win bonus merch as well…

So let’s get going! We’ll be posting regular updates on this blog and our Mastodon, Bluesky and X (Twitter) accounts over the next four weeks – stay tuned…

Friday
31 October, 2025

[es] Blog de LibreOffice Hispano: Seguridad del formato ODF: cifrado, firmas y gestión de metadatos

@ 18:13 UTC

por Italo Vignoli

El formato Open Document (ODF) es un estándar abierto para documentos de oficina (textos, hojas de cálculo, presentaciones y más) que es flexible e interoperable. Al igual que con cualquier otro formato digital, su seguridad es una …

[en] Official TDF Blog: ODF format security: encryption, signatures and metadata management

@ 10:49 UTC

Open Document Format (ODF) is an open standard for office documents – texts, spreadsheets, presentations and more – that is flexible and interoperable. As with any other digital format, its security is a key concern, as ODF files often contain sensitive information that, without adequate protection measures, can be exposed, tampered with or tracked.

This post analyses how ODF handles security, focusing on encryption, digital signatures and metadata management: three features that protect documents from prying eyes and tampering.

Encryption: content locking

ODF supports file-level encryption using standard algorithms. When you save an ODF document with a password, the content is compressed and then encrypted using AES (Advanced Encryption Standard), typically with a 256-bit key.

Here’s what happens behind the scenes:

The document content (the XML file) is compressed.
A random salt (a sequence of bits used together with a password as input to a one-way function) and an initialisation vector (IV), which is a block of bits of a predefined length, are generated.
A key is derived from the password using PBKDF2 (Password-Based Key Derivation Function 2). The key is a string of data used with an algorithm to encode (encrypt) and decode (decrypt) the text, transforming it from plain text to unreadable text.
AES encrypts the content using this key.

This is encryption based on open and verified algorithms, sufficiently strong when implemented correctly, whose security depends largely on the strength of the password. Users should therefore always use long, unique passwords, preferably created by a password generator.

Unfortunately, not all applications that support the ODF format implement encryption in the same way, with possible repercussions on interoperability.

Digital signatures: who modified the document?

Digital signatures guarantee authenticity and integrity, and show who created or modified the ODF file, and whether it has been modified by another user since its creation.

How it works:

ODF uses XML digital signatures.
A cryptographic hash of the document’s content is created (a fixed-size digital fingerprint of data, created by a one-way algorithm that is almost impossible to reverse).
This hash is signed with the signer’s private key (a secret code, similar to a password, used to encrypt and decrypt data and digitally sign transactions).
The signature is stored in “META-INF/documentsignatures.xml”.

This makes it possible to verify the origin of the document, but verifying signatures requires access to the signer’s public key or certificate. If the workflow involves multiple people, multiple signatures are supported. Any changes to the file after signing invalidate the signature.

Unfortunately, not all office suites that support ODF consistently display or validate signatures.

Metadata management: a potential information leak

Metadata can unintentionally disclose various information, including sensitive information such as usernames, file paths, software versions, timestamps (creation and save dates), and even content revision history.

What does metadata contain?

Author name, change history, and save times.
Custom properties, such as project codes or internal comments.
Application-specific data embedded in namespaces.

Malicious actors can extract metadata for social engineering, document tracking, or profiling purposes. To …

[en] Official TDF Blog: LibreOffice project and community recap: October 2025

@ 08:55 UTC

Here’s our summary of updates, events and activities in the LibreOffice project in the last four weeks – click the links to learn more…

We started the month by posting the LibreOffice Podcast, Episode #5 –Accessibility in Free and Open Source Software, with Michael Weghorn and Mike Saunders. Watch it below – or on PeerTube.

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Markdown support is coming to LibreOffice! This is just one of the projects from the Google Summer of Code 2025, and should be included in our next major release, LibreOffice 26.2, due in February next year.

In October, we had two updates to the software: LibreOffice 25.8.2, and LibreOffice 25.2.7. The latter is the final update to the 25.2 branch, so after this, all users are recommended to upgrade to the 25.8 branch.

It’s the End of 10! Yes, in October, Microsoft ended official support for Windows 10. This leaves users who want to continue using the operating system with few alternatives — especially if they have an old PC that is not compatible with Windows 11’s demanding hardware requirements — other than buying a new PC. But we a posted about 10 reasons to switch to Linux – and, of course, many desktop Linux distributions ship with LibreOffice.

Lots of people ask us about LibreOffice’s compatibility with Microsoft Office/365 documents. We think our compatibility is very good (and always improving, as more people send us documents to test), but the format is extremely difficult to work with, as our posts about the DOCX and PPTX formats explain. (Of course, ideally we’d all be using the Open Document Format, regardless of the software we prefer! And here’s how to make your ODF documents more accessible.)

