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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 😊

LibreOffice Conference 2026 and 2027

Month of LibreOffice, May 2017: First week’s results

On May 1st we started a new Month of LibreOffice campaign, to give credit to contributions all across the project. So, after the first week, how is it looking? Well, here’s how many stickers have been awarded so far…

That’s a great start – 121 members of the LibreOffice community who’ll get a shiny sticker at the end of the month. Click the number to see how the contributions are spread across code, QA, documentation, user support and other areas. Of course, there’s more to come, and if you want to get a sticker for your laptop or other device, read on! Every contribution to LibreOffice can help millions of users across the globe.

How to get a sticker

There are many ways you can help the LibreOffice project and claim a sticker:

  • Help to confirm bugs: go to our Bugzilla page and look for new bugs. If you can recreate one, add a comment like “CONFIRMED on Windows 10 and LibreOffice 5.3.2”. (Make sure you’re using the latest version of LibreOffice.)
  • Contribute code: The codebase is big, but there are lots of places to get involved with small jobs. See our Developers page on the website and this page on the wiki to get started. Once you’ve submitted a patch, if it gets merged we’ll send you a sticker!
  • Translate the interface: LibreOffice is available in a wide range of languages, but its interface translations need to be kept up-to-date. Or maybe you want to translate the suite to a whole new language? Get involved here.
  • Write documentation: Another way to earn a badge is to help the LibreOffice documentation team. Whether you want to update the online help or add chapters to the handbooks, here’s where to start.
  • Answer questions from users: Over on Ask LibreOffice there are many users looking for help with the suite. We’re keeping an eye on that site so if you give someone useful advice, you can claim a shiny sticker.
  • Spread the word: Tell everyone about LibreOffice on Twitter! Just say why you love it or what you’re using it for, add the #libreoffice hashtag, and at the end of the month you can claim a sticker. (We have a maximum of 100 stickers for this category, in case the whole internet starts tweeting!)

Stay tuned to this blog for further updates during the month!

TDF at MucGov17 BarCamp in Munich

On April 29th, the City of Munich in southern Germany held an event called MucGov17. Subtitled “Digital city – ideas, projects and apps”, it provided an opportunity for people involved with Munich’s IT infrastructure to get together, exchange ideas, and come up with new projects. The Document Foundation (TDF) attended and took part in various sessions.

Because the event was a BarCamp, sessions were planned on an ad-hoc basis; attendees could suggest presentations and talks, which were then allocated to different rooms. Other people at the event could then visit the talks they found most interesting.

Topics included: removing barriers in the digital world (eg making Munich’s websites and software more friendly to users with special needs or disabilities); improving the systems used in schools and education; and how to digitalise older, printed materials – making them more available to residents in the city.

TDF organised a discussion about the relationship between open data and open source. A question was raised: as cities, local councils and governments pay more attention to open data, should we be working harder to advocate the benefits of open source (and free software) as well? Is open data just one step on the road towards adopting open source, or do people find it hard to see a connection?

We also discussed how open source can mitigate duplication of effort. For instance, the City of Munich is working on an app to help residents (and visitors) find out about events and places to visit. Other cities in Germany are working on their own apps as well. Would it make more sense for all cities to work together on a single open source “core” app, and then individual cities could add their data on top?

Finally, we had an opportunity to talk to various people about LibreOffice, explaining how it is developed, what new features are being worked on, and how to get involved. So it was worth attending, and later in the year, TDF hopes to be present at Munich’s Open Government Day in October.

Tender to implement HSQLDB binary format import in LibreOffice (#201705-03)

The Document Foundation (TDF), the charitable entity behind the world’s leading free office suite LibreOffice, seeks for companies or individuals to

implement support for importing HSQLDB binary data

to start work as soon as possible. TDF is looking for an individual or company to, as a turnkey project, implement the following:

In order to remove the legacy Java/HSQLDB database completely, and move fully to Firebird in LibreOffice 5.4, it is necessary to be able to import old document data with high fidelity from the HSQLDB binary file format, which we have used (for performance reasons) inside so many of our existing ODB files. This task involves reading the existing (reasonably simple) Java serialization code, and writing an (import only) filter to import this data safely into base.

Required skills

  • Extensive knowledge of C++
  • Experience working on the LibreOffice source code
  • Knowledge of HSQLDB

We exclusively use free, libre and open source (FLOSS) software for development wherever possible, and the resulting work must be licensed under the the Mozilla Public License v2.0.

Other Skills

  • English (Conversationally fluent in order to coordinate and plan with members of TDF)

TDF welcomes applications from all suitably qualified persons regardless of their race, sex, disability, religion/belief, sexual orientation or age.

As always, TDF will give some preference to individuals who have previously shown a commitment to TDF, including but not limited to members of TDF. Not being a member, or never having contributed before, does not exclude any applicants from consideration.

