Michael Stahl

LibreOffice uses Universal Content Providers to access files via various protocols. Due to accidents of history, LibreOffice contained 2 different UCPs for WebDav and HTTP, one based on neon and the other on Apache Serf, each with different bugs and bugfixes.

For LibreOffice 7.3, thanks to a tender from The Document Foundation, we have replaced both of them with a new UCP based on libcurl, which is designed to meet all currently known requirements, and is able to use the operating system's TLS stack on Windows and macOS.

Word fields are far more flexible than ODF/Writer fields - to most users, the additional expressiveness doesn't matter, but for some specialized use cases, Writer is limited. Writer had a rudimentary implementation of Word compatible fields for about 10 years, but it never worked well. We have added the ability to round-trip nested Word fields in RTF/DOCX formats, and fixed a bunch of long standing bugs along the way.

A well known deficiency of Writer is that its Hide Tracked Changes mode is slow. We will discuss the origin of the problem, and the current status of the plans to fix it. Also an aside on leveraging type systems to aid large scale refactoring.

C++ has evolved quite a bit over the years, and the new C++11 standard finally has usable implementations on all relevant platforms. We aim to give an overview of the current status of C++11 adoption in the LibreOffice project.