The Document Foundation is the small (15-person) non-profit organisation that coordinates the LibreOffice project and community. And we’re expanding! In October, we posted two new positions: Paid Developer working on Base (application deadline already over) and Paid Developer focusing on scripting support (application deadline November 17).

Then we provided an update on LibreOffice 64-bit progress, and support for Amazon Linux 2023.

Our Nepalese community is organising an event called the LibreDots Unconference 2025 in Kathmandu. More details to follow – stay tuned to this blog!

Meanwhile, the Libreitalia Conference 2025 was organized by Marco Marega – a LibreItalia and TDF Member – in Gradisca d’Isonzo, near the border with Slovenia.

Then we posted the outcome and conclusions of the VI Latin American LibreOffice Congress, which was held in Habana, Cuba, from October 6 to 9.

And our final event report was from LinuxDays 2025 in Prague, where we had a stand with stickers, flyers and a quiz about LibreOffice.

Keep in touch – follow us …

Thursday
30 October, 2025

[en] Official TDF Blog: The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 25.2.7

@ 12:29 UTC

Berlin, 30 October 2025 – The Document Foundation announces the release of LibreOffice 25.2.7, the final maintenance release of the LibreOffice 25.2 family, available for download at www.libreoffice.org/download [1]. Users of LibreOffice 25.2.x should update to LibreOffice 25.8.x, as LibreOffice 25.2.x is approaching the end of its support period.

LibreOffice 25.2.7 is based on the LibreOffice Technology, which enables the development of desktop, mobile and cloud versions – either from TDF or from the ecosystem – that fully supports the two document format standards: the open ODF or Open Document Format (ODT, ODS and ODP), and the closed and proprietary Microsoft OOXML (DOCX, XLSX and PPTX).

Products based on the LibreOffice Technology are available for all major desktop operating systems (Windows, macOS, Linux and ChromeOS), mobile platforms (Android and iOS) and the cloud.

For enterprise-class deployments, TDF recommends a LibreOffice Enterprise optimized version from one of the ecosystem companies, with dedicated value-added features and other benefits such as SLAs and security patch backports for three to five years (www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-in-business/).

English manuals for the LibreOffice 25.2 family are available for download at books.libreoffice.org/en/. End users can get first-level technical support from volunteers on the user mailing lists and the Ask LibreOffice website: ask.libreoffice.org.

Downloading LibreOffice

All available versions of LibreOffice for the desktop can be downloaded from the same website: www.libreoffice.org/download/.

LibreOffice users, free software advocates and community members can support The Document Foundation and the LibreOffice project by making a donation: www.libreoffice.org/donate.

[1] Fixes in RC1: wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/25.2.7/RC1. Fixes in RC2: wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/25.2.7/RC2.

Wednesday
29 October, 2025

[en] Marius Popa Adrian: A modern C++ wrapper for the Firebird database API.

@ 15:15 UTC

A modern C++ wrapper for the Firebird database API.Documentation | Repositoryfb-cpp provides a clean, modern C++ interface to the Firebird database engine. It wraps the Firebird C++ API with RAII principles, smart pointers, and modern C++ features.Features Modern C++: Uses C++20 features for type safety and performanceRAII: Automatic resource management with smart pointersType Safety:

Friday
24 October, 2025

[es] Blog de LibreOffice Hispano: Haz que tus archivos ODF sean accesibles: una guía sencilla para todos

@ 19:24 UTC

por Italo Vignoli

Las personas sin discapacidades no tienen ningún problema para ver documentos en la pantalla de una computadora, pero hay personas con discapacidad visual o ciegas que utilizan lectores de pantalla y navegación por teclado. Los archivos ODF …

Wednesday
22 October, 2025

[en] LibreOffice Dev Blog: enumarray for better data arrays – EasyHack

@ 19:30 UTC

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, enumarrays are helpful. Although they are not limited to string literals, and can be used for any data.

Using Symbolic Links

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++.

Using enumarray

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;

Final Notes

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.

