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LibreOffice Online: a fresh start

2026-02-24

LibreOffice is a desktop application, but we get many requests for a web-based version of the suite that users can deploy on their own infrastructure. Several years ago, project members started to develop LibreOffice Online, but in 2022 the Board of Directors at The Document Foundation voted to freeze the project and put it in the “attic”, for reasons that have now been superseded.

Earlier this month, the current Board of Directors decided to revoke those votes to give new life to the project, as Eliane Domingos, chairperson, put it:

To start the process of freeing LibreOffice Online, and to start the journey that will lead to having an online version by the community and for the community.

Now the work begins. We plan to reopen the repository for LibreOffice Online at The Document Foundation for contributions, but provide warnings about the state of the repository until TDF’s team agrees that it’s safe and usable – while at the same time encourage the community to join in with code, technologies and other contributions that can be used to move forward. We will actively work with the community to identify how to foster LibreOffice Online, including its technological basis, QA and marketing.

Note that this doesn’t mean that TDF will host or provide enterprise support for LibreOffice Online – that’s beyond the scope of the foundation. For these things, users are strongly recommended to consult the commercial ecosystem around LibreOffice. But TDF wants to offer the technology for those who want to use, modify and share it.

We will post more soon about our plans, and ways to get involved. We look forward to a new future for LibreOffice Online!

ODF Toolkit Project Announces Release 0.13.0: Last Release Supporting JDK 11

2026-02-11

BERLIN, Germany — The ODF Toolkit community is proud to announce the official release of version 0.13.0. This release marks a significant transition point in the project’s history, representing the last release to support JDK 11, with the project pivoting toward modern Java long-term support (LTS) releases.

Release Highlights: Stability and Modernisation

The 0.13.0 release provides a stable, high-performance foundation for programmatic manipulation of ODF 1.2 documents.

Final JDK 11 Support: This is the definitive release for users operating on Java 11 environments.
Broad Compatibility: Validated across the Java ecosystem on Windows 10, macOS (Apple Silicon M3), and Ubuntu 24.04 LTS.
Automated Deployment: GitHub release artefacts are now built automatically with Temurin JDK, ensuring a transparent, reproducible supply chain.

FOSDEM 2026: Setting the Stage for 1.0.0

Following the release, the project’s core developers met in person at FOSDEM in Brussels, using the opportunity to align on the project’s next major milestone. During the event, the team finalised the roadmap for the upcoming 1.0.0 Release Candidate. Discussions focused on resolving the remaining blocking issues in the toolkit’s code-generation engine, paving the way for a more robust and extensible architecture.

Immediate Future: JDK 17 and Apache Jena 5

The project has already moved its development baseline to JDK 17 for the upcoming version, 0.14.0.

Apache Jena 5.6.0: The shift to JDK 17 enables integration with the latest Apache Jena library, significantly enhancing the toolkit’s ability to handle document metadata and RDF.
Early Access: A 0.14.0-SNAPSHOT release is now available for developers who want to test these new features.

Expanding the Core Team

The project continues to grow its community of maintainers. Following discussions between Michael Stahl, Oliver Rau, and Svante Schubert, Axel Howitz has been granted commit rights, strengthening the project’s long-term sustainability and development capacity. Axel’s contributions since joining last year have been instrumental in maintaining the project’s momentum toward its 1.0.0 goals.

Availability

The ODF Toolkit 0.13.0 is available via the official project page.

About the ODF Toolkit

The ODF Toolkit is a community-driven, open-source Java library for creating, scanning, and manipulating OpenDocument Format (ODF) files. By providing a lightweight API that operates independently of any office suite, it remains a preferred choice for server-side document automation.

LibreOffice Podcast, Episode #6 – Language support

2026-01-12

LibreOffice is available in over 120 languages – but we want to do more! Jonathan Clark recently joined the TDF team to improve LibreOffice’s support for RTL (right-to-left) and CTL (complex text layout) scripts. In this episode, he talks to Mike Saunders about his work, and how users can help out. (This episode is also available on PeerTube.)

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LibreOffice and Google Summer of Code 2025: The results

2025-10-222025-11-03

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. At the time of writing this, the feature has not yet been merged into the code base, but hopefully it will appear in the next weeks.

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. At the time of writing this, the feature has not yet been merged into the code base.

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!

LibreOffice 64-bit progress, and support for Amazon Linux 2023

2025-10-092025-10-09

LibreOffice has been available for Linux since we started the project in 2010. The official builds from The Document Foundation (the non-profit entity behind LibreOffice) are designed to be self-contained and distribution agnostic – that is, they should work on as many distributions as possible.

To achieve this, we test on various Linux distributions, and now we consider Amazon Linux 2023 as another platform supported by LibreOffice. Amazon has provided resources for regular and automated CI (continuous integration) testing of LibreOffice builds against Amazon Linux 2023, including crash-testing runs, via the AWS Open Source Credits programme.

As part of this, and for the general benefit of other users, TDF has started to provide 64-bit ARM Linux builds (aarch64) in RPM format. We’ve worked on improving 64-bit ARM support for various platforms in recent years, including for Windows and on Apple silicon Macs, given that the chips are becoming increasingly used in desktops and servers.

64-bit ARM chips commonly power cloud infrastructure, where LibreOffice is often used in headless (non-GUI) tasks, such as batch conversions of large numbers of documents. But some users run LibreOffice graphically too. With the updates we’ve been working on, LibreOffice is now available on more infrastructure and can be deployed on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). If there’s anything else users would like to see, submit an enhancement request and let us know!

LibreOffice Podcast, Episode #5 – Accessibility in Free and Open Source Software

2025-10-02

LibreOffice strives to be accessible for people with special needs or limitations, such as visual impairment or limited motor abilities. How does the software work towards this? What accessibility features are in the pipeline? And how can all users help out? We talk to Michael Weghorn about these topics – and more. (This episode is also available on PeerTube.)