The task offered is a project-based one-off, with no immediate plans to a mid- or long-term contractual relationship. It is offered on a freelance, project basis. Individuals and companies applying can be located anywhere in the world.

TDF is looking forward to receiving your applications, your financial expectations (name the final price for the turnkey project), and the earliest date of your availability, via e-mail to Florian Effenberger at floeff@documentfoundation.org no later than June 2, 2017. You can encrypt your message via PGP/GnuPG.

Applicants who have not received feedback by July 3, 2017 should consider that their application, after careful review, was not accepted.

 

Tender to deprecate LibreOffice’s SVG filter in favour of SVGIO (#201705-02)

The Document Foundation (TDF), the charitable entity behind the world’s leading free office suite LibreOffice, seeks for companies or individuals to

deprecate the SVG filter used by LibreOffice in favor of SVGIO

to start work as soon as possible. TDF is looking for an individual or company to, as a turnkey project, implement the following:

  • Remove the old SVG import filter code (used for importing documents)
  • Switch all SVG handling to the SVGIO filter (used when inserting images into a file)
  • As a consequence, simplify the codebase and save around 2-3,000 lines of code

Required skills

  • Extensive knowledge of C++
  • Experience working on the LibreOffice source code
  • Knowledge of the SVG image format

We exclusively use free, libre and open source (FLOSS) software for development wherever possible, and the resulting work must be licensed under the Mozilla Public License v2.0.

Some further references on the discussion can be found at http://nabble.documentfoundation.org/Two-svg-import-filters-tt4165248.html and http://nabble.documentfoundation.org/Libreoffice-qa-minutes-of-ESC-call-tc4171063.html.

Other Skills

  • English (Conversationally fluent in order to coordinate and plan with members of TDF)

TDF welcomes applications from all suitably qualified persons regardless of their race, sex, disability, religion/belief, sexual orientation or age.

As always, TDF will give some preference to individuals who have previously shown a commitment to TDF, including but not limited to members of TDF. Not being a member, or never having contributed before, does not exclude any applicants from consideration.

The task offered is a project-based one-off, with no immediate plans to a mid- or long-term contractual relationship. It is offered on a freelance, project basis. Individuals and companies applying can be located anywhere in the world.

TDF is looking forward to receiving your applications, your financial expectations (name the final price for the turnkey project), and the earliest date of your availability, via e-mail to Florian Effenberger at floeff@documentfoundation.org no later than June 2, 2017. You can encrypt your message via PGP/GnuPG.

Applicants who have not received feedback by July 3, 2017, should consider that their application, after careful review, was not accepted.

Video interview: Michael Meeks, LibreOffice developer

Michael Meeks is a veteran LibreOffice (and OpenOffice.org) developer. We talk to him about how the project has progressed over the years, and the technology behind LibreOffice Online, the cloud version of the suite.

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Tender to improve image handling in LibreOffice (#201705-01)

The Document Foundation (TDF), the charitable entity behind the world’s leading free office suite LibreOffice, seeks for companies or individuals to

improve and fix issues with image handling in LibreOffice

to start work as soon as possible. TDF is looking for an individual or company to, as a turnkey project, implement the following:

  • Use a robust and hard lifecycle mechanism (eg smart reference count) for every reference to an image
  • Propagate this lifecycle mechanism through filters and UNO APIs
  • Copy all (compressed) image streams out of document storages into an on-disk cache – to avoid data loss on file movement
  • Improve image detail reading and storage, to avoid reading a whole JPEG or PNG just to work out its pixel size and discard/swap-out the result
  • Reduce excessive swap-in and out thrash
  • ideally – but non-essentially cleanup the “graphics cache size” and manage caching of images in a more intelligent way

Required skills

  • Extensive knowledge of C++
  • Experience working on the LibreOffice source code

We exclusively use free, libre and open source (FLOSS) software for development wherever possible, and the resulting work must be licensed under the the Mozilla Public License v2.0.

Other Skills

  • English (Conversationally fluent in order to coordinate and plan with members of TDF)

TDF welcomes applications from all suitably qualified persons regardless of their race, sex, disability, religion/belief, sexual orientation or age.

As always, TDF will give some preference to individuals who have previously shown a commitment to TDF, including but not limited to members of TDF. Not being a member, or never having contributed before, does not exclude any applicants from consideration.

The task offered is a project-based one-off, with no immediate plans to a mid- or long-term contractual relationship. It is offered on a freelance, project basis. Individuals and companies applying can be located anywhere in the world.

TDF is looking forward to receiving your applications, your financial expectations (name the final price for the turnkey project), and the earliest date of your availability, via e-mail to Florian Effenberger at floeff@documentfoundation.org no later than June 2, 2017. You can encrypt your message via PGP/GnuPG.

Applicants who have not received feedback by July 3, 2017 should consider that their application, after careful review, was not accepted.

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

Relaunching ODF Advocacy as ODF News

I decided to start the current campaign, with one blog post per week focusing on the different aspects of Open…