Tuesday
21 October, 2025

[en] LibreOffice QA Blog: QA/Dev Report: September 2025

@ 11:20 UTC

General Activities

LibreOffice 25.2.6 was announced on September 8
Olivier Hallot (TDF) improved the help for Select Function in Calc’s formula bar, expanded help for the selection of chart data sources, added AutoFilter and Pivot Table/Chart to the help page on sheet protection, added information about summary above/below to the help of Calc’s SUBTOTAL() function, documented sensitivity in the help page for Solver and added the description meta element to the Help page templates
Gábor Kelemen (Collabora) improved the script for finding unneeded includes in the code and did many code cleanups
Tomaž Vajngerl (Collabora) implemented a sheet view functionality in Calc allowing to manipulate AutoFilters in one view without affecting other views
Pranam Lashkari, Maya Stephens, Gökay Şatır, Rashesh Padia and Mohit Marathe (Collabora) worked on LOKit used by Collabora Online. Maya also fixed an issue with Ctrl+clicking hyperlinked objects
Miklós Vajna (Collabora) expanded Writer Markdown export support, worked on change tracking of formatting, continued improving the handling of tracked changes that depend on each other and fixed bullet list style going missing with PPTX export
Xisco Faulí (TDF) implemented right-to-left text direction and bidirectional text support in SVG import, added venv to the internal Python, fixed crashes, added several new automated tests, upgraded many dependencies and did many code cleanups and optimisations
Michael Stahl (Collabora) improved the DOCX compatibility of floating tables, helped Miklós with interdependent change tracking in Writer and fixed an issue with document compression
Mike Kaganski (Collabora) fixed Help for BASIC’s Str function, adapted Writer’s change tracking to DOCX’s inability to track the deletion of comments, made date handling code more robust, improved the Visual Studio IDE integration, made the handling of double variables in BASIC more robust, replaced dtoa library with fast_float for faster string-to-float parsing and fixed an RTF import issue with some paragraphs appearing outside of their frames. He also did many code cleanups and optimisations
Caolán McNamara (Collabora) fixed many issues found by static analysers and did code cleanups and optimisations
Stephan Bergmann (Collabora) worked on the WASM build. He also adapted the code to compiler changes and did code cleanups
Noel Grandin (Collabora) fixed an (unreleased) issue with image fills disappearing at lower zoom levels, improved the performance of spreadsheets with thousands of shapes, improved the performance of 3D charts, fixed a performance issue with importing SVGs with small scaling, improved the performance of Calc’s Remove Duplicates, implemented Skia native rendering of bitmap tiling to improve the performance of filled polygons and fixed an issue with Insert Special Character dialog not being available with mergedlibs builds (Windows releases). He also did many code cleanups and optimisations, especially in the area of transparency handling
Justin Luth (Collabora) fixed an issue with the alignment setting in Page Number Wizard, fixed localised accelerator shortcut conflicts, fixed many issues with page styles, page breaks and spell checking, improved the Bullets and Numbering dialog by showing the currently …

Monday
20 October, 2025

[es] Blog de LibreOffice Hispano: El Congreso Latinoamericano 2025 y la construcción de nuevos caminos colaborativos

@ 12:33 UTC

por Gustavo Pacheco

Un informe sobre las actividades de la sexta edición del Congreso Latinoamericano de LibreOffice [1], celebrado en La Habana, Cuba, del 6 al 9 de octubre de 2025.

Con un modelo de organización completamente diferente al de …

Thursday
16 October, 2025

[en] LibreOffice Dev Blog: enum class instead of unscoped enum – EasyHack

@ 14:05 UTC

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.

Rationale

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:

593f08303 convert enum _ImplINetRFC822MessageHeaderState to enum class

You can read more about that in:

Why is enum class considered safer to use than plain enum?

Finding Instances

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.

Examples Commits

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:

9072c5c855 convert SbxFlagsBits to scoped enum

Implementation

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 …

Tuesday
07 October, 2025

[en] Miklos Vajna: Markdown import/export in Writer

@ 06:13 UTC

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.

Motivation¶

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.

Results so far¶

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:

How is this implemented?¶

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:

Want to start …

Thursday
18 September, 2025

[en] LibreOffice Dev Blog: Debugging tips for LibreOffice

@ 14:11 UTC

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

Choose the Right Debug 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.

Debugging Tools

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:

TDF Wiki: Development/IDE

Make sure that you can build and debug a simple program before trying to build and debug LibreOffice.

Environment Variables

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:

TDF Wiki: Development/Environment variables

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

Pretty Printers

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.

