Updates from the Document Liberation Project

We mostly focus on LibreOffice on this blog, but The Document Foundation also oversees the Document Liberation Project (DLP), which develops software libraries to import and export many different file formats. If you have some old documents or spreadsheets from legacy office software, for instance, the DLP can help you to access that data – giving control back to you.

Many well-known free and open source programs use DLP libraries, such as Inkscape, Scribus, Calligra and of course LibreOffice. A few days ago, there were some DLP updates, so here’s a quick summary:

libvisio 0.1.7

libvisio is a library that helps software to import documents from the Microsoft Visio diagramming and vector graphics application. It turns this:

Into this:

In libvisio 0.1.7, various conversion fixes were made, and a few memory leaks were plugged thanks to OSS-Fuzz. Check out the full release notes here.

libabw 0.1.3

Meanwhile, libabw was also updated. This is a library to import documents from AbiWord, a free software word processing tool. In libabw 0.1.3, a memory access error was fixed thanks to OSS-Fuzz, while expanding entities by the XML parser were disabled as well as a preventative measure.

Learn more and get involved!

The Document Liberation community is always looking for help: if you have old documents or files in legacy formats that you can’t open (or which don’t look right when opened in free software tools), let the project know! You can help the community to better understand file formats by submitting examples, and test new releases.

To learn more about DLP, check out this short video: