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

Announcement of LibreOffice 25.8.4

Czech translation of LibreOffice Draw Guide 25.8

Videos from the Open Source Conference 2025 in Luxembourg

Relaunching ODF Advocacy as ODF News

Winners in the Month of LibreOffice, November 2025 – Grab your free sticker pack 😊

Document Liberation Project: New releases

LibreOffice’s native file format is the fully standardised OpenDocument Format. This is ideal for long-term storage of data, but many of us have to work with other file formats as well, including those generated by proprietary software. The Document Liberation Project (DLP) develops libraries to help us access these files, and there have been various updates in the last two weeks, so let’s see what’s new:

  • libfreehand 0.1.2 – This is a library for importing Aldus/Macromedia/Adobe FreeHand documents. In this release, the library can import more elements, such as text on paths, text effects, stroke patterns, arrows and paragraph attributes.
  • libzmf 0.0.2 and libcdr 0.1.4 – libzmf is a library for importing Zoner drawing and bitmap files, currently supporting Callisto/Draw 4-5 and Bitmap, while libcdr is a library that parses the file format of CorelDRAW documents of all versions. Both have been made more secure thanks to OSS-Fuzz, which we talked about recently, and there have been build fixes as well.
  • libwpg 0.3.2 and libwpd 0.10.2 – The former is for importing WordPerfect Graphics images, and has performance improvements when reading image data from WPG2 files, while the latter has had build system improvements and also fixes from the aforementioned OSS-Fuzz.

These improvements will be included in future major releases of LibreOffice, and indeed other open source programs that use Document Liberation Project libraries.

Meanwhile, DLP developer Laurent Alonso sent us this great before-and-after picture, showing recent improvements to the import of Lotus 123 spreadsheets. At the top you can see a Lotus 123 file (that contains lots of formatting) being displayed in LibreOffice 5.3 – but the formatting is missing. Thanks to improvements in DLP libraries, though, LibreOffice 5.4 can read and display the spreadsheet much more accurately, as you can see underneath (click for bigger):

The DLP community appreciates all contributions, and even if you’re not a coder, there are many ways to help – such as documenting file formats, or preparing sample documents. To learn more about DLP, check out our short video:

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Marketing activities so far in 2017: Mike Saunders

Thanks to donations to The Document Foundation, along with valued contributions from our community, we maintain a small team working on various aspects of LibreOffice including documentation, user interface design, quality assurance, release engineering and marketing. Together with Italo Vignoli, I help with the latter, and today I’ll summarise some of the achievements so far in 2017.

Videos

The year started off with preparations for LibreOffice 5.3, a major release that arrived on February 1st. We’ve found that videos are a great way to demonstrate new features to end users – and news websites often embed them as well. So I created a series of New Features videos for LibreOffice 5.3 covering the suite as a whole, along with Writer, Calc and Impress. So far they’ve had over 150,000 views in total:

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I also coordinated script translations from our diligent localisation community, so that the videos had subtitles in 17 different languages. Thanks to everyone who helped!

Around the same time, FOSDEM took place in Brussels, and I used the opportunity to record video interviews with various people involved in The Document Foundation. If you want to learn more about how TDF works, and what you can do to help the project, check out this playlist:

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After returning from FOSDEM, I also edited and uploaded LibreOffice-related presentations from the event.

Month of LibreOffice, and events

In May, we had another Month of LibreOffice, celebrating contributions from right across the project. But this time we awarded printed stickers to everyone who took part:

Over 300 contributors won stickers, and we gathered together some photos showing them in action on laptops, PCs, and even a bike!

Regarding events, I attended the MuvGoc ’17 BarCamp in Munich together with Thorsten Behrens. We discussed removing barriers in the digital world, and the relationship between open data and open source. See here for the write-up.

From 23 – 25 of June, I helped to organise a German LibreOffice community meeting in Berlin. We talked about various topics, including ways to bring in new contributors and link different parts of the project and community together – see here for the details (German version).

Website, blog and infrastructure

The LibreOffice download page was due for a facelift, so I worked with Christian Lohmaier (Cloph) on a new design: this makes the download button more prominent, provides better and clearer information, and is generally more pleasant to look at. Similarly, we worked on a restructured donate page, making it significantly simpler and more user-friendly than the previous version.

Meanwhile, I created a new Frequently Asked Questions page on the site, to handle some of the queries TDF receives every day. Community members can point users to these answers where necessary, and discuss them further on Ask LibreOffice.

Various LibreOffice-related events around the globe have taken place since the start of the year, and I collected information about them and wrote a short report. In addition, I summarised various updates from the Document Liberation Project.

If you haven’t seen TDF’s 2016 Annual Report yet, check out out – the TDF team worked together to write it and translate it into German.

Infrastructure-wise, Guilhem Moulin and I set up a new Nextcloud instance for community members to host and share data. We also moved the events calendar to Nextcloud as well.

LibreOffice timeline and LibreOffice 5.4

LibreOffice has a rich history behind it, starting with StarOffice in the 1990s and being open sourced as OpenOffice.org in 2000. To showcase many of the important steps along the way, we worked on a LibreOffice timeline on the website. Along with new versions of the suite, you can see news of major LibreOffice migrations and events that took place.

In August, TDF welcomed a new Development Mentor, Teodor Mircea Ionita (aka Shinnok). I worked with him to examine the state of our build system documentation, to see how we can make it friendlier for new developers – here’s my report.

Finally, for LibreOffice 5.4 I created another New Features video – and again, our localisation communities did a great job providing subtitle translations:

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So that’s the progress so far this year – but there’s more to come, with the LibreOffice Conference in October, another Month of LibreOffice in November, and preparations for LibreOffice 6.0 – which is due to be released early next year!

Call to Action: Hackfests “The New Generation”

LibreOffice’s development community has been growing steadily for seven years, thanks to the great enthusiasm demonstrated by several core members. They have mentored an entirely new generation of LibreOffice developers, also thanks to Hackfests and other face-to-face meeting opportunities such as FOSDEM and the LibreOffice Conference.

After seven years is now the right time to start thinking about the new generation of Hackfests. For several reasons, their number has decreased over the last couple of years, and they have never really gone beyond European borders (even with core developers flying over the Atlantic to attract potential new developers).

Bjoern Michaelsen will be hosting a conference call to discuss HackFests “The New Generation” on Sunday, September 17, at 4:30PM CEST (Berlin time, or UTC +2). Everyone interested is warmly invited to participate, especially from LibreOffice native language communities around the world.

If you cannot connect, make your voice heard by sending a couple of ideas by email to the Projects mailing list: projects@global.libreoffice.org.

Public Money? Public Code!

The Document Foundation joins FSFE campaign

31 organisations ask to improve public procurement of software

 

Digital services offered and used by public administrations are the critical infrastructure of 21st-century democratic nations. To establish trustworthy systems, government agencies must ensure they have full control over systems at the core of our digital infrastructure. This is rarely the case today due to restrictive software licences.

Today, 31 organisations are publishing an open letter in which they call for lawmakers to advance legislation requiring publicly financed software developed for the public sector be made available under a Free and Open Source Software licence. The initial signatories include CCC, EDRi, Free Software Foundation Europe, KDE, Open Knowledge Foundation Germany, openSUSE, Open Source Business Alliance, Open Source Initiative, The Document Foundation, Wikimedia Deutschland, as well as several others; they ask individuals and other organisation to sign the open letter. The open letter will be sent to candidates for the German Parliament election and, during the coming months, until the 2019 EU parliament elections, to other representatives of the EU and EU member states.

“Because the source code of proprietary software is often a business secret, it radically increases the difficulty of discovering both accidental and intentional security flaws in critical software. Reverse engineering proprietary software to improve or strengthen it is an absolute necessity in today’s environment, but this basic technical requirement is unlawful in many circumstances and jurisdictions. With critical infrastructure such as hospitals, automobile factories, and freight shippers having all been brought offline this year due to flaws concealed within proprietary software, unauditable code is a liability that states can no longer subsidize with special legal privileges without incurring a cost denominated in lives.

Right now, the blueprints for much of our most critical public infrastructure are simply unavailable to the public. By aligning public funding with a Free Software requirement — “Free” referring to public code availability, not cost — we can find and fix flaws before they are used to turn the lights out in the next hospital.” says Edward Snowden, President of the Freedom of the Press Foundation about the “Public Money Public Code” campaign launch.

Public institutions spend millions of euros each year on the development of new software tailored to their needs. The procurement choices of the public sector play a significant role in determining which companies are allowed to compete and what software is supported with tax payers’ money. Public administrations on all levels frequently have problems sharing code with each other, even if they funded its complete development. Furthermore, without the option for independent third parties to run audits or other security checks on the code, sensible citizen data is at risk.

“We need software that fosters the sharing of good ideas and solutions. Only like this will we be able to improve digital services for people all over Europe. We need software that guarantees freedom of choice, access, and competition. We need software that helps public administrations regain full control of their critical digital infrastructure, allowing them to become and remain independent from a handful of companies,” says Matthias Kirschner, President of the Free Software Foundation Europe.

That is why the signatories call on representatives all around Europe to modernise their digital infrastructure to allow other public administrations, companies, or individuals to freely use, study, share and improve applications developed with public money. Thereby providing safeguards for the public administration against being locked in to services from specific companies that use restrictive licences to hinder competition, and ensuring that the source code is accessible so that back doors and security holes can be fixed without depending on only one service provider.

“Public bodies are financed through taxes. They should spend funds responsibly and in the most efficient way possible. If it is public money, it should be public code as well!”, says Kirschner.

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REMEMBER TO SIGN THE OPEN LETTER

LibreOffice contributor interview: Chandrakant Dhutadmal

LibreOffice contributors around the world have a big impact on the success of the project – we really appreciate their help. Today we’re talking to Chandrakant Dhutadmal, who is involved in various free and open source projects including Mozilla Firefox and LibreOffice…

Where do you live?

I live in Pune, Maharashtra State, India.

Do you work for a LibreOffice-related company or just contribute in your spare time?

I work for the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), which is an autonomous scientific organization under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, in the government of India. We worked on a project of national importance where we aimed to provide software tools in Indian languages (free of charge) so that people can easily use the software in their own languages.

One of the applications which we worked on initially (way back in 2006) was OpenOffice.org. Later we shifted to work on LibreOffice. I do contribute to the project in my free time as well.

How did you get involved with LibreOffice?

During the above mentioned project work, we interacted with many organizations and individuals. Mr. Rajesh Ranjan was one of the persons who I interacted with – and told to about how the open source community works, and what kind of impact can it bring to the overall project.

We interacted very frequently and that is where we started working on organized efforts of volunteers for LibreOffice in India. I started doing a bit of contributions for LibreOffice since that time. Mr. Mahesh Kulkarni, who heads the department where I work, and my office in general have been really supportive for such activities.

What areas of the project do you normally work on? Anything else you want to tackle?

I normally work on LibreOffice marketing, community building and localization. These tasks keep me occupied enough.

What was your initial experience of contributing to LibreOffice like?

I was very pleased with the way the global LibreOffice community accepts newcomers and beginners. Initially, I was hardly a serious contributor to LibreOffice. But the fact that even small contributions by new contributors are valued by the community. Members like Sophie Gautier and Italo Vignoli have always been very supportive to me and others in India.

What does LibreOffice need most right now?

One of the most common and frequent issues which people report to me whenever I talk about LibreOffice is compatibility with Microsoft Office. It is quite a difficult task to satisfy them by explaining a few facts. I generally ask people to pinpoint the issues which affect them. Another area is to build a community of developers in India who can contribute to LibreOffice development.