Dumping Data

Sometimes when you debug a LibreOffice application, it is easier to …

Tuesday
16 September, 2025

[en] LibreOffice QA Blog: QA/Dev Report: August 2025

@ 09:42 UTC

General Activities

LibreOffice 25.8.0 and LibreOffice 25.8.1 were announced on August 20 and August 29 respectively
Olivier Hallot (TDF) updated help for the option to load printer settings with document, sorting blocks of cells in Calc, hyphenation, statistical functions, number of lines in charts, exponentiation operator in Calc, remote files, Edit menu in Calc, object rotation, Math options and MATCH function in Calc
Celia Palacios added help for the new Intersect() method in ScriptForge
Gábor Kelemen (Collabora) did many code cleanups
Tomaž Vajngerl (Collabora) did many code cleanups and added OOXML test documents for text fitting / scaling
Pranam Lashkari and Marco Cecchetti (Collabora) worked on LOKit used by Collabora Online. Marco also made it so hovering with the mouse over Chart data range colour palette entries in the Sidebar shows a live preview in the active chart
Miklós Vajna (Collabora) added list and inline code block support for Markdown export and continued improving the handling of tracked changes that depend on each other
Xisco Faulí (TDF) fixed crashes, added over a dozen new automated tests, upgraded many dependencies and did many code cleanups and optimisations
Michael Stahl (Collabora) made it so pasted anchored objects are no longer selected by default while adding an expert configuration option for the behaviour, added overline support to XHTML export and worked around a dbus bug affecting the build process on some Linux systems
Mike Kaganski (Collabora) fixed an issue with embedded fonts getting dropped from opened files in certain scenarios on Windows, made it so the user can choose to either discard license-restricted embedded fonts in an opened document or switch to read-only mode, improved PPTX compatibility with trailing empty lines in automatically shrinking text boxes, fixed long links getting truncated when exporting to XLSX, fixed issues with inserting hyperlinks in Calc via the API, made Calc text insertion API methods more robust, fixed inserting PDFs into spreadsheets, fixed a string handling issue in Basic’s Format function, fixed a VBA macro issue with dates and fixed processing of escaped backslashes in RTF files. He also did many code cleanups and optimisations
Caolán McNamara (Collabora) fixed many issues found by static analysers and did code cleanups and optimisations
Stephan Bergmann (Collabora) worked on the WASM build. He also adapted the code to compiler changes and did code cleanups
Noel Grandin (Collabora) improved the scrolling speed in Writer documents with lots of comments. He also did many code cleanups and optimisations, especially in the area of transparency handling
Justin Luth (Collabora) improved DOCX compatibility with margins of aligned floating objects, fixed right/left only page breaks going missing with DOC/DOCX export, fixed a DOCX indentation issue, fixed column breaks going missing in certain DOCX files, fixed an issue with numbered lists created by AutoCorrect, made it so justified text with section breaks in saved DOC files no longer triggers an MS Word bug and fixed numbering or bullets getting lost when applying a paragraph style
Michael Weghorn …

Monday
15 September, 2025

[en] Mike Kaganski: A fairy tale about poor UX enforcing vendor lock-in

@ 08:25 UTC

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 …

Thursday
11 September, 2025

[en] LibreOffice Dev Blog: Using C++ STL functions instead of loops – EasyHack

@ 14:24 UTC

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.

Checking Conditions

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:

153109 – Use all_of, any_of or none_of from STD instead of looping to check a condition over a range

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.

Conditional Copying, Removing and Finding

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.

153294 – Use copy_if, find_if or remove_if to simplify loops

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);

Final Words

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:

TDF Wiki – EasyHacks

Tuesday
09 September, 2025

[en] Miklos Vajna: Interdependent tracked changes improvements in Writer, part 3

@ 06:23 UTC

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.

Motivation¶

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.

Results so far¶

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:

Rejecting that format redline resulted in just the defaults, i.e. no character style and 12pt font size:

But now we track the old character style & direct format:

This required changes in the DOCX import, ODF import and ODF export, too.

How is this implemented?¶

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:

Want to start using this?¶

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).

Monday
01 September, 2025

[sl] Slovenski LibreOffice: V zaledju LibreOffice 25.8

@ 15:00 UTC

LibreOffice 25.8: strateška dobrina za vlade in podjetja, usmerjena v digitalno suverenost in zasebnost

Pregled

V času, ko geopolitične napetosti, zakoni o lokalizaciji podatkov in tveganja v zvezi s skladnostjo spreminjajo IT-okolje, se LibreOffice 25.8 (izšel je konec avgusta 2025) izkazuje kot strateška izbira. Gre za popolnoma odprtokodni, krajevno delujoč pisarniški paket, zasnovan za organizacije, ki potrebujejo popoln nadzor nad svojo programsko opremo, podatki in infrastrukturo.

Ta različica neposredno temelji na prednostnih nalogah, ki so jih izrazile javne uprave in velika podjetja po vsem svetu: zaščita podatkov uporabnikov, zmanjšanje odvisnosti od tujih dobaviteljev in krepitev digitalne avtonomije.

Zakaj je digitalna suverenost pomembna?

Za vlade in podjetja digitalna suverenost ni le filozofija. Gre za:

nacionalno varnost: zmanjšanje izpostavljenosti ekstrateritorialnemu nadzoru in varnostnim luknjam v programski opremi;
skladnost z zakonodajo: izpolnjevanje zakonskih zahtev, kot so GDPR, nacionalni zakoni o javnih naročilih in predpisi o lokalizaciji IT;
neodvisnost od dobaviteljev: izogibanje prisilnim migracijam, agresivnim modelom licenciranja ali nepredvidljivim cenam dobaviteljev lastniške opreme;
strateško odpornost: ohranjanje delovanja sistemov, ki so ključni za poslovanje, brez odvisnosti od oblaka.

