The Document Foundation has published the release of the LibreOffice 25.2 office suite. Ready-made installation packages have been prepared for various Linux, Windows, and macOS distributions. 176 developers took part in the release preparation. 47% of the changes were made by 50 employees of the companies supervising the project, such as Collabora and Allotropia, 31% by seven employees of The Document Foundation, and 22% by 119 independent enthusiasts.
The LibreOffice 25.2 release is labeled "Community" and will be supported by enthusiasts and is not aimed at enterprise use. LibreOffice Community is available free of charge to everyone without exception, including corporate users. For enterprises that need additional services, products of the LibreOffice Enterprise family are being developed separately, for which partner companies will provide full support, the ability to receive updates over a long period of time (LTS) and additional functions such as SLA (Service Level Agreements).
The most notable changes:
- Added support for reading and writing documents in the OpenDocument 1.4 format (ODF), which is not yet standardized and is in the testing stage of the first draft of the specification.
- The ability to customize the application theme is provided, regardless of the desktop environment theme. To change the parameters of the theme, a tab "Tools ▸ Options ▸ LibreOffice ▸ Appearance" has been added, in which you can change the colors to your taste, including redefining the colors borrowed from the system theme, and also select a color mode (dark, light, or corresponding to the system theme mode).
- Added support for placing an arbitrary image as the background of the document window.
- To change the design settings, it is suggested to use extensions with themes, which can be installed by clicking on the "More themes" button on the theme selection page.
- Implemented the ability to display help pages in dark mode.
- A new experimental dialog for managing macros has been introduced (Tools ▸ Macros ▸ Macro Manager), which combines five previously available macro-related dialogs.
- Added the ability to show only files associated with the current module (for example, only spreadsheets in Calc) in the list of recently used files ("File ▸ Recent Documents"). The "[x] Current Module Only" option is offered to enable the filter.
- Settings for automatically transferring the end of words to another line have been added to the properties section in the sidebar.
- Added the ability to automatically sign documents with a digital signature after defining a default certificate.
- The ability to assign keyboard shortcuts to activate commands for setting text and background color has been provided.
- Added support for pasting formatted text from the clipboard that uses the , or HTML tags for strikethrough .
- Added a feature to remove all personal information associated with a document, such as author names, creation and editing times, printer name, settings, template used, names of comment authors and tracked changes.
- Changes in Writer:
- Updated icons shown in front of items in unordered lists.
- Object boundaries are now enabled via the View ▸ Boundaries menu, regardless of the formatting icons settings, and are configured in the Tools ▸ Options ▸ Writer ▸ Formatting Aids section.
- Added a tooltip with the number of words and characters in a section, displayed when hovering the mouse cursor over the section title in the Navigator panel.
- The change tracking system has been improved for managing large numbers of changes to large documents. Elements in the Manage Changes window and sidebar are now highlighted when you click on changes in a document. Sorting options have been added to the change tracking dialog and sidebar.
- When importing documents in DOCX format, the fallback to spare fonts has been improved and the correct drawing of lines has been adjusted.
- For opened documents, an option has been added to set a default zoom level that has a higher priority than the zoom level set in the document itself.
- Added support for converting a reply to a comment into a root comment.
- An option has been added to the Page Numbering Wizard to place the number into existing fields to avoid page renumbering.
- Added the ability to delete a specific type of content (for example, all images) via the Navigator panel.
- The ability to customize the colors of non-printable characters and comment backgrounds is now available.
- Added the ability to convert all footnotes at the bottom of pages to footnotes at the end of the document and vice versa.
- Added support for integrating headings directly into the main text, without moving them to a separate line.
- Updated icons shown in front of items in unordered lists.
- Changes in the spreadsheet Calc:
- An indicator has been added to the status bar to indicate that the automatic recalculation of formulas is disabled when they are entered or changed (Data ▸ Calculate ▸ AutoCalculate).
- Added a dialog for selecting or deleting duplicate entries in selected cells.
- Added support for importing and exporting connections.xml (Power Query) file for OOXML.
- Improved interface and expanded search capabilities in the Function Wizard dialog and the Functions tab in the sidebar.
- The behavior of the "Select All" operation has been changed - when in a cell, performing this operation will select all adjacent cells with data on the first call, and on the next call - the entire sheet will be selected. To disable this behavior, the SelectRangeBeforeAll setting has been added.
- Added the ability to save Solver models in a spreadsheet file, as well as generate reports with sensitivity analysis (analysis of the degree of influence of the initial parameters on the result).
- Added the WrapNextPrevSheetTab setting to control the behavior when navigating through spreadsheet sheets using the "Ctrl + PgDn" and "Ctrl + PgUp" keyboard shortcuts.
- The Subtotals dialog now has a new option called "Summary below data" to display summary information at the bottom of the table.
- Added spreadsheet sheet protection settings related to PivotTables, PivotCharts, and AutoFilters.
- An indicator has been added to the status bar to indicate that the automatic recalculation of formulas is disabled when they are entered or changed (Data ▸ Calculate ▸ AutoCalculate).
- Changes in the Impress presentation creation system:
- The dialog for performing actions when clicking on slides during a presentation has been switched to work in non-blocking mode.
- Implemented the ability to customize translucent text in relation to individual paragraphs when exporting in SVG format.
- Added support for activating automatic slide repeat in windowed mode.
- Anti-aliasing and glow effects are enabled on objects with framed text.
- Many small improvements have been made to templates. In the Nature_Illustration, Pencil, and Piano templates, images have been replaced with editable shapes. In the Blueprint Plans and Metropolis templates, background raster images have been replaced with vector images in SVG format. The DNA template has improved rendering of the DNA double helix. The Blueprint Plans and Vintage templates have removed the final slides. In the Master Notes and Handout modes, all templates now have visible elements. Information about authors has been added to the File ▸ Properties dialog.
- An option has been added to the "Align" context menu item to center objects on an Impress slide or Draw page.
- Fixed an issue where protruding text in notes would be cut off when printing a presentation.
- Draw now supports cropping object outlines in imported PDF documents.
- The interface of the dialog for working with SQL queries has been improved in Base. Saving of user input within a session has been ensured and display of the number of results has been added. Support for ODBC calls with Unicode has been added.
- Math provides the ability to save formulas in user-defined categories.
- Improved compatibility with the OOXML format used in MS Office.
- Improved support for Microsoft Visio 5 format. The libvisio library has been updated to version 0.1.8.
- For the macOS platform, an add-on has been provided for quick preview of documents using the Quick Look mechanism.
- The next release of LibreOffice 25.8 is scheduled to end support for Windows 7 and Windows 8/8.1 platforms.
Source: opennet.ru
