Recent Posts

The Document Foundation Releases LibreOffice 26.2.1 with Contributions from Community and Ecosystem Partners

Hyperlink dialog improvements from Siddhi Salunkhe

LibreOffice Online: a fresh start

LibreOffice is in the Google Summer of Code 2026!

LibreOffice 25.8.5 has arrived

LibreOffice Named a 2026 “Best Value” Leader by Capterra

Two ODF Toolkit releases in a row!

ODF is the Open Document Format, the native format used by LibreOffice (and supported by many other apps too). Then there’s the ODF Toolkit, a set of Java modules that allow programmatic creation, scanning and manipulation of ODF files. Svante Schubert writes with some updates:

We are happy to announce that there have been recently two ODF Toolkit releases in a row. These were our first releases at The Document Foundation (TDF), after the migration of the project to TDF in 2019:

  • With the 0.9.0 release, we have our last JDK 8 release (due to a switch of the Java Doc Taglet API we are using). After this release, we dropped the so-called “Simple API” (which was once forked from our ODFDOM doc Java Package by IBM, but not merged back, leaving lots of duplicated code that was unable to embrace our new change API). And the XSLT Runner Ant plugin will be removed in a future release, as we are no longer using Ant but Maven (to avoid maintenance of untested functionality).
  • With the 0.10.0 release, we support the next JDK 11 LTS version and our new change API that was implemented by myself for Open-XChange’s web office OX Documents – thanks to them, especially Malte Timmermann and Rafael Laguna for keeping the Apache License 2. Unfortunately, OX forked before I started there and it took me several months – and some sponsorship from a PrototypeFund project – to merge manually every file and enable all tests again (which some OX colleagues had disabled as they took too long…). (Please check out the PrototypeFund: Any German taxpayer may apply with an open-source project/idea!).

I would like to thank also all those numerous folks assisting us to make this work – especially recently in pushing this forward!

Especially, I would like to congratulate Michael Stahl for officially becoming the co-maintainer of this project. Michael has been my long term colleague (from StarOffice Hamburg times) and helps me constantly drop procrastination and/or fix issues I am no longer capable to realize as I looked too long at them. In addition, Michael and I also serve as editors of the OASIS ODF TC. There at the ODF TC, we envision having a faster turn-around of ODF spec deliveries and making their information set more readable for downstream software as we are. Thanks to allotropia software GmbH, Michael’s employer, for providing him with the time for working on these tasks!

So what’s next? Obviously, it’s more than time to release an ODF Toolkit 1.0.0.

Personally, I would like to get the code generation right, but keep as much compatibility to prior releases as possible. Michael and my aim is to work from the end of January on this release (any helping hand is most welcome) 😊

There is also ODF 1.3, to be embraced by a release in the near future.

In February, I will likely have an online talk at FOSDEM, at the LibreOffice dev room about our project and what I intend to do next year.

In a nutshell, I was able to receive some NGI Search funding for this project to enable search in ODF documents.

Aside from the obvious search API – focusing on one higher-level based on user semantic and likely having also one lower-level based on XML, I would like to refactor my “spaghetti feature code” in the SAX parser that made the implementation of the changes hard to maintain. Sorry for that, not my first and likely not my last mistake – but I am learning! 🙂

We’re going to work out a more elaborate picture for the FOSDEM presentation.

Until then, have fun with the ODF Toolkit!

PRELIMINARY results of the elections for the next Board of Directors at The Document Foundation

TDF Membership Committee announces the PRELIMINARY results of the elections for the next Board of Directors at The Document Foundation.

The number of TDF Members who voted is 120, from a total amount of 211 eligible voters. This means that 91 TDF Members did not vote. The Membership Committee would like to thanks all the voters, as the elections are the most significant time of the year for TDF Members, because they can decide about the project’s governance.

Based on the PRELIMINARY results, the following candidates are elected as members of TDF Board of Directors, in order of preference:

Full Members:

  1. Thorsten Behrens
  2. Paolo Vecchi
  3. Jan ‘Kendy’ Holešovský
  4. Emiliano Vavassori
  5. Caolán McNamara
  6. Cor Nouws
  7. László Németh

Deputies:

  1. Gábor Kelemen
  2. Ayhan Yalçınsoy
  3. Gabriel Masei

Results were calculated using the same tooling and rules of previous elections, based on the single transferable vote (STV) voting system and the Meek algorithm (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counting_single_transferable_votes). The software used is OpenSTV (https://github.com/Conservatory/openstv).

The Membership Committee agreed on the ranking of the first six candidates, but is still discussing about the last four candidates.

Unfortunately, given that there are 10 candidates and 10 seats, OpenSTV 1.7 does not provide more than one round to rank all candidates that have not reached the threshold, and considers all candidates as elected. For more details, see: https://elections.documentfoundation.org/results.php?election_id=14. The Membership Committee will investigate this further, and will update TDF Members and the general public as soon as possible.

Before the results can be considered as final, we have the challenge phase from Wednesday, December 15, to Monday, December 20, at midnight CET (UTC+1).