LibreOffice 25.8 je bil razvit posebej za te namene.

Ključne prednosti LibreOffice 25.8 za ustanove

Arhitektura, ki daje prednost zasebnosti

Brez telemetrije: brez zbiranja podatkov v ozadju. LibreOffice je popolnoma transparenten in deluje neopazno.
Popolna zmogljivost brez internetne povezave: vse funkcije delujejo brez internetne povezave, kar je idealno za varna, izolirana ali kritična okolja.
Šifriranje OpenPGP: dokumente je mogoče šifrirati s ključi, ki jih upravlja uporabnik, kar zagotavlja skladnost z notranjimi varnostnimi politikami.

Odprti standardi in medsebojna povezljivost

Domorodna podpora za odprti zapis dokumentov (ODF), standard ISO, ki zagotavlja dolgoročen dostop in odpravlja lastniško vezanost.
Izboljšana združljivost z zapisi Microsoft Office/365 (.docx, .xlsx, .pptx) in zapisi OpenOffice (.doc, .xls, .ppt).

Prilagodljiva namestitev in integracija

Na voljo je za Windows, Linux in macOS: podpira heterogena IT-okolja.
Brezhibna integracija z Nextcloud, ownCloud in samostojnimi platformami za sodelovanje.
Skalabilen od ene same varne delovne postaje do celovitih namestitev v podjetju s centralizirano konfiguracijo in izvajanjem politik.

Strateške prednosti za javni in podjetniški IT

Nadzor stroškov: brez licenčnin. LibreOffice lahko zmanjša IT-stroške in je hkrati skladen z javnimi naročili, ki zahtevajo odprte standarde in pošteno konkurenco.
Revizijska sledljivost: popolnoma odprtokoden. Vsaka vrstica kode je vidna in preverljiva, kar podpira revizijske zahteve in zmanjšuje tveganja v dobavni verigi.
Lokalna opolnomočenost: spodbuja nacionalne in regionalne IT-ekosisteme z omogočanjem pogodb za lokalno podporo, prilagajanjem in strokovnimi storitvami, kar spodbuja domači tehnološki sektor.

Uporaba v praksi

Vlade in velike institucije po Evropi, Latinski Ameriki in Aziji so LibreOffice sprejele kot del pobud za digitalno suverenost. Vladni organi v Nemčiji, na Danskem in v Franciji ter nacionalna ministrstva v Italiji in Braziliji so se obrnili k LibreOffice, da bi ponovno prevzeli nadzor nad svojo digitalno infrastrukturo. LibreOffice podpira The Document Foundation, nevtralna, neprofitna organizacija z globalno …

Thursday
28 August, 2025

[en] LibreOffice Dev Blog: Unit conversion in LibreOffice code – EasyHack

@ 14:06 UTC

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:

static 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)

Handling Overflows

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)
{
...
}

Code Pointers

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

Final Words

The task described here is filed as tdf#168226:

Use o3tl::convert() for unit conversion instead of custom formula

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 …

Wednesday
20 August, 2025

[sl] Slovenski LibreOffice: LibreOffice 25.8: pametnejši, hitrejši in zanesljivejši

@ 21:01 UTC

Najboljši odprto-kodni pisarniški paket se še naprej razvija, hkrati pa ohranja svoj poudarek na zasebnosti in digitalni suverenosti

Berlin, 20. avgust 2025 – TDF (The Document Foundation) objavlja izid izdaje LibreOffice 25.8. Ta najnovejša različica brezplačnega odprto-kodnega pisarniškega paketa, ki je vodilni na trgu, se še naprej osredotoča na digitalno suverenost in zaščito zasebnosti Posameznikom, organizacijam in vladam ponuja popoln nadzor nad njihovimi podatki in najobsežnejša orodja za produktivnost.

V globalnem kontekstu naraščajoče zaskrbljenosti glede zasebnosti podatkov, zaklepanja v oblaku in kapitalizma nadzorovanja ravno LibreOffice 25.8 ponuja konkretne rešitve.

Odprta koda: Izvorna koda je na voljo za pregled in je popolnoma brez lastniških tehnoloških omejitev.

Zasebnost in nadzor: LibreOffice ne zbira osebnih podatkov, metrik uporabe ali diagnostičnih informacij in je v skladu s predpisi o varstvu podatkov, ki jih zahtevajo implementacije javne uprave (GDPR).

