LibreOffice and Google Summer of Code 2025: The results
This year, LibreOffice was once again a mentoring organization in the Google Summer of Code (GSoC), a global program focused on bringing more developers into free and open source software development. Seven projects were finished successfully. Contributors and mentors enjoyed the time, and here we present some of the achievements, which should make their way into LibreOffice 26.2 in early February 2026!
You can experiment with the new features by using daily builds and report any problems in our bug tracker.
Import Markdown files into LibreOffice Writer by Ujjawal Kumar Chouhan
Mentors: Thorsten Behrens (Collabora), Ilmari Lauhakangas (TDF)
Requests to add support for the simple text formatting language known as Markdown to LibreOffice have been more and more frequent. These days Markdown is often encountered in forum posts, chat messages and readme files. In fact, the content of the website of The Document Foundation is written in Markdown.
Thanks to this project, LibreOffice now supports importing Markdown files and pasting Markdown content into Writer as well as pasting Markdown tables into Calc. The supported dialect is CommonMark with GitHub-style table syntax and the library used is MD4C.
Additionally, Collabora developers added support for exporting to Markdown from Writer.
Learn more about Markdown import in the final report.
New Dialog To Edit Table Styles by Karthik Godha
Mentors: Heiko Tietze (TDF), Rafael Lima
LibreOffice does not yet support proper styles for tables, but has a system for applying direct formatting to them. Before Karthik’s work, it was only possible to add new formatting templates, while now existing ones can be edited as well.
Learn more about the table styles project in the final report.
Python code auto-completion by Manish Bera
Mentors: Xisco Faulí, Hossein Nourikhah (TDF)
Power users are sure to love the improvements brought to Python support by this project. Now Python IDEs are able to provide auto-completion for LibreOffice UNO API methods and properties, flag type errors and display information about parameters and types.
Learn more about the Python auto-completion project in the final report.
BASIC IDE code auto-completion by Devansh Varshney
Mentors: Jonathan Clark, Hossein Nourikhah (TDF), Rafael Lima
BASIC macro developers are not forgotten: this project implemented an object browser, allowing the macro author to see all the available and used methods and properties, including the whole UNO API. A helpful view for details is shown, reducing the need to dig through the API documentation. After this foundational achievement, the next goal is to add context-aware auto-completion to the BASIC IDE editor.
Learn more about the BASIC auto-completion project in the final report.
Rust UNO Language Binding by Mohamed Ali Mohamed
Mentor: Stephan Bergmann (Collabora)
Rust is a popular type safe programming language, which can now be used to write LibreOffice extensions or do any kind of scripting and processing via the UNO API.
Learn more about the Rust binding in the final report.
Implement report builder in C++ by Adam Seskunas
Mentors: Michael Weghorn, Hossein Nourikhah (TDF)
The Report Builder produces Writer documents from Base files. While it might not be the most popular feature in LibreOffice, there have been increasing concerns about the maintainability of the current Java-based tool. The first group of people to celebrate Adam’s reimplementation will surely be Linux package maintainers, who had even started omitting the feature entirely.
Learn more about the C++ Report Builder in the final report.
Rework Impress slideshow to use DrawingLayer primitives by Shardul Vikram Singh
Mentors: Thorsten Behrens, Sarper Akdemir (Collabora)
This is important modernising work happening under the hood of Impress. The project mostly completed the rework on Linux, laying a foundation for rendering modernisation on other platforms. The code itself lives in a separate feature branch for now and will not be merged for LibreOffice 26.2.
Learn more about the slideshow rework in the final report.
Wrapping up
Many thanks to all contributors who spent their summer time improving LibreOffice. You are awesome! And special thanks also to the mentors who always put so much love and energy into these tasks. That’s what makes LibreOffice rock.
Now we are looking forward to next year’s GSoC. If you are interested, why not prepare early? Learn more at out wiki page where some ideas are listed.
Participating in GSoC is a great way to build your skills, and show future employers what you’re capable of!