About LEOS

LEOS (Legislation Editing Open Software) is a software designed to address the need of the public administrations and European Institutions to generate draft legislation in a legal XML format. It was created under ISA Programme - ISA Action 1.13. LEOS - Legislation Editing Open Software and it continued to evolved under ISA2 Action 2016.38 Legislation Interoperability Tools - LegIT.  The LEOS journey continues under Digital Europe Programme (DIGITAL).

LEOS has been created to addresses the modernisation and digital transformation of the drafting and revising of legislation in EU Institutions, EU agencies and bodies and Member States. The aim is to:

• Improve the quality of legislation.
• Increase the efficiency of the legislative process across the Union.
• Facilitate interoperability and seamless cooperation between the different actors in the legislative process in and between EU Institutions and Member States.
• Improve transparency and accessibility and thus effectiveness of law.
• Explore and pilot the use of innovative technologies such as Artificial Intelligence.

It is based on the Akoma Ntoso XML format an OASIS LegalDocML standard (in particular, it supports the AKN4EU interinstitutional instantiation subschema of Akoma Ntoso) that facilitates interoperability between EU institutions and Member States

The code is available for free under EUPL licence (version 1.2 or – as soon they will be approved by the European Commission - subsequent versions of the EUPL (the "Licence")), and the development team paid attention to organise the code in a structured way to ease its reusability (modules, plugins…).  

For more information on the EUPL licence, please visit this link. 

 

What’s new?

The main differences compared to the previous version are:

Cover Page

• Cover page section added on Proposal viewer page;
• Cover page tab added on Milestone explorer view;
• Cover page dedicated view is available and remove from legal act view;

Annotations

• Improved UI;
• Added possibility to justify suggestions;
• Allow external references hyperlinks in the annotations;
• Add export with annotations on regular proposal;
• Spell and grammar checker added in comment section;
• Improved annotations filters;
• Added possibility for author to manually mark annotations as processed;

 Annex Viewer

• Show annex number on Annex cover page;

Document Viewer

• Added shortcut 'Ctrl + Home' 'Ctrl + End' to navigate on document page;
• Enable user to select any version to be used as base version for live comparison when working with Mandates;

Table of Content

• Remove TOC edit mode if reverting the version;
• Possibility to delete elements in bulk;

Internal reference 

• Improvements on internal references labels;

AKN4EU Baseline alignment

• Templates updated:
  • Adaptation of "mainDocLanguage" attribute;
  • "DocLabel" container removed;
  • @xml:Id prefixed with "_";
  • Label change on the Math Text formula attribute;
  • TLCReference in the main.xml (proposal document);
  • Adaptation of "actingEntity";
  • Legal type show as in CAPS;
  • Disable caption element from the ckeditor table plugin;
  • Document filenames adapted;
  • Change <leos:ref> field in xml to align with AKN4EU Baseline specs;
• Preface of annexes adapted when annex numbering change;

Editor 

• New element indentation mechanics over element of Mandate legal text;
• Deleting first the subparagraph deletes all below hierarchy on Mandate legal text edition;

Statement of Council Reasons

• Support for new 3 templates: 2 default SCR document ; 1 dynamic SCR document;
• Support for new SCR documents on Proposal view screen;
• Support for <Crossheading> elements;
• Support for <Division> elements;

VTD Migration

• Numbering module for Articles, Paragraphs Recitals and Points migrated to Xerces for handling Mandates;
• Cleanup / refactor VTD migration support code;

New Fork and Merge feature

• Support for Fork of a proposal and send it for revision;
• Support for working on track changes under proposal revision;
• Support for moving elements with tracking capabilities within the revised document;
• Support for download live view with track changes version and clean version;
• Support for providing revision feedback to original requester;
• Support for annotations anonymization when sending back a revision feedback;
• Support for consolidating revision in diffed view mode and changes cherry picking;
• Improved milestone explorer UI;

Technical Tasks & Improvements

• Improved performance when saving changes to CMIS;
• Improved performance for refresh time needed after document after save : ref2link;
• Improved performance for internal references processing;
• Improved UI experience;
• Improved support for higher number of document versions on document repository;
• Special characters allowed on Proposal and Annexes titles;
• Chapters allow both Arabic and Roman numbering;
• Logback configuration not applied anymore for console logs;
• Improved handling of special characters on document screen;
• Fix circular dependency for Packageservice bean;
• openCMIS log4j updated to version to 2.17.1;
• Removed redundant save status message after saving;
• Improved EUR-Lex URL detection;

 

Bug Fixes

• Collaborators management
  • Reviewer could delete proposal;
  • Collaborator with role reviewer could restore previous version of the document;
• Numbering of elements
  • Fixed issue when higher element involved;
  • Fixed issue on Council numbering when importing from OJ where elements go pass 'z';
• Export
  • Several fixes on document export for Mandate handling on live view for simple and double comparison;
• Cover Page
  • EC flag picture was distorted;
• Editor View 
  • Increased stability for footnote handling;
  • Increased stability for numbering handling;
  • Increased stability for edition of text and tables;
  • Increased stability for TOC handling;
  • Split plugin was creating invalid AKN paragraphs;
  • Fixed comparison issue on deleting subparagraph while handling Mandates;
  • Several issues fixed with copy and paste in Ckeditor;
  • Indentation/ Outdentation was not available in unnumbered paragraph for Mandate legal text edition;
• VTD Migration
  • Issue fixed: Comparison giving invalid results under specific corner cases;
  • Issue fixed: Unable to create internal reference to nested points;
  • Issue fixed: When creating a new proposal by uploading a .leg file, all internal references were broken;
  • Fixed xerces issue when saved with formula;
• Annexes
  • Xerces issue fixed when trying to save by creating a subparagraph;
  • Wrong Annex numbering fixed under corner cases;
  • Fixed duplicated Preface issue in Mandate annexes;
  • Fixed the issue occurring while adding table in paragraph;
• Annotations
  • Comment on Preface is showing without anchor;
• Milestone Explorer
  • Milestone order was corrected once new cover page is introduced;
  • Fixed Milestone creation which was failing for old proposals;
• Document Viewer
  • Fixed regression style on page break;
  • Fixed the Scrolling issues with moved elements in TOC;
  • Title was getting saved without heading;
  • Point was getting removed after moving and indenting another point in certain scenario;
  • Was not possible to number Part, Title, Chapter, Section;
  • Remove delete icon for deleted elements;
  • Fix move label issues in live proposal and in comparison screen;
• Table of Content
  • Fix style issues when TOC is edited;
  • Drag and Drop position to be set in TOC;
  • Moving and deleting a paragraph was creating the duplication of paragraph;
  • Fix error when deleting a moved element;
  • TOC should not be editable while reverting versions;
  • Put the levels at right place when dropped via TOC;
• Internal References
  • Fixed broken internal references in the bill;
  • Fixed Content was not visible in internal reference window;

 

Get in touch

We are envisaging to create an open source community on software for legislation drafting, in order to share best practices, experiences, expertise, and why not code!!
Should you be interested in joining our open source community, or you would just like to share with us some observations on our work, please contact us at:
DIGIT-LEOS-FEEDBACK@ec.europa.eu.

 

We are looking forward to hearing from you,

The LEOS Team