Krajevno izvajanje: vse funkcije se izvajajo krajevno na uporabnikovem računalniku, brez potrebe po internetni ali oblačni povezavi.

Sodelovanje ob lastnem gostovanju: integracija s krajevnimi rešitvami v oblaku, kot je Nextcloud, omogoča ekipam, da sodelujejo, ne da bi delile svoje informacije z velikimi tehnološkimi podjetji.

LibreOffice 25.8: nove zmogljivosti in funkcije

Uporabniški vmesnik: pogovorno okno Dobrodošli/Novosti zdaj ponuja dostop do izbirnika uporabniškega vmesnika in možnosti videza, kar novim uporabnikom omogoča, da izkoristijo prilagodljiv uporabniški vmesnik LibreOffice in prilagodijo videz in uporabnost glede na svoje želje.

Zmogljivost: vse je hitrejše, od zagona do pomikanja po velikih dokumentih – z znatnim povečanjem hitrosti na manj zmogljivih računalnikih.

Glede na primerjalne preizkuse Writer in Calc odpreta datoteke do 30 % hitreje.
Optimizirano upravljanje pomnilnika omogoča nemoteno delovanje na virtualnih namizjih in tankih odjemalcih.

Boljša medopravilnost z datotekami Microsoft Office, z natančnejšo obdelavo datotek DOCX, XLSX in PPTX ter manj težav z oblikovanjem, zahvaljujoč spremembam, kot so:

popolna prenova deljenja besed in razmika;
upravljanje pisav v programu Impress, ki je združljivo z datotekami PowerPoint;
dodane nove funkcije v Calc: CHOOSECOLS, CHOOSEROWS, DROP, EXPAND, HSTACK, TAKE, TEXTAFTER, TEXTBEFORE, TEXTSPLIT, TOCOL, TOROW, VSTACK, WRAPCOLS in WRAPROWS.

Seveda ponuja tudi druge pomembne nove funkcije, kot je možnost izvoza v zapisu PDF 2.0 in več novih storitev knjižnice ScriptForge. Seznam vseh novosti se nahaja tukaj: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleaseNotes/25.8/sl

Kar zadeva spremembe podpore za operacijske sisteme, LibreOffice 25.8 ne bo več deloval v sistemih Windows 7, 8/8.1 ali (32-bitnih) različicah x86. To je tudi zadnja različica, ki jo lahko izvajate na macOS 10.15.

LibreOffice 25.8 za poslovno rabo

Organizacija TDF sodeluje z globalno mrežo certificiranih partnerjev, ki nudijo podporo in vzdrževanje za poslovno rabo v podjetjih, prilagojene funkcije in integracije ter pomoč pri migraciji in usposabljanju uporabnikov. Celoten seznam partnerjev najdete tukaj: https://sl.libreoffice.org/po-pomoc/profesionalna-podpora/

Kam se umešča LibreOffice 25.8?

LibreOffice 25.8 je popolnoma brezplačen …

Friday
15 August, 2025

[en] Miklos Vajna: Multi-page floating tables in Writer: keep together or not

@ 06:14 UTC

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.

Motivation¶

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.

Results so far¶

Here is how the tdf#167222 bugdoc looks like now in Writer:

And here is how it used to look like:

And here is the reference rendering:

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.

How is this implemented?¶

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:

Want to start using this?¶

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).

Monday
11 August, 2025

[en] LibreOffice QA Blog: QA/Dev Report: July 2025

@ 17:04 UTC

General Activities

LibreOffice 25.2.5 was announced on July 17
Olivier Hallot (TDF) updated help for CSV import, explained Property Mapping in help for Charts and improved help for Calc’s FILTERXML function and AutoFilter
Gábor Kelemen (Collabora) did many code cleanups
Tomaž Vajngerl (Collabora) made internal hyperlinks in a table of contents accessible when exported to PDF/UA
Pranam Lashkari, Szymon Kłos and Hubert Figuière (Collabora) worked on LOKit used by Collabora Online
Parth Raiyani (Collabora) did reorganisations in some dialogs

