The breadth of work happening across the project is remarkable. Here’s a taste from this week’s meetings:

Releases and Platforms: Andras is preparing a 26.04 Beta before COOL-days, targeting Windows, Mac, and Linux from the same code-base. The 25.04.10 Collabora Office release is already out. Skyler is testing a mobile release — fixing remaining issues before COOL Days, and after that a new mobile release is expected.

Wayland and Desktop: Sahil completed the X11 → Wayland migration — everything works, including multi-display with different scaling. Dynamic zoom for Impress is next.

Accessibility: Parth, Caolan, Bayram, Lilly & Henry are systematically improving accessibility — adding proper labels to sidebar checkboxes in Writer, fixing dialog focus issues in Calc, and reporting UI alignment bugs. This is the kind of unglamorous, essential work that makes software better for everyone.

Code Modernization: Dennis is nearly done converting the last jQuery-based context menus to the internal JSDialog framework — just three call-sites remain. This is important because it will let us drop a duplicated external Javascript module and its dependencies – making the code in turn smaller, simpler and more self contained. Sahil is driving TypeScript conversions for comment widgets and other components. After this beds down we will have less legacy code, fewer bugs.

Custom Cursors — PNG to SVG: Ivana is leading an effort to redesign all cursors as SVGs, making them resolution-independent and OS-agnostic. She’s cataloguing every cursor in the codebase and working with Andreas’s existing SVG set as a starting point.

AI Assistant UI: Rashesh is working on the AI sidebar, with Ivana contributing new icons. The team is discussing where to place the AI Assistant button and refining chat bubble styling.

Performance and Stability: Rashesh found and fixed a disk leak — orphaned temporary directories were accumulating in production, growing to multiple GB over weeks. Tomaž is deep in PDF rendering improvements and found a good solution for the font issues from last week. Caolán enabled SIMD optimizations into 26.04 and theme performance improvements.

Calc breakage detection: Thanks to Ferdinand Gassauer for contributing a world-first feature that helps users detect when some spreadsheet operations they are doing will break formulae elsewhere in the document, warns users allowing that to be undone easily, thanks too to Balasz for review and tweaks.

PDF and Rendering: Tomaž continues work on PDF primitives, fixing issues found during backporting to 25.04, and getting Impress thumbnails working with the new vector rendering pipeline.

Collaborative Editing: Stephan is working on CODA-Q collaborative editing, and Miklos is tackling a fun problem where document compare, comments, and the sidebar all interact in unexpected ways.

Poppler Removal: Michael S uploaded the patch to drop Poppler in favor of pdfium. It’s hitting a VCL meta-file unit test — some PDF-related type-detection code in the sdext module needs to be preserved, but the path forward is clear.

New Contributors Settling In: Leif is getting the build working and setting up Sailfish for COOL Days. Attila set up his development system on the new Gerrit and is working on template thumbnail caching. Banobe is implementing view-mode restrictions and writing Cypress tests. The community is growing from the edges in.

And much more: No doubt we have missed many improvements and people here, let us know for next week.

The TC held its inaugural meeting this week. People showed up ready to work: Michael Stahl, Michael Meeks, Andras, Stephan, Samuel Ruegger, Thibaut Piernot, Szymon, Tomaž (Quikee), Dennis, Darshan, Hubert, and Andreas K. Here’s what was discussed:

Releases on Track

Andras is continuing stable branch releases as normal, and a 26.04 Beta is planned before COOL-days. The goal is to release a new Collabora Office from the same 26.04 code-base — for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

Monorepo: One Repo to Rule Them All

Work is underway to bring the source code for COOL and Collabora Office into a single git repository. Most reviewers prefer Gerrit, so the plan is to move everything there, with GitHub becoming a read-only mirror. Dictionaries and help content will be merged in, while translations stay separate. Andras is already planning how to reflect this in the build system, with work starting immediately.

Patch Review: Catching Up Fast

Around 100 open patches on Gerrit and 127 on GitHub — the team is working hard to catch up on reviews after the migration. Darshan is tracking patches without reviewers (about 16 currently) and exploring ways to improve the welcome experience for new contributors — including a new GitHub Action that greets first-time contributors.

Code Quality and Modernization

Dennis is converting the last remaining jQuery-based context menus to the internal JSDialog framework — just three more call-sites to go. He’s also driving JS-to-TypeScript conversions, with patches already in review. Less tech debt, cleaner code.

Removing Poppler — Simplifying the Stack

The team decided to drop Poppler in favor of pdfium as the sole PDF backend. Maintaining two PDF libraries meant double the security surface for no real benefit. Caolán has already done significant work on pdfium import-to-draw. One less dependency, one less attack vector.

PDF Rendering and the Font Rabbit Hole

Tomaž is deep in PDF primitive rendering and uncovered font handling issues affecting paragraph spacing and slide layouts — specifically, different Carlito font versions in Flatpak versus other builds. The root cause goes deep into how edit engine picks between multiple font tables. A fix is in progress, with care being taken around backward compatibility.

COWASM: Offline Transitions

Stephan is working on COWASM and on/off-line transitions — getting that into CODA-Q — pushing forward the vision of Collabora Office working seamlessly whether you’re connected or not.

New Faces Digging In

What stood out most was new contributors already rolling up their sleeves. Samuel Ruegger is diving into the codebase, finding and fixing bugs on the Linux desktop. Thibaut Piernot is exploring the inner workings of the project, curious and ready to contribute. This is exactly the kind of energy that makes open source thrive.

What Everyone Is Working On

The meeting closed with a glimpse into what people are working on — the list was long: RTF fixes, performance backports, code cleanup, view-mode bug fixes, TypeScript migrations, infrastructure monitoring, and more. Nobody is waiting around. Everyone has something they’re building, fixing, or improving.

Full minutes are published for everyone to read: TC Meeting Minutes

This is how we work — openly, with the community.