The Document Foundation has announced the publication of a maintenance release of the Community edition of LibreOffice 7.1.3, aimed at enthusiasts, power users and those who prefer the latest versions of the software. Ready-made installation packages are prepared for Linux, macOS and Windows platforms. The update only includes fixes for 105 bugs (RC1, RC2). About a quarter of the fixes are related to improved compatibility with Microsoft Office formats (DOCX, XLSX and PPTX).
Let us recall that starting with branch 7.1, the office suite was divided into an edition for the community (“LibreOffice Community”) and a family of products for enterprises (“LibreOffice Enterprise”). Community editions are supported by enthusiasts and are not intended for enterprise use. For enterprises, it is proposed to use products from the LibreOffice Enterprise family, for which partner companies will provide full support and the ability to receive updates over a long period of time (LTS). LibreOffice Enterprise can also include additional features such as SLA (Service Level Agreements). The code and distribution conditions remain the same and LibreOffice Community is available free of charge to everyone without exception, including corporate users.
Additionally, we can note the inclusion in the LibreOffice code base of initial support for using the Emscripten compiler to assemble the office suite into WebAssembly intermediate code, which allows it to run in web browsers. WebAssembly provides browser-independent, universal, low-level intermediate code for running applications compiled from various programming languages in the browser.
The assembly is carried out by specifying the option “—host=wasm64-local-emscripten” in the configure script. To organize the output, a VCL backend (Visual Class Library) is used based on the Qt5 framework, which supports assembly in WebAssembly. When working in a browser, standard interface elements from the LibreOfficeKit are used whenever possible.
The key difference between building in WebAssembly and the long-shipping LibreOffice Online product is that when using WebAssembly, the office suite runs entirely in the browser and can run in isolation without accessing external servers, while the main LibreOffice Online engine runs on the server and in the browser only the interface is translated (the layout of the document, the formation of the interface and the processing of user actions are performed on the server).
Moving the main part of LibreOffice Online to the browser side will allow us to create a collaborative edition that relieves the load on servers, minimizes differences from desktop LibreOffice, simplifies scaling, reduces the cost of maintaining the hosting infrastructure, can work in offline mode, and also allows for P2P interaction between users and end-to-end data encryption on the user side.
Source: opennet.ru