Developer Blog

Keep track of the latest changes to the code! 

TDF ejects its core developers

Update: 2026-04-07 Let’s kick the developers out! In the ongoing saga of The Document Foundation (TDF), their Membership Committee has decided to eject from membership all Collabora staff and partners. That includes over thirty people who have contributed faithfully to LibreOffice for many years. It is interesting to see a...

Start of automated testing of the new Collabora Office on Windows (CODA-W)

It is useful to check that basic functionality in CODA-W is not broken accidentally by commits to other parts of the code. We have lots of existing tests for COOL functionality in general that use Cypress. That technology is not usable for testing CODA, as its JavaScript part does not...

New MetricSpinButton implementation

A “metric” spinbutton is a spinbutton that has an associated unit: cm/inch, points and percentage are common units used. The previous implementation used the standard spinbuttons and overlaid the unit some distance from the trailing edge so it could be seen and not obscure the value. Putting the unit inside...

Log anonymization

One of the features of Collabora Online has been a way to ensure that log files (of reasonable verbosity) don’t include any personally identifying information. This allows logs to be shared by customers and partners with confidence to allow debugging unusual problems. This is done with a one-way hash, and...

Document Property based Fields MSO Behaviour

Basics: Office documents like ODF (odt, …) and OOXML (docx, …) can have so called Fields embedded in the text. Fields can automatically update the content they show. The most common example may be having a page number in the footer of each page. The piece of text showing the...

Keep Overriden Colors in the Slide Layouts

Related commit: pptx: export overrideClrMapping in slide layouts In presentations saved as PPTX file format there is a possibility to map some theme colors differently in particular slides or layouts than in the general master theme (see <a:overrideClrMapping>). For example you can use it for different “section separator” slides –...

Fixing a layout bug in Writer

A problem was reported about Writer, and we investigated. In a document with a lot of content, on certain editing operations, an entire table would...

Highlighting in Document Comparison

I worked with Gokay on a new document compare view for COOL Writer. Part of that feature is to be able to highlight the matching...

Various Papercuts

These developments were made in February, 2026. Available in 26.04 only. Collabora Online can be built against musl libc musl libc is an alternative implementation...

Accordion bits in sidebar

Among a host of other accessibility enhancements, we have implemented the W3C Accordion Pattern for our expanders, as used in the sidebar and dialogs, where...

Pointer in range

Mostly for historical reasons, LibreOffice has its own `SvMemoryStream` class (for, you guessed it, writing in-memory streams). For quite a while now, code in the...

1800 timezone files !?

Collabora Online puts a lot of effort into containing your changes inside a new file-system jail per document. We use chroot or unprivileged user namespaces...