The Document Foundation has released version 25.8 of the LibreOffice office suite. Installation packages are prepared for various distributions of Linux, Windows, and macOS. A total of 160 developers contributed to this release. 40% of the changes were made by 44 employees from project partner companies such as Collabora and Allotropia, 41% by eight employees from The Document Foundation, and 19% by 108 independent enthusiasts.
The release of LibreOffice 25.8 is labeled 'Community' and will be supported by enthusiasts, not aimed at enterprise use. LibreOffice Community is freely available to everyone without exception, including corporate users. For enterprises that require additional services, products from the LibreOffice Enterprise family are developed separately, offering full support through partner companies, long-term update options (LTS), and additional features such as SLA (Service Level Agreements).
The most notable changes:
- A universal document viewer ('Viewer Mode') has been implemented, allowing any files to be opened in read-only mode with all editing tools disabled. An expert setting 'ViewerAppMode' has been added to enable the viewer mode.
- Support for exporting documents in PDF 2.0 format (ISO 32000-2) has been added. AES-256 encryption, structural elements, and PDF/A-4 specifications are now supported. A hybrid mode for embedding ODF documents has been introduced, along with a redesigned PDF export interface.
- An option for matching masks considering diacritical marks has been added to the quick search panel.
- An experimental macro management dialog (Tools ▸ Macros ▸ Macro Manager) has been implemented, combining the functions of 5 existing dialogs for working with macros and scripting. Activation of experimental features (Tools ▸ Options ▸ LibreOffice ▸ Advanced ▸ Enable experimental features) is required to enable it.
- An experimental extended encryption mode for ODF files has been added, featuring improved performance, metadata protection, and the use of AES-GCM and Argon2id algorithms.
- When opening documents in read-only mode, a formatting toolbar is displayed for sections that allow editing, as well as the option to use the Edit Field dialog.
- A toggle has been added to the password input dialogs to show the entered password.
- The welcome window displayed upon launch now provides access to appearance settings.
- A menu item for inserting hyperlinks has been added to the contextual menu displayed for selected text.
- A feature to activate toolbars has been added to the interface configurator (View ▸ User Interface).
- On the 'Page Style ▸ Area ▸ Bitmap' page, thumbnails of the background images used in the document are now displayed.
- Support for SHA-384 and AES-192 algorithms has been added for working with encrypted files.
- Compatibility with Adobe Reader for PDF documents exported with digital signatures has been ensured.
- In editing mode, it is now possible to proportionally resize OLE objects, such as charts, while maintaining their height-width ratio. The ability to snap movements to 45° angles while dragging objects with the Shift key has also been added.
- In Writer and Calc, the ability to change the rotation mode of the selected object with a single click has been implemented, as already done in Impress and Draw.
- Performance optimizations have been made—tests show that Writer and Calc can now open files 30% faster. Memory consumption has been optimized.
- Changes in Writer:
- A new line breaking rule, 'Move line', has been added, which causes the entire line to move to the next page if a part of a word falls on the last line (one part is on one page and the other part on another).
- The ability to define zones for paragraph, column, page, and spread endings where word separation is not allowed during breaking or where special breaking rules apply has been added.
- Paragraph alignment properties now allow setting a minimum, desired, and maximum space between words.
- A tooltip with information about the number of words and characters has been implemented in the navigator for headings.
- The command '.uno:BreakAboveTable' has been added to insert a paragraph break before the table.
- Text selection while scrolling content has been simplified.
- A dialog for copying field content from documents in read-only mode has been added.
- The ability to set the language for individual punctuation characters has been added.
- A command (Ctrl + ⇧ Shift + F2) to convert fields to plain text has been added.
- The ability to track changes separately in each window has been implemented.
- The ability to restore a document to its original state, discarding recorded changes while keeping information about them in the document, has been added.
- Work with interdependent tracked changes has been improved.
- An option for editing images has been added to the auto-redaction dialog (Tools ▸ Auto-Redact ▸ Add Target).
- Optimizations have been added to speed up the loading of documents with tracked changes, as well as language data and graphic objects from complex DOC files. The handling of undo operations has been optimized. The time for deleting large tables and loading tables with bookmarks has been reduced.
- A new line breaking rule, 'Move line', has been added, which causes the entire line to move to the next page if a part of a word falls on the last line (one part is on one page and the other part on another).
- Changes in the Calc spreadsheet application:
- Support for the cryptocurrency Bitcoin (₿) has been added.
- The text import dialog (CSV import) has been enhanced with a default 'Always show on import' setting, which controls the display of the dialog during CSV import and the use of saved settings.
- The ability to customize conditional formatting operators applied to icon sets has been provided.
- A 'Clear AutoFilter' function has been added to the context menu shown for spreadsheet cells.
- New functions have been implemented:
- CHOOSECOLS
- CHOOSEROWS
- DROP
- EXPAND
- HSTACK
- TAKE
- TEXTAFTER
- TEXTBEFORE
- TEXTSPLIT
- TOCOL
- TOROW
- VSTACK
- WRAPCOLS
- WRAPROWS
- The rendering speed and opening of XLSX files with a large number of conditional formatting operations, customFormat attributes, formulas, or graphic objects have been improved. Switching between sheet tabs has accelerated row height calculations and object rendering. Spellchecking in multilingual tables has been sped up. Work with large charts has been optimized. Performance with tables containing a large number of comments has been boosted.
- Changes in the Impress presentation system:
- In Slide Sorter mode, you can now use the mouse wheel while holding down the Ctrl key to change the number of slides displayed in a row.
- PPTX files now support embedded fonts.
- The algorithm for determining the font embedded in the PPTX file during export, as well as the font used, has been improved.
- Copying of content from master slides in Impress and master pages in Draw has been enabled.
- In Draw, page field boundaries are now displayed. An option is available to disable this feature under Draw::Misc::TextObject::ShowBoundary.
- Filters have been improved: support for importing autofilters from MS Excel XML files and importing encrypted hybrid PDF documents has been added. Compatibility for word wrapping logic between lines has been enhanced with DOCX documents created in Microsoft Office 2016 and later versions. Issues with displaying multi-level lists when importing DOCX files have been resolved.
- On macOS, switching to full-screen mode for document windows and the Launch Center has been implemented after clicking the green button in the window title. Menu options for positioning and layout, supported in macOS Sequoia, have been added.
- Support for Windows 7 and Windows 8/8.1 has been removed. Support for 32-bit builds for Windows has been deprecated. In the next version, support for macOS 10.15 is planned to be discontinued (only macOS 11 and later releases will be supported).
Source: opennet.ru
