LibreOffice supports Zip compression for ODT and DOCX files, among other compression uses. There’s now work beginning to be merged for supporting Zstandard (Zstd) compression moving forward.
For nearly five years now has been this Document Foundation bug report suggesting Zstandard compression as a faster and higher compression ratio than Zip. But it also comes down to a documentation format standards issue for being able to support documents compressed with Zstd. As such there hasn’t been much activity around Zstd compression in LibreOffice Git until the past month.
Open-source developer Akshay Kumar Dubey has been working to accomplish Zstd integration within LibreOffice. Akshay refactored the inflator code within LibreOffice Git for better extensibility. And then finally merged today is adding actual Ztd build support and decompression handling to LibreOffice.
“Integrate build system support for the Zstandard (zstd) library and implement the corresponding C++ decompression stream classes, enabling future use of zstd-compressed streams in ZIP packages.
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This completes the infrastructure for zstd decompression support. The next step (Part 2c) involves adding logic to select the appropriate Inflater based on the ZIP entry’s compression method ID.”
It will be interesting to see in time ultimately where Zstd usage ends up within this open-source office suite and the wider document standards space.
