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Author: Mike Saunders

LibreOffice: The Klingons and Interslavs are already here

We happily report that Klingons have – at this point – not taken over control of the LibreOffice bug-tracker.

While Klingon language support still ranks somewhat low among issues thought not to be essential, the federation that is LibreOffice 7.3 will also bring Interslavic support to the mix when released come early February.

Since you were wondering, Interslavic is an artificial language meant to operate in the cross-section of Slavic interlingualism.

Targ-herders everywhere are reportedly mildly pleased. The synergy in KSL (Klingon as second language) regions is a potato harvest that we can all appreciate.

Undeterred by the confines of a monogalactic community of translators, LibreOffice numbers are growing. Hundreds of millions or earthlings alone now have powerful tools honed in their native languages.

Together we bring free and open source software to the Nekrit Expanse. We can go into space, and beyond. Use, inspect, improve and share freely — with all. Full tut ahead.

Thanks, Qapla’ and hvala!

Update: check out the Interslavic Spellchecker extension

And now, a bit more seriously…

Yes, initial language support for Klingon and Interslavic is coming to LibreOffice. But before you ask: “Why don’t you focus on X or Y instead?” Remember that LibreOffice is a volunteer-driven, community open source project. Individual developers (and companies in the ecosystem) work on what’s important for them, and not to the detriment of anything else. If someone wants to help with a Klingon translation, that doesn’t mean others in the project stop working on other important tasks!

And especially: even if Klingon and Interslavic support sounds like a novelty, it shows how versatile free and open source software is. As mentioned, LibreOffice is available in over 100 languages, and we’d like to expand that even further. The more languages the better, especially if we can help to boost IT skills in places which don’t otherwise have software in their native languages!

Join our localisation projects, and give us a hand!

LibreOffice 7.2.5 is now available

Berlin, January 6, 2022 – The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 7.2.5 Community, the fifth minor release of the LibreOffice 7.2 family, which is available on the download page.

This version includes 90 bug fixes and improvements to document compatibility. The changelogs provide details of the fixes: changes in RC1 and changes in RC2.

For enterprise-class deployments, TDF strongly recommends the LibreOffice Enterprise family of applications from ecosystem partners, with long-term support options, professional assistance, custom features and Service Level Agreements: LibreOffice in Business.

LibreOffice Community and the LibreOffice Enterprise family of products are based on the LibreOffice Technology platform, the result of years of development efforts with the objective of providing a state of the art office suite, not only for the desktop but also for mobile and the cloud.

LibreOffice Technology-based products for Android and iOS are listed on this page, while products for App Stores and ChromeOS are listed here.

Get help, and support us

Individual users are assisted by a global community of volunteers, via our community help pages. On the website and the wiki there are guides, manuals, tutorials and HowTos. Donations help us to make all of these resources available.

LibreOffice users are invited to join the community at Ask LibreOffice, where they can get and provide user-to-user support. People willing to contribute their time and professional skills to the project can visit the dedicated website at What Can I Do For LibreOffice.

LibreOffice users, free software advocates and community members can provide financial support to The Document Foundation with a donation via PayPal, credit card, bank transfer, cryptocurrencies and other methods on this page.

LibreOffice 7.2.5 is built with document conversion libraries from the Document Liberation Project.

Download LibreOffice 7.2.5

LibreOffice at FOSDEM 2022 – February 5-6

FOSDEM is a non-commercial, volunteer-organized European event centered on free and open-source software development – and one of the biggest such events of its kind. Normally it takes place in Brussels, but due to the pandemic, it’ll be online this year.

And the LibreOffice community will be there! We’ll have 25 talks about the technology behind the suite, open standards, and other topics.

See a full list of the talks here, and join us!

LibreOffice project and community recap: December 2021

Happy new year, everyone! Here’s our summary of updates, events and activities in the LibreOffice project in the last four weeks of 2021 – click the links to learn more…

  • We started December by announcing the LibreOffice Technology DevRoom Call for Papers for FOSDEM. This year, FOSDEM will take place online once again, and the LibreOffice community will be present with talks and discussions. Join us!

  • In December, TDF announced two updates for LibreOffice, for the 7.2 and 7.1 branches. These fix an important security issue and all users are recommended to upgrade.
  • Meanwhile, the Coalition for Competitive Digital Markets, a group of more than 50 technology companies from 16 different European countries, sent an open letter to members of the European Parliament to raise awareness about interoperability and to impose stricter rules on big companies – the so-called ‘big tech’ companies – that act as gatekeepers and prevent transparency and openness in digital markets.