TDF Members are invited to check their votes as explained after the voting, by using the anonymous token received at that time (each voter has received a different token, and is the sole owner of that token). Election results to verify are available here: https://elections.documentfoundation.org/votes.php?election_id=14.

If you have any questions or if you think that there were irregularities during the vote, please get in touch with the Membership Committee AS SOON AS POSSIBLE, and in any case no later than Monday, December 20, at midnight CET (UTC+1), using the email address elections@documentfoundation.org.

For reference, details of the whole election process have been outlined in the first announcement: https://listarchives.tdf.io/i/tFJzSYUUGcSjf0c0NtNiEOou.

Record number of LibreOffice downloads

The chart says it all! Last week, we had a record number of downloads for LibreOffice in a single week. More and more people are discovering the free and open source office suite, the successor to OpenOffice, that respects users’ privacy and freedom.

Downloads have been growing steadily over time, and one week ago we released an important security update, so we recommend downloading it, if you’re using an older version.

Thanks to everyone in our wonderful worldwide community for all their help! It’s thanks to you that LibreOffice keeps going from strength to strength. Let’s keep spreading the word together 👍

Community Member Monday: Ravi Dwivedi

Today we’re chatting with Ravi Dwivedi, a free software supporter who recently joined our marketing community…

To start, tell us a bit about yourself!

I am from India, and I recently received my masters degree (M.Math) in mathematics from the Indian Statistical Institute in Kolkata. I am looking forward to doing a PhD in mathematics. My hobbies include listening to music, reading novels, playing chess, and meeting new people.

I campaign that software must respect users’ freedom. We call such a software free software, where ‘free’ refers to freedom and not price. In Indian languages, we call it “swatantra/mukt software” to remove the confusion. Free Software gives users the freedom to run, study, modify, share and improve the software. If the software lacks any of these freedoms, it is called non-free/proprietary software.

In my computing, I use only free software, except for some blobs in my phone. I volunteer for the Free Software Community for India. (FSCI). FSCI is not a registered organization, but a community of free software activists. It is also a non-hierarichal group. I raise awareness on why free software is important and the dangers of non-free/proprietary software.

I also raise awareness about the importance of digital privacy, and try my best to avoid privacy-invading technologies – and this means I usually have an amount of inconvenience for my freedom and privacy. Although I work on the issues of free software, I do care about other issues in society and actively look for opportunities to meet people who care about these issues. I believe in the power of collaboration.

I am an associate member of Indian Pirates, a group of people who would like to be a political party some day, with the goal of protecting the human rights of citizens. Within the groups FSCI and Indian Pirates, there is no leader, boss or hierarchy. I embrace the nonhierarchial structure of these groups, otherwise groups become(or, are liable to become) dictatorship of a few people.

What are you doing to spread the word about Free Software in India?

I hangout in FSCI chat groups. FSCI is very active in promoting free software, guiding people to switch to free software, providing technical support as well.

I am personally a part of the following activities by FSCI:

  • Convincing educational institutes to use Free Software and providing technical support to help them switch (see this page). Open letter to Kerala teachers is a part of this campaign. This is a hard and lifelong change that we are trying to bring and therefore, we need more volunteers. Snehal, who is from our group, could switch his department to fully free software for teaching.
  • Organizing Software Freedom Camp Diversity Edition 2021: We are trying to reach people from underrepresented (in the free software community) or underprivileged backgrounds. The main goal is to teach people about ethical issues in technology, and integrate them in our community. In the camp, people meet other like-minded people and interact with them. The learners participate in many activities in the camp and this makes it fun place. They also contribute to free software via technical (like programming) or non-technical means (like translations or organizing events).
  • Crowdfunding for fixing a problem with XMPP-matrix bridge: Matrix-XMPP bridge has a limitation that XMPP users miss messages posted in the groups hosted on matrix when they were offline. Sunday Nkwuda and Olatunji Ajayi, with help from team formed by Pirate Praveen, including me, are planning to fix the problem. Please help us to raise funds, so that we can fix the limitation. Check the fundraiser here.
  • With free software, users can fix the bugs themselves and share the modification with others, so that everyone benefits. With non-free software, we would have to beg the developer to fix the bridge. We need to actively think in terms of fixing things ourselves and building this attitude.
  • Privacy Yathra campaign: Promotes and raises awareness about privacy in India. The website is not up yet, but should be up this month. The website is here.

FSCI does a lot of other activities which I am not a part of. We run many services: poddery.com and diasp.in are our Matrix, XMPP, Diaspora service, Gitlab instance, Jitsi Meet, https://fund.fsci.in etc.

What are the challenges you face in convincing people?

There are many challenges. A lot of people do not get convinced about switching to free software or protecting their privacy.

I meet people on streets, trains, buses and wherever I find the opportunity – and I talk about the issue of free software and privacy. Usually, I try to understand what issues other people care about, and then relate digital privacy and free software with their issue.

For example, once a bookseller told me how people have stopped buying from physical bookstores, especially in COVID times, and instead buy books online from Amazon. I understood their issues and I told them that I never bought from Amazon even once (after June 2020) because ordering from Amazon puts me under surveillance. This way, I related the issues of privacy and free software with the ones they already care about. This is one good way to explain people.

