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 a video from Document Freedom Day celebrations with the Nepalese LibreOffice community. Here it is:
Please confirm that you want to play a YouTube video. By accepting, you will be accessing content from YouTube, a service provided by an external third party.
Digital sovereignty is of vital importance for data freedom. If governments and organisations use proprietary or pseudo-standard formats, they limit the tools that citizens can use to access data.
So we’re happy to see that the IT Planning Council in Germany is committing to move to the Open Document Format – a fully standardised format (and the default used in LibreOffice). The German IT Planning Council is a 17-member committee consisting of representatives of Germany’s federal government and the state governments. They say:
Open formats and open interfaces are an important building block for the necessary transformation process of public administration in Germany on the path to greater digital sovereignty and innovation.
The IT Planning Council is committed to ensuring that open formats such as the Open Document Format (ODF) are increasingly used in public administration and become the standard for document exchange by 2027. It is commissioning the Standardization Board to implement this.
The LibreOffice Conference is the annual gathering of the community, our end-users, developers, and everyone interested in free office software. In 2024, it took place in Luxembourg
(This is part of The Document Foundation’s Annual Report for 2024 – we’ll post the full version here soon.)
This was our third in-person conference after the COVID pandemic, following on from the Milan conference in 2022 and Bucharest conference in 2023, but we also lived-streamed sessions so that participants could watch remotely (and ask questions in our chat channels too).
The conference took place from 10 – 12 October 2024 in Belval, Esch-sur-Alzette, which is around a 20 minute train ride from Luxembourg City. As public transport is free in the whole country, attendees staying in the city didn’t need to buy tickets to attend the event in Belval.
Conference Tracks and extra sessions
Opening sessions were given by Eliane Domingos (chairperson of the Board of Directors at TDF), Serge Linkels (Managing Director of the Digital Learning Hub and 42 Luxembourg), and Stéphanie Obertin (Luxembourg’s Minister for Digitalisation and Minister for Research and Higher Education).
Then there were presentations and talks were given across various “tracks”, or categories: LibreOffice Development; ODF and Interoperability; LibreOffice Design and Accessibility; and LibreOffice Marketing. There were highly technical talks focused on specific areas of LibreOffice and source code, along with more open discussions about community building and recent updates from The Document Foundation.
The conference also had some extra tracks to broaden its scope beyond just LibreOffice, and raise awareness about free and open source software (cybersecurity, EdTech and Open Source Program Office).
A workshop for new developers was held in parallel with the main tracks over the three days of the conference, and many different things around LibreOffice development were discussed, including: bug reporting and triaging; Git and Gerrit basics; building LibreOffice from its source code; and automation via scripting.
Sponsoring and merchandise
Partner sponsors were Collabora Productivity, Passbolt and SnT (University of Luxembourg), while venue sponsors were Digital Learning Hub and 42 Luxembourg. The Luxembourg Media & Digital Design Centre organised the EdTech track, and local supporters were Business Events Luxembourg, LU-CIX, LIST and Luxembourg House of Cybersecurity. Thanks to the sponsors, attendees could get merchandise at the event, including T-shirts with the conference logo.
Full programme and videos
Full details about the event are available on our main conference website. For a quick overview of all the talks, including links to PDF versions of the presentations, see the schedule. 63 videos – covering almost all of the talks are available as a playlist on our YouTube channel:
Please confirm that you want to play a YouTube video. By accepting, you will be accessing content from YouTube, a service provided by an external third party.
If you accept this notice, your choice will be saved and the page will refresh.
Conference in 2025
Planning is already underway for the LibreOffice Conference 2025, which will take place in Budapest from September 1 – 5, following a vote from TDF members. Stay tuned to this blog for more details soon…
In 2024, LibreOffice celebrated its fourteenth birthday. Two new major versions of the suite introduced a variety of new features, while minor releases helped to improve stability as well
(This is part of The Document Foundation’s Annual Report for 2024 – we’ll post the full version here soon.)
LibreOffice 24.2
On January 31, LibreOffice 24.2 was officially released after six months of work. Developers at The Document Foundation, Collabora, allotropia, CIB, Red Hat, NISZ and other companies and organisations – along with volunteers – worked on many new features.
For instance, there were many improvements to the tabbed “NotebookBar” user interface, while styles support was added for comments. A new search field was added to the Functions sidebar deck in Calc, while in terms of accessibility, several significant improvements to the handling of mouse positions and the presentation of dialogue boxes via the Accessibility APIs were made, allowing screen readers to present them correctly. And regarding security, the “Sace with Password” dialogue box now has a password strength meter, which uses zxcvbn-c to determine the password strength.
TDF’s marketing and localisation community produced and translated a video (below) which demonstrated many of the new features in LibreOffice 24.2. This was linked to in the announcement, and embedded into various web news websites that covered the release. The video is also available on PeerTube.
Please confirm that you want to play a YouTube video. By accepting, you will be accessing content from YouTube, a service provided by an external third party.
If you accept this notice, your choice will be saved and the page will refresh.
LibreOffice 24.8
Later in the year, on August 22, TDF released LibreOffice 24.8. Based on the LibreOffice Technology platform for personal productivity on desktop, mobile and cloud, it provided a large number of interoperability improvements with Microsoft’s proprietary file formats.
