In the past few days there has been an uptick in patches merged for the LibreOffice 25.8 open-source office suite around “Qt Weld” that has been seeing an increasing number of patches over the past few months for enhancing the Qt toolkit integration.
LibreOffice developer Michael Weghorn has been pushing many patches for enhancing the Qt toolkit support with LibreOffice for its “Weld” theming interface. This work originates from a five year old bug report for enhancing the Qt toolkit usage in a similar manner to GTK:
“Currently LO’s qt5 / kf5 VCL backend just uses the QStyle interface to draw the LO UI to look like native widgets. As a result, this has limits for various UI designs rendered by native Qt style engines not exposed via that interface.
Already a few years ago, Caolan started to introduce the new “weld” theming interface, which uses native – in his case gtk+ – widgets, to get even better GNOME integration.
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Currently that API is very gtk+ specific, but this shouldn’t prevent adaption by the Qt backend in general.”
Within LibreOffice Git for the next v25.8 release there’s been a lot of these Qt weld patches building up.
It will be interesting to see how far this Qt weld work is by the time of LibreOffice 25.8 in August for hopefully delivering a nicer Qt-based office suite experience for pleasing KDE Plasma desktop users and the like.
