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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 😊

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.

The May 2017 Month of LibreOffice begins!

Yes, a new Month of LibreOffice begins today, crediting contributions all across the project. This time we’re giving away real printed stickers for your laptop, desktop PC or other kit! If you help the LibreOffice community in various ways, we’ll add your name to a wiki page and then, at the end of the month, you’ll be able to claim your sticker. It’ll look like this:

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!)

So, good luck – we’ll be posting regular updates on this blog and our Twitter account. Get involved, help to make LibreOffice even better, and enjoy your awesome sticker as thanks!

Help keep the Calc guide up to date

The Documentation Team Meeting will

take place in May 10th at 17:00 CET

The Calc module of LibreOffice is one of its most complex and extensive applications and one of the most in-demand for documentation, as our measurements of the documentation website clearly show.

Documentation website daily visits over time, since January 1st, 2017.

The latest published Calc Guide is connected to LibreOffice release 4.1. The gap between this guide and the most recent Calc developments has widen and the current publication is outdated. (more…)

News about the migration to ODF in Taiwan

Plan of National Chi-Nan University to Stop Purchasing Microsoft Office from 2018 Raises Heated Discussions in Taiwan

April 23, 2017, Taiwan – The migration of ODF keeps going in many different fields in Taiwan. Since 2016 the Ministry of Education in Taiwan entrusts the Information Service Association of Chinese Colleges (ISAC) and Software Liberty Association Taiwan (SLAT) with the task of promoting and migrating ODF/LibreOffice in universities in Taiwan. Among all the university, National Chi-Nan University (NCNU) is the earliest one, which started migrating LibreOffice since 2014 and has been working on it for three years.

Then on April 20, 2017, a student from NCNU posted an article on Dcard forum saying that, according to her teacher, NCNU “Will not use Microsoft Office anymore due to the budget issue. LibreOffice will be used to replace Microsoft Office.” The student strongly questioned, “LibreOffice is totally unknown to everyone. I don’t know what the administrative staffs of our school are thinking about. Microsoft’s software is a very basic skill for enterprises to recruit people. This decision will make students lost their core competitiveness.”

This article raised heated discussion on the Internet. Some people questioned the NCNU about the usage of the budget, saying that such a big national university may never lack the budget to buy Microsoft licenses. Also, there were still a number of people questioning about the interoperability between LibreOffice and OOXML. However, more people disagreed with the student’s thoughts about “Microsoft equals core competitiveness.”

Ben Jai, a famous entrepreneur and public opinion leader in Taiwan, said on his Facebook page: “For a student, it should be more important to actively explore new things rather than waiting for someone to teach him. If he just waits for teachers to teach him how to use a tool and plans to use the tool all his life, he will be very easily eliminated.”

Matthew Lien – a.k.a. BlueT in open source communities in Taiwan – who was one of the main promoters of LibreOffice in NCNU, explained the policy on Facebook: “The budget is just one of the reasons but not all. The budget of schools should invest on students and education, but the Microsoft’s license fee is going higher and higher and starts to supplant budgets of other items. Therefore, we’ve worked on promoting ODF and LibreOffice for three years. It’s not an impulsive decision. BTW, we won’t forbid anyone to use Microsoft Office, just that NCNU won’t purchase Microsoft Office anymore.”

Another article on The Inside Media discussed this topic and gave a conclusion by asking this question: “Maybe Microsoft Office has been the basic skill of many enterprises. However, why our education only teaches our students a single tool, instead of training our students to learn and adopt new skills actively?”

Tender to Implement Accessibility Improvements (#201704-01)

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

implement accessibility improvements into LibreOffice

to start work as soon as possible. TDF is looking for an individual or a company to design and implement, as a turnkey project, a tool to find and flag new glade widgets that are added without accessibility (a11y) markup.

  1. That includes any new label without a relation for the widget it relates to, which should cause a compile/tinderbox warning, except in the case that it is used as a hidden string placeholder to avoid the resource files.
  2. The tool has to catch the common cases and blacklist all the existing dialogs and/or widgets without these. The goal of the implementation is to avoid future a11y regressions in the markup that we can scan.

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

Other Skills

English (conversationally fluent, in order to coordinate and plan with other TDF and project members).

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 TDF members. 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 May 26, 2017. You can encrypt your message via PGP/GnuPG.

Applicants who have not received feedback by June 30, 2017, should consider that their application, after careful review, was not accepted.

Coming up on 1st May: the next Month of LibreOffice

Last year we had two Months of LibreOffice, in May and November. These celebrated contributions all across the project, from development and documentation through to translations and QA. Everyone who got involved was awarded a badge to use on websites and social media.

This year, though, we’re taking it up a notch. For the first Month of LibreOffice, starting on Monday 1st of May, we’re giving out real printed stickers to all contributors! And they look like this (printed versions on the way):

Yes, if you help the LibreOffice project during May, you’ll be able to claim a shiny sticker for your laptop, desktop or other kit at the end of the month. You’ll just need to let us know your address and we’ll pop a sticker in the post. Then you’ll be able to show the world not only that you love LibreOffice, but that you’re a proud contributor as well!

So, how do you get a sticker? Stay tuned to this blog – on Monday we’ll provide all the details and the campaign will get started. See you then…

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…