In terms of features, this release added many improvements to the Navigator in Writer, including ding cross-references by drag-and-drop items, deleting footnotes and endnotes, and indicating images with broken links. In Calc, the functions FILTER, LET, RANDARRAY, SEQUENCE, SORT, SORTBY, UNIQUE, XLOOKUP and XMATCH were added, along with chart types “Pie-of-Pie” and “Bar-of-Pie” which break down a slice of a pie as a pie or bar sub-chart respectively (this also enables import of such charts from OOXML files created with Microsoft Office/365).
Many other features were added as well, and there were a large number of compatibility improvements. As with the previous release, TDF staff worked with the marketing ad localisation communities to make a video (also on PeerTube) to demonstrate some of the new features.
Please confirm that you want to play a YouTube video. By accepting, you will be accessing content from YouTube, a service provided by an external third party.
The Document Foundation is the non-profit entity that coordinates the LibreOffice project and community. In 2024 we had with elections for the foundation’s Membership Committee, along with regular Advisory Board calls, and support for other projects and activities
(This is part of The Document Foundation’s Annual Report for 2024 – we’ll post the full version here soon.)
Election of new Membership Committee (MC)
The mission of the Membership Committee is to administer membership applications and renewals following the criteria defined in the Foundation’s Statutes. Members of the MC are directly elected by community members every two years, and serve for a two-year term. The Board of Directors consists of five members and three deputies.
On July 15, Eliane Domingos – chairperson in the Board of Directors at TDF – announced the election for the next MC, and asked for nominations and self-nominations. On August 27, she then announced that the nomination phase had ended, and that voting would run from 3 – 9 September. Around this time there were also three live “town-hall” Q+A meetings with the candidates, so that community members could ask questions and discuss the responses. We made video recordings from the second and third meetings, and here they are (also available on PeerTube here and here):
Please confirm that you want to play a YouTube video. By accepting, you will be accessing content from YouTube, a service provided by an external third party.
If you accept this notice, your choice will be saved and the page will refresh.
Please confirm that you want to play a YouTube video. By accepting, you will be accessing content from YouTube, a service provided by an external third party.
If you accept this notice, your choice will be saved and the page will refresh.
On September 12, Eliane announced the preliminary results, along with a “challenge” phase for people to check their votes and contest the results. And on September 27, TDF announced the final results, with full MC members being Gustavo Buzzatti Pacheco, Stéphane Guillou, Balázs Varga, Pranam Kumarbhai Lashkari and Jona Azizaj; and deputy members being Shinji Enoki, Andreas Mantke and Marco Marinello.
TDF would like to say thank you to all past and new members of the MC for their service to the community, and to all candidates for running. Congratulations to the newly elected MC members and their deputies.
Advisory Board members and meetings
The Document Foundation relies on its Advisory Board Members in order to receive advice and support. The Advisory Board’s primary function is to represent The Document Foundation’s supporters and to provide the Board of Directors with advice, guidance and proposals. Current members are Adfinis, allotropia software GmbH, Collabora, GNOME, CAGE Technologies Inc, City of Munich (Landeshaupstadt München), Open Source Business Alliance (OSBA), Software in the Public Interest (SPI), KDE e.V., and the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE).
Throughout the year, TDF had regular calls with representatives of the Advisory Board. Staff and Board members at TDF provided updates on the foundation, LibreOffice software and community, and described plans and activities for the future. Advisory Board members were invited to provide valuable feedback on TDF’s work, and various ideas and proposals were discussed during the calls. TDF would like to express its thanks to all of the members for their help and support.
New team member
In summer 2024, we welcomed Jonathan Clark to the TDF team as a new developer. Jonathan is initially working on improving LibreOffice’s writing script support, especially for RTL (right-to-left), CTL (complex text layout) and CJK (Chinese-Japanese-Korean) languages. This will help to make LibreOffice more accessible and usable for hundreds of millions of people around the globe.
When asked why he decided to apply for the position at TDF, Jonathan said:
I want to help people use open source software to work and create in their own language. There are other reasons, too: I’m a long-time user, interested in linguistics, and my background seemed like a good fit for the role. But the most important thing to me that I can believe in the mission.
Highlights of activities
Throughout the year, TDF supported – and provided information about – various milestones, campaigns and events, via this blog and our social media channels. For instance, in January we announced the ODF Toolkit 0.12.0 release. Big changes included a new ODF 1.3 mimetype “Text master template”, while the API for Text Selection was completely refactored. In addition, there were many fixes to improve reliability and security.
In early March, we announced that the new Board of Directors at TDF had started its term, while later in the month we celebrated Document Freedom Day, a yearly event which raises awareness of how open standards and open document formats provide us with the freedom to read and write as we wish.
Also in March, we wrote on our blog how the European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS) had found that the European Commission had breached several provisions of Regulation (EU) 2018/1725, the EU data protection law for EU institutions, in its use of Microsoft 365, including those relating to the transfer of personal data outside the EU and the European Economic Area (EEA). The EDPS is imposing corrective measures on the Commission.
On a related topic, in September we supported a campaign to bring back Free Software funding, asking people to give their feedback to the European Commission, following a cut in important funds for FOSS.