Even when people don’t care, I tell them about these issues because it might be their first trigger, and they might need several triggers to consider the idea. I hope to raise some questions in people’s minds rather than convincing them. Also, I need to remind myself time and again that we cannot convince everyone that they should care for privacy. Apparently, it is a hard change to bring in today’s world and therefore, even small changes (like convincing and installing a few free software apps in their device) requires a lot of hard work.

You recently joined the LibreOffice community. How/why did you decide to join, and how’s your experience been so far?

I personally use LibreOffice as my office suite for all the work, as I am a devotee of free software. I also promote LibreOffice when I guide people to switch to free software. Further, I make my slides for talks in LibreOffice Impress, and tell the audience that the slides are made using LibreOffice which respects user’s freedom.

I think the LibreOffice community is doing very good work, and therefore I wanted to share some LibreOffice flyers with some college group, on my Mastodon and my website. Before doing that, I wanted to remove the term ‘open source’ with ‘freedom-respecting’ because personally, I don’t promote the term ‘open source’. Then I contacted Mike Saunders. We had some email exchanges and Mike gave me the idea of joining the LibreOffice Marketing team.

I found the LibreOffice community inclusive and welcoming, so I feel at home. Promoting LibreOffice also serves my broader goal of spreading free software. Therefore, I decided to help LibreOffice in marketing. Thanks a lot!

What else are you planning to do?

As of now, FSCI is planning to announce public meetings which help people switch to Free Software. It is similar to GNU/Linux installfests. We haven’t done this yet. We are planning to have our first session soon. I personally believe that even if people understand the dangers of non-free software and realize that they should switch to free software, they have some inertia. This type of meetings are aimed at breaking that inertia.

Currently, the adoption and awareness of free software is concentrated highly in a few Indian states, like Kerala. I am also planning to reach people in other areas of India too.

How can others help with Free Software adoption / spreading the word in India?

The most important part for free software adoption is to replace as much proprietary software you can with free software in your own computing. Then convince others to switch to free software.

Please visit fsci.in, and join our chat groups mentioned at the bottom of the page. Feel free to join and discuss. Help us with maintaining the services and other activities that we already do. You can start your own initiatives. One important aspect of community is that if you do the activism alone, you can easily get demotivated. Meeting like-minded people acts as a psychological boost. This is one reason I am able to boycott non-free software successfully.

Further, our goal (as FSCI) is not only creating more free software users but creating functional free software communities which are inclusive, welcoming and respectful.

I believe, we also need to have more free software businesses like libretech.shop, which sells free software powered laptops and mobiles.

Thanks for your time, Ravi! Finally, how can we reach you?

The contact page of my personal website lists the ways you can get in touch with me. You can also send me an email via ravi at ravidwivedi.in. Looking forward to hearing from you!

LibreOffice project and community recap: November 2021

Here’s our summary of updates, events and activities in the LibreOffice project last month – click the links to learn more!

  • Although the pandemic is still limiting in-person events, members of the French-speaking community met at the Open Source Experience 2021 in Paris. They had a booth with materials and information about LibreOffice.

  • Meanwhile, Bayram Çiçek, who’s helping to implement new features in LibreOffice as part of the Google Summer of Code, told us about his work and why he recently became a Member of The Document Foundation.

Keep in touch – follow us on Twitter, Facebook and Mastodon. Like what we do? Support our community with a donation – or join us and help to make LibreOffice even better!

LibreOffice Base Guide 7.2 has been released

The LibreOffice Documentation Team releases the Base Guide 7.2, based on refactored content from the Base Guide 6.4, with the 7.2 branding and text layout. It covers LibreOffice’s database component.

Download the Bse Guide 7.2

The team decided to just fast-forward the release number, given the very little developments for Base since LibreOffice 6.4. The team intended to complete the Guide set for LibreOffice 7.2 and get ready to update contents of the set for the forthcoming LibreOffice 7.3 release.

The LibreOffice Base Guide is a community effort that include valuable collaboration from Robert Großkopf,  Pulkit Krishna, Dan Lewis, Drew Jensen (In Memoriam), Peter Schofield, Jost Lange, Steve Schwettman, Jean-Pierre Ledure, Jochen Schiffers, Martin Fox, Alain Romedenne, Jenna Sargent, Hazel Russman, Andrew Pitonyak and Randolph Gamo.

Steve Fanning assembled the new Base guide and Jean Weber reviewed for publication

Jean Weber

Steve Fanning
Steve Fanning

The Base guide is available for download at https://documentation.libreoffice.org/

A printed copy from Lulu Inc. is available at this web page.

Join the Documentation Team

Press Releases

The Document Foundation Releases LibreOffice 26.2.1 with Contributions from Community and Ecosystem Partners

Videos describing new features available on YouTube and PeerTube Berlin, 26 February 2026 – The Document Foundation today announced the…

Open Document Format

Why ODF and not OOXML

Many interpreted the last article in this series as an attack on Microsoft for using the OOXML format against users'…