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Author: Italo Vignoli

How TDF uses its tendering process to improve LibreOffice and share knowledge with the community

In 2017, The Document Foundation (TDF) launched four tenders aimed at improving LibreOffice in several strategic areas, where the tasks are beyond the capabilities of independent volunteer developers. Proposals from several companies have been carefully evaluated by the Foundation with the help of competent and independent volunteers. Development activity is going to start soon and we want to share some details with you upfront.

All proposals include sharing knowledge via blog posts and other documentation. The source code will be available in the public Git repository, while the development process will be discussed during public ESC calls and in our open mailing lists. This will make it easier for volunteer developers to further contribute to the source code and to implement additional features based on the tendered items.

Development results will be evaluated by TDF jointly with the volunteers who helped to assess the proposals.

These are the four tenders:

(1) Tender to Implement Accessibility Improvements
(https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2017/04/27/tender-accessibility/)

Hypra will develop a tool to find and flag new Glade widgets that are added without accessibility (a11y) markup, which will catch all the common cases and blacklist all the existing dialog and/or widgets without these. The goal is to avoid future a11y regressions.

TDF will invest € 18,000.00

(2) Tender to improve image handling in LibreOffice
(https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2017/05/02/tender-improve-image-handling-libreoffice-201705-01/)

Collabora will develop a mechanism, which will be propagated through filters and UNO APIs, to better manage (compressed) image streams out of document storage into an on-disk cache. This should avoid any chance of data loss, while improving image detail reading performance and storage

TDF will invest € 39,750.00.

(3) Tender to deprecate LibreOffice’s SVG filter in favor of SVGIO
(https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2017/05/03/tender-deprecate-libreoffices-svg-filter-favour-svgio-201705-02/)

CIB will remove the old SVG import filter code (used for importing documents) and switch all SVG handling to the SVGIO filter (used when inserting images into a file).

TDF will invest € 9,520.00.

(4) Tender to implement HSQLDB binary format import in LibreOffice
(https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2017/05/04/tender-implement-hsqldb-binary-format-import-libreoffice-201705-03/)

Collabora will develop a mechanism to import database files with high fidelity from the HSQLDB binary file format, which has been used inside many existing ODB files, by reading the Java serialization code, and writing a filter to import all data into LibreOffice Base. The objective is to remove the legacy Java/HSQLDB database and move to Firebird.

TDF will invest € 29,750.00.

Sunday Marketing #4

Document classification is one of LibreOffice 6.0 improved features. As the concept of classification is not well known outside enterprises and large organizations, to help marketing the feature we have produced this graphic to help community members with presentations. Of course, we have used LibreOffice Draw, and you are invited to localize the ODG file embedded into the attached Hybrid PDF file. The graphic complements the background, which provides additional information about classification.

Wednesday Community #3

FOSDEM 2018 is approaching. As usual, several members of the LibreOffice community will move to Brussels to gather for the largest meeting of free and open source advocates in Europe.

People attending FOSDEM 2018 can find LibreOffice representatives at LibreOffice booth in building K during Saturday and Sunday.

On Saturday, there will be several LibreOffice-related presentations at the Open Document Editors DevRoom.

Immediately after FOSDEM, on Monday and Tuesday, there will be a LibreOffice HackFest, with developers working at new features and community members meeting to discuss certification, marketing, QA, design, and other relevant topics.

The Document Liberation project announces five new or improved libraries to export EPUB3 files and import AbiWord, MS Publisher, PageMaker and QuarkXPress documents

Berlin, January 22, 2018 – The Document Liberation Project announces five new or improved libraries to export EPUB3 and import AbiWord, MS Publisher, PageMaker and QuarkXPress files. The libraries have been originally developed for the LibreOffice 6.0 major release, but can be used by any other software thanks to the OSI (Open Source Initiative) compliant license.

libe-book exports LibreOffice ODT files to EPUB3. At the moment it offers just basic features, but development is still undergoing and new features will be added before the next major release. The library can be downloaded from https://sourceforge.net/projects/libebook/. A description of the architecture and the features is available here: https://vmiklos.hu/blog/basic-epub3-export.html.

libabw imports AbiWord documents, and can be downloaded from http://dev-www.libreoffice.org/src/libabw/. The library home page is at https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/DLP/Libraries/libabw.

libmspub imports MS Publisher documents, and can be downloaded from http://dev-www.libreoffice.org/src/libmspub/. The library home page is at https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/DLP/Libraries/libmspub.

libpagemaker imports PageMaker 6/7 documents, and can be downloaded from http://dev-www.libreoffice.org/src/libpagemaker. The library home page is at https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/DLP/Libraries/libpagemaker.

libqxp imports QuarkXPress 3.1/4.1 documents and templates and can be downloaded from http://dev-www.libreoffice.org/src/libqxp/. The library home page is at https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/DLP/Libraries/libqxp.

The Document Liberation Project was created to empower individuals, organizations and governments to recover their data – hidden inside obfuscated proprietary file formats – and migrate them into perennially accessible standard file formats.

To return effective control over content to the real authors, the Document Liberation Project develops software libraries that can be used by applications to read data in proprietary formats. The libraries are currently used by Calligra, Inkscape and Scribus.

Sunday Marketing #3

Google Trends is a service which compares end user searches for specific terms, and as such is a useful marketing tool to get some insight on the awareness of LibreOffice in comparison with other applications. I have compared the five alternatives to the leading office suite during the last 12 months: LibreOffice is leading, followed – as expected – by OpenOffice and WPS Office. LibreOffice is also leading in term of geographical coverage.

Wednesday Community #2

The sun never sets on the LibreOffice community, as there are always active members in some countries. Unfortunately, only a minimal part of this global effort is reflected on this blog, which should feature all activities and achievements. In order to get to this objective, we warmly invite all native language communities around the world to send us a short synopsis and a couple of pictures – if available – every time they do something significant for LibreOffice: a talk at a conference, a booth at an exhibition, a meeting, a conference, a localization sprint, or any other event. The same for achievements such as LibreOffice adoptions by government bodies, central or local public administrations, or large enterprises. Just send an email to media@documentfoundation.org, and we will take care of writing the blog post (if necessary, we will translate the local language to English).

Press Releases

Announcement of LibreOffice 25.8.4

Berlin, 18 December 2025 – LibreOffice 25.8.4, the fourth minor update to the free office suite developed by volunteers for…

Open Document Format

Why open standards are extremely beneficial to end users

Whenever I talk to other technology users — including CTOs, CSOs and ICT managers, who in theory should have a…