  • In November, we ran a Month of LibreOffice, crediting contributions all across the project. And in December, we announced the winners – 324 people could claim sticker packs! And we had extra merchandise to give away as well…

  • We talked to Ravi Dwivedi from the Indian LibreOffice community. He’s helping to spread the word about free software in India, and has interesting insights into free software adoption in his country.

  • The Document Foundation, the non-profit entity behind LibreOffice, recently had an election for its Board of Directors. Well, the preliminary results came in – click the link to see the lists of full and deputy members.
  • ODF is the OpenDocument Format, the native format used by LibreOffice (and supported by many other apps too). Then there’s the ODF Toolkit, a set of Java modules that allow programmatic creation, scanning and manipulation of ODF files. Svante Schubert gave us some updates.

  • Finally, we wished everyone a good start to 2022 – here’s hoping that we’ll be able to meet more in-person this year, and celebrate good times together.

Keep in touch – follow us on Twitter, Facebook and Mastodon. Like what we do? Support our community with a donation – or join us and help to make LibreOffice even better!

Two ODF Toolkit releases in a row!

ODF is the Open Document Format, the native format used by LibreOffice (and supported by many other apps too). Then there’s the ODF Toolkit, a set of Java modules that allow programmatic creation, scanning and manipulation of ODF files. Svante Schubert writes with some updates:

We are happy to announce that there have been recently two ODF Toolkit releases in a row. These were our first releases at The Document Foundation (TDF), after the migration of the project to TDF in 2019:

  • With the 0.9.0 release, we have our last JDK 8 release (due to a switch of the Java Doc Taglet API we are using). After this release, we dropped the so-called “Simple API” (which was once forked from our ODFDOM doc Java Package by IBM, but not merged back, leaving lots of duplicated code that was unable to embrace our new change API). And the XSLT Runner Ant plugin will be removed in a future release, as we are no longer using Ant but Maven (to avoid maintenance of untested functionality).
  • With the 0.10.0 release, we support the next JDK 11 LTS version and our new change API that was implemented by myself for Open-XChange’s web office OX Documents – thanks to them, especially Malte Timmermann and Rafael Laguna for keeping the Apache License 2. Unfortunately, OX forked before I started there and it took me several months – and some sponsorship from a PrototypeFund project – to merge manually every file and enable all tests again (which some OX colleagues had disabled as they took too long…). (Please check out the PrototypeFund: Any German taxpayer may apply with an open-source project/idea!).

I would like to thank also all those numerous folks assisting us to make this work – especially recently in pushing this forward!

Especially, I would like to congratulate Michael Stahl for officially becoming the co-maintainer of this project. Michael has been my long term colleague (from StarOffice Hamburg times) and helps me constantly drop procrastination and/or fix issues I am no longer capable to realize as I looked too long at them. In addition, Michael and I also serve as editors of the OASIS ODF TC. There at the ODF TC, we envision having a faster turn-around of ODF spec deliveries and making their information set more readable for downstream software as we are. Thanks to allotropia software GmbH, Michael’s employer, for providing him with the time for working on these tasks!

So what’s next? Obviously, it’s more than time to release an ODF Toolkit 1.0.0.

Personally, I would like to get the code generation right, but keep as much compatibility to prior releases as possible. Michael and my aim is to work from the end of January on this release (any helping hand is most welcome) 😊

There is also ODF 1.3, to be embraced by a release in the near future.

In February, I will likely have an online talk at FOSDEM, at the LibreOffice dev room about our project and what I intend to do next year.

In a nutshell, I was able to receive some NGI Search funding for this project to enable search in ODF documents.

Aside from the obvious search API – focusing on one higher-level based on user semantic and likely having also one lower-level based on XML, I would like to refactor my “spaghetti feature code” in the SAX parser that made the implementation of the changes hard to maintain. Sorry for that, not my first and likely not my last mistake – but I am learning! 🙂

We’re going to work out a more elaborate picture for the FOSDEM presentation.

Until then, have fun with the ODF Toolkit!

Record number of LibreOffice downloads

The chart says it all! Last week, we had a record number of downloads for LibreOffice in a single week. More and more people are discovering the free and open source office suite, the successor to OpenOffice, that respects users’ privacy and freedom.

Downloads have been growing steadily over time, and one week ago we released an important security update, so we recommend downloading it, if you’re using an older version.

Thanks to everyone in our wonderful worldwide community for all their help! It’s thanks to you that LibreOffice keeps going from strength to strength. Let’s keep spreading the word together 👍

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

The Role of ODF in the Era of Digital Identity and Authentication

Digital identity has become an integral part of everyday life. We use it to access work tools and sign documents…