What do you do when you’re not working on LibreOffice?

I read lot of articles on financial literacy. This is one of the topics which interests me a lot. I also like to travel to different places.

Anything else you want to mention?

I hope people get motivated enough by reading interviews like this, and get involved in the project!

Thanks Chandrakant – and indeed, there are many ways to get involved and make LibreOffice better for millions of users around the world. Our community is friendly and fun, and contributing to the QA, documentation, design, marketing or other projects is a great way to build up experience for a future career!

LibreOffice and Google Summer of Code 2017: The results

The Google Summer of Code (GSoC) takes place every year, and provides university students with funding to work on free and open source software. For 2017, nine LibreOffice projects were accepted into GSoC, and as developers finish their work, let’s take a look at some of their achievements…

Grzegorz Araminowicz – Improve SmartArt import

SmartArt graphics are used in Microsoft Office to “easily make a visual representation of your information”. LibreOffice already had the ability to import SmartArt, with file parsing code and basic layout features, but Grzegorz started to extend it, taking Office 2007 test files one-by-one and implementing missing features to load them correctly.

Throughout GSoC, Grzegorz worked on many fixes and improvements, as described in this mailing list post. At the end, he summarised his results:

I am happy with project results. Now LibreOffice is able to load and correctly render many types of basic diagrams. However, there is still much to be done to support more complex SmartArts. If anyone would be interested in contributing in this area, feel free to contact me for any help.

Muhammet Kara – Revamp the customization dialog

LibreOffice’s “Customize” dialog box, under the Tools menu, is very versatile but could also be improved in terms of design and user friendliness. Muhammet started his work by adding a search feature for the Functions pane of the Keyboard tab, as search was described as “the killer feature” by the design team.

He then started cleaning up the source code (most of the dialog was implemented in a single file with over 5,000 lines of code), before moving on to layout and design improvements. In the end, he had 19 patches integrated into LibreOffice, and made a video demonstrating the updated dialog in action:

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Aditya Dewan – LibreOffice online

Aditya is a third-year undergraduate student at the Indian Institute of Information Technology in Allahabad, specialising in Information Technology. Throughout GSoC he worked on LibreOffice Online, the cloud-based version of the suite. He started with small features and fixes to get familiar with the codebase, such as compression on startup and extra graphs in the admin console.

Then he moved on to a bigger job: adding an interactive horizontal ruler, as seen in the desktop version of the suite. Here’s Aditya’s demonstration of the new feature:

With that done, he extended the current WOPI implementation to support “Save as” functionality. Summarising GSoC, he said:

It was a very good experience for me. I have done a lot, and learned a lot this summer. Thank you to all LibreOffice developers, especially my mentors, for your support.

Gautam Prajapati, Alex Pantechovskis, Mohammed Abdul Azeem, Ximeng Zu, Akshay Deep and Varun Dhall – various improvements

Meanwhile, other GSoC developers did great work fixing bugs, adding new features and boosting compatibility. Gautam Prajapati made significant improvements to the Android Viewer build system, as described in his report, while Alex Pantechovskis helped to create a QuarkXPress import filter for the Document Liberation Project (see our recent blog post).

Mohammed Abdul Azeem produced many patches for migrating from the legacy parser to FastParser, and Ximeng Zu fixed various “most annoying bugs” in the Android Viewer (see here). Finally, Akshay Deep worked on updates for the special characters dialog, while Varun Dhall replaced the EditEngine binary clipboard with an ODF filter.

Wrapping up

So 2017’s Google Summer of Code was a terrific success, and has helped to improve LibreOffice in many different areas. We’ll all get to enjoy these changes and new features in LibreOffice 6.0, due early next year. Thanks to all of the developers for their excellent work – and thanks to Google for their support and initiative. We look forward to GSoC 2018!

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…