Miklós Vajna (Collabora) polished the support for floating tables in Writer, fixed some crashes and continued improving the handling of tracked changes that depend on each other
Xisco Faulí (TDF) added Albanian and Moldovan locale, fixed short weekdays in Romanian locale, improved the translation checker script, added some new automated tests, upgraded many dependencies and did many code cleanups and optimisations
Michael Stahl (Collabora) fixed an issue with expansion of list level numbering formats with repeated levels and fixed a column width issue in RTF tables
Mike Kaganski (Collabora) implemented Markdown export, fixed not being able to apply colour to Chart walls via Sidebar, fixed an issue with paragraph numbering in RTF files, helped Miklós with floating table polishing, fixed an issue with date conversion in Base, made URL handling more robust in Extension updating code, fixed and issue with spacing in lists in RTF files, fixed RTF export issues causing loss of bullet fonts and “No character border” explicit formatting and fixed some crashes. He also did many code cleanups and optimisations
Caolán McNamara (Collabora) fixed many issues found by static analysers and did code cleanups and optimisations
Stephan Bergmann (Collabora) worked on the WASM build. He also adapted the code to compiler changes and did code cleanups
Noel Grandin (Collabora) made Skia rendering backend mandatory on Windows and greatly improved the import time of CSV data with trailing newline characters. He also did many code cleanups and optimisations, especially in the area of transparency handling
Justin Luth (Collabora) made it so failed command line operations return exit status 1, allowing for automated bisecting of command line issues among other things, fixed an issue with spellchecking and the option “Check uppercase words” and fixed a style continuity issue with page breaks in DOCX files
Michael Weghorn (TDF) continued cleaning up and reorganising accessibility-related code, made the orientation radio buttons in Envelope dialog accessible, fixed an issue with unwanted focus accessibility events being fired in Borders tab page of Writer’s Paragraph dialog, made the border preset selection be clearly indicated when focused, implemented support for native colour pickers in GTK and Qt UIs and did cleanups and reorganisations in Android, vcl and report design code. He also worked on using native widgets in Qt UIs
Balázs Varga (Collabora) implemented support for Microsoft Media Foundation APIs on Windows for playback of common codecs, fixed Calc’s MATCH function returning an incorrect result with inline arrays and fixed an issue with …

Tuesday
29 July, 2025

[en] LibreOffice QA Blog: LibreOffice 25.8 RC2 is available for testing

@ 11:55 UTC

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!!!

…

Friday
25 July, 2025

[en] Mike Kaganski: Microsoft, anybody home?

@ 06:39 UTC

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 …

Thursday
10 July, 2025

[en] LibreOffice QA Blog: LibreOffice 25.8 RC1 is available for testing

@ 11:00 UTC

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!!

…

Tuesday
08 July, 2025

[en] Miklos Vajna: Interdependent tracked changes improvements in Writer, part 2

@ 06:43 UTC

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.

Motivation¶

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.

Results so far¶

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:

And you selected BBB to mark those characters as bold, we just updated the existing insert redline to be bold:

But now we track a format change on top of the insert 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:

How is this implemented?¶

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:

Want to start using this?¶

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).

Monday
07 July, 2025

[en] LibreOffice QA Blog: QA/Dev Report: June 2025

@ 11:33 UTC

General Activities

LibreOffice 25.2.4 was announced on June 6
Olivier Hallot (TDF) added help for compact layout Pivot Tables, Writer table formula MOD and improved the help for Writer’s Send menu commands, font colour, text attributes for drawing objects, Calc shortcut keys, Calc’s LOOKUP function, Of-Pie charts and file conversion filters
Pierre F. added help for Writer table formula INT
Gábor Kelemen (Collabora) simplified code for VCL settings and did many other code cleanups
Tomaž Vajngerl (Collabora) continued polishing support for embedded fonts in PowerPoint files
Marco Cecchetti (Collabora) worked on LOKit used by Collabora Online
Jaume Pujantell (Collabora) improved the import of ref fields in DOCX files
Parth Raiyani (Collabora) makde it so the Layouts panel in Impress Sidebar now uses a native IconView widget instead of the ValueSet widget
Miklós Vajna (Collabora) fixed a Writer list indent removal issue, implemented RTF export of section breaks right sections, fixed an issue with images inside shapes being sized incorrectly in RTF files and continued improving the handling of tracked changes that depend on each other
Xisco Faulí (TDF) implemented Writer table formula MOD, added support for transparent fill colour in SVGs, removed the Euro converter wizard, added several new automated tests, upgraded many dependencies and did many code cleanups and optimisations
Michael Stahl (Collabora) continued working on multi-user editing based on a conflict-free replicated data type (CRDT) and improved the stability of handling Writer comments within the Navigator
Mike Kaganski (Collabora) fixed invisible tree view expansion triangles in Python script organizer, fixed an issue with storing selected encodings in the Text Import dialog, fixed a document read error, fixed an issue with accessing VBScript objects in macros, made menu command code more robust, fixed display of Cyrillic text in RTF files, fixed issues with pasting shapes between LibreOffice applications, fixed Manage Changes dialog not enabling Accept / Reject buttons initially, improved the display of Calc’s Number format dialog in the case of a selection containing different number locales, fixed an RTF table width issue, made bracketing of selected text more robust, fixed a Skia/Vulkan rendering issue affecting line numbers in Basic IDE, fixed an issue with Basic IIf function when used with array indexes, reduced console message noise when running LibreOffice from the command line and fixed several crashes. He also did many code cleanups and optimisations
Caolán McNamara (Collabora) helped Heiko with vertical tabs, fixed crashes and many issues found by static analysers and did code cleanups and optimisations
Stephan Bergmann (Collabora) worked on the WASM build
László Németh added an indicator for justified lines with overly large word spacing

