LibreOffice 26.8 beta release

The Document Foundation has announced the start of beta testing for LibreOffice 26.8. Pre-installed packages have been prepared for various distributions. Linux, Windows и macOSThe release will take place on August 18-20.

Among the changes:

• Different background colors for the top panel (Notebookbars) can now be set in different modules (Writer, Calc, Draw, and Impress). Category labels are now available in the tabbed toolbar mode. The ability to switch between tabs in the panel using the touchpad or mouse wheel is now available.
• The ability to change the color theme without restarting the application has been provided.
• The list of styles in the toolbar, sidebar, and formatting drop-down block has been unified, so that it now looks the same everywhere and does not lose the standard styles after adding your own.
• Additional page sizes A0, A1, A2, B0, B1, B2, and B3 have been added to the page style settings dialog and sidebar.
• The sidebar in the style management dialog now allows you to apply style filters independently.
• The ability to customize keyboard shortcuts for individual documents has been provided.
• Built-in support for OpenType variable fonts, in which the weight, width, and other stylistic characteristics of a glyph can be varied arbitrarily, has been implemented. Instead of separately describing each representation, combinations of possible variations are defined in a single font resource by defining possible delta deviations from the base glyph, with the result obtained through interpolation.
• The Find and Replace dialog for text in regular expressions now supports the use of escape sequences to encode Unicode characters, such as "\u000A" for a line feed or "\u0041" for the uppercase letter "A".
• When using basic VCL widgets in the interface, a warning is displayed with a suggestion to install a desktop integration package (for example, libreoffice-kf6 for KDE).
• Correct usage of fonts whose names change depending on the system language has been ensured. Documents created using one interface language are now correctly displayed with the appropriate fonts in interfaces using a different language, if those fonts are installed on the system.
• In configurations without the APSO (Alternative Python Script Organizer) add-on installed, it is now possible to open Python scripts in the system text editor from the macro management dialog.
• An option to strip parameters from the URL ("?a=b&c=d…") has been added to the hyperlink insertion dialog.
• For resizable dialogs on the platform Windows Added a button to expand the window to fill the entire available space.
• Added a filter for searching in user-connected dictionaries.
• Numerous improvements have been made to the handling and display of text in right-to-left languages.
• Writer and Calc allow editing existing table styles.
• Changes in the Writer document editor:
  • A visual document comparison mode has been added, allowing you to evaluate the differences in two documents or different versions of the same document side by side in a single window.
  • A new paragraph layout engine (Paragraph Composer) has been implemented. It breaks text into lines and distributes spaces when justifying, taking into account not only the current line's content but also the lines that follow. The new engine evenly distributes white space across all lines of a paragraph, eliminating situations where one line is almost completely filled while another is almost empty due to long words adjacent to each other.
  • Added the "View ▸ Grids and Helplines ▸ Display Baseline Grid" option to visualize the layout grid used to align letters to the bottom of lines. You can set a custom color for horizontal guides in the settings (Tools ▸ Options ▸ LibreOffice ▸ Appearance ▸ Customizations ▸ Baseline Grid).
  • When the alignment to the baseline grid function is enabled, the correct alignment of text boxes is implemented.
  • Added support for reading and re-exporting DOCX files with style properties for hiding elements and displaying them in a gallery. DOCX import and export filters also now correctly handle comments on deleted text. Comments on deleted text in Track Changes mode are now displayed as strikethrough, just like the text itself.
  • Added a Draft view mode (View ▸ Draft), which displays only text and hides distracting design elements such as indents, headers, footers, and images.
  • The sidebar's quick search bar now supports searching within comments. Quick search options are now displayed directly in the panel, without opening a modal dialog.
  • Added an option to disable deletion of selected text when you start typing new characters without deleting the selection (Tools ▸ Options ▸ LibreOffice Writer ▸ Formatting Aids: Typing: ☑ Typing replaces selection).
  • Added support for sorting document section headings in alphabetical order.
  • The word count dialog now displays the number of words before and after the cursor.
  • In expert mode, the ability to override the contents of the style drop-down list has been added using the ShowDefaultStyles, ShowUsedStyles, ShowFavouriteStyles, and ShowUserDefinedStyles parameters in the org.openoffice.Office.Common group.
  • Improved performance when opening very large documents with images.
• Changes in the spreadsheet Calc:
  • Pivot Tables now support inserting columns with values ​​that are not entered directly but calculated based on data from a spreadsheet.
  • In the toolbar, the border control button has been converted into a combination button that, in addition to offering a drop-down menu with lists of available frame types, now remembers the selected style and, when pressed again, immediately selects it, and the menu is displayed only when you click the arrow icon.
  • Added Shuffle command to randomize the order of cells in a selected range.
  • Added a "silent" mode for blocking incorrect data input without displaying warnings.
  • Improved compatibility with the XLSX format when forcing line breaks within cells when creating links.
  • Improved interface for changing text formatting in cell headers and footers.
  • Allowed to specify relative font sizes when defining cell styles.
  • Added keyboard shortcut Ctrl + Home to move the cursor to the first occupied cell.
• Changes in the Impress presentation creation system:
  • The ability to create slides of different sizes in one presentation is now available.
  • Added support for grouping slides into sections, which can be used for navigation based on the presentation structure. In the sidebar and in control panels The page provides the ability to display user-defined slide names next to their numbers.
  • The ability to access color theme palettes via the top panel has been implemented.
  • Added the ability to switch between numbered and bulleted list styles while maintaining their structure.
  • Built-in presentation templates with 16:9 aspect ratios have been added, in addition to the 4:3 options initially offered. When using these templates, changing a slide's aspect ratio from 4:3 to 16:9 no longer results in background stretching.
  • In presentation mode, icons in the optional navigation bar are automatically scaled depending on the window size.
• An option to use the mouse wheel for zooming instead of scrolling has been added to Draw. To scroll with the mouse wheel in this mode, hold down the Ctrl key. The ability to create pages of different sizes within a single document has been implemented.
• Base now supports filtering by date or time when working with the Firebird DBMS. An issue with SQL query comments being deleted when switching to a different query in Design View has been resolved.
• Chart now supports importing and resaving OOXML files containing new chart types ("chartex") added to Microsoft Office. However, LibreOffice cannot currently display or edit these charts, displaying placeholders indicating they are not supported.
• A dialog for creating matrices has been added to Math.

Source: opennet.ru