Week #2: The Monorepo Lands, the Community Grows, and the Code Keeps Flowing

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.