The international consortium OASIS, dedicated to the development and promotion of open standards, approved final specification OpenDocument 1.4 (ODF) as an OASIS standard. The next stage will be the promotion of OpenDocument 1.4 as an international ISO/IEC standard. The OpenDocument 1.4 format has been supported in LibreOffice since the release of LibreOffice 25.2.
ODF is an XML-based, application- and platform-independent file format for storing documents containing text, spreadsheets, charts, and graphics. The specifications also include requirements for organizing the reading, writing, and processing of such documents in applications. The ODF standard is applicable to creating, editing, viewing, sharing, and archiving documents, which can be text documents, presentations, spreadsheets, raster graphics, vector drawings, diagrams, and other types of content.
The most notable changes to OpenDocument 1.4:
- Expanded the range of objects that can use complex backgrounds, such as color gradients and shading.
- Shapes such as rectangles and flowcharts, in addition to bare text and lists, are now allowed to embed tables.
- Added the ability to mark decorative objects so that they are ignored in tools for people with disabilities, such as screen readers.
- The capabilities for working with text in languages with different writing directions (left to right, right to left, top to bottom) have been expanded and clarified.
- The method for specifying handles that define the frame of complex shapes has been improved.
- A more flexible method has been proposed for determining the format of numbered labels in multi-level lists.
- In text documents: Allowed to position objects relative to page margins. Added the ability to specify the column spacing (gatter) in