Noel Grandin (Collabora) improved rendering speed of transparent shape fills dramatically, fixed a Windows GDI backend resource use issue seen in documents with lots of styles when the style preview is visible, made Skia rendering backend mandatory on macOS and improved the performance of style handling in Calc. He also did many code cleanups and optimisations
Justin Luth (Collabora …

Friday
13 June, 2025

[en] LibreOffice QA Blog: LibreOffice 25.8 Beta1 is available for testing

@ 15:47 UTC

LibreOffice 25.8 will be released as final at the end of August, 2025 ( Check the Release Plan ) being LibreOffice 25.8 Beta1 the second pre-release since the development of version 25.8 started at the beginning of December, 2024. Since the previous release, LibreOffice 25.8 Alpha1, 782 commits have been submitted to the code repository and 154 issues got fixed. Check the release notes to find the new features included in this version of LibreOffice.

LibreOffice 25.8 Beta1 can be downloaded for Linux, macOS and Windows, and it can be installed alongside the standard version.

In case you find any problem in this pre-release, please report it in Bugzilla ( You just need a legit email account in order to create a new account ).

For help, you can contact the QA Team directly in the QA IRC channel or via Matrix.

LibreOffice is a volunteer-driven community project, so please help us to test – we appreciate it!

Happy testing!!

…

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Tuesday04 November, 2025

[en] Miklos Vajna: Interdependent tracked changes improvements in Writer, part 4: direct accept/reject

@ 07:11 UTC

Motivation¶

Results so far¶

How is this implemented?¶

Want to start using this?¶

Saturday01 November, 2025

[es] Blog de LibreOffice Hispano: ¡Haz algo increíble! Únete al Mes de LibreOffice, noviembre de 2025

@ 23:19 UTC

[en] Official TDF Blog: Do something awesome! Join the Month of LibreOffice, November 2025

@ 13:56 UTC

How to take part

So let’s get going! We’ll be posting regular updates on this blog and our Mastodon, Bluesky and X (Twitter) accounts over the next four weeks – stay tuned…

Friday31 October, 2025

[es] Blog de LibreOffice Hispano: Seguridad del formato ODF: cifrado, firmas y gestión de metadatos

@ 18:13 UTC

[en] Official TDF Blog: ODF format security: encryption, signatures and metadata management

@ 10:49 UTC

[en] Official TDF Blog: LibreOffice project and community recap: October 2025

@ 08:55 UTC

Keep in touch – follow us …

Thursday30 October, 2025

[en] Official TDF Blog: The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 25.2.7

@ 12:29 UTC

Wednesday29 October, 2025

[en] Marius Popa Adrian: A modern C++ wrapper for the Firebird database API.

@ 15:15 UTC

Friday24 October, 2025

[es] Blog de LibreOffice Hispano: Haz que tus archivos ODF sean accesibles: una guía sencilla para todos

@ 19:24 UTC

Wednesday22 October, 2025

[en] LibreOffice Dev Blog: enumarray for better data arrays – EasyHack

@ 19:30 UTC

Using Symbolic Links

Using enumarray

Final Notes

Tuesday21 October, 2025

[en] LibreOffice QA Blog: QA/Dev Report: September 2025

@ 11:20 UTC

General Activities

Monday20 October, 2025

[es] Blog de LibreOffice Hispano: El Congreso Latinoamericano 2025 y la construcción de nuevos caminos colaborativos

@ 12:33 UTC

Thursday16 October, 2025

[en] LibreOffice Dev Blog: enum class instead of unscoped enum – EasyHack

@ 14:05 UTC

Rationale

Finding Instances

Examples Commits

Implementation

Tuesday07 October, 2025

[en] Miklos Vajna: Markdown import/export in Writer

@ 06:13 UTC

Motivation¶

Results so far¶

How is this implemented?¶

Want to start …

Thursday18 September, 2025

[en] LibreOffice Dev Blog: Debugging tips for LibreOffice

@ 14:11 UTC

Choose the Right Debug Platform

Debugging Tools

Environment Variables

Pretty Printers

Dumping Data

Tuesday16 September, 2025

[en] LibreOffice QA Blog: QA/Dev Report: August 2025

@ 09:42 UTC

General Activities

Monday15 September, 2025

[en] Mike Kaganski: A fairy tale about poor UX enforcing vendor lock-in

@ 08:25 UTC

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