The Document Foundation has released the LibreOffice 7.2 office suite. Ready-made installation packages are prepared for various distributions of Linux, Windows and macOS. In pre-release, 70% of the changes were made by employees of the companies curating the project, such as Collabora, Red Hat and Allotropia, and 30% of the changes were added by independent enthusiasts.
The LibreOffice 7.2 release is labeled "Community", will be supported by enthusiasts, and is not aimed at enterprises. LibreOffice Community is freely available for free to everyone, 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 for a long time (LTS) and additional features, such as SLA (Service Level Agreements).
The most notable changes:
- Added initial support for GTK4.
- Removed OpenGL based rendering code in favor of using Skia/Vulkan.
- Added pop-up interface for searching settings and commands in MS Office style, shown over the current image (heads-up display, HUD).
- Added a dark theme, enabled through the menu "Alternative Tools ▸ Options ▸ LibreOffice ▸ Application Colors".
- Added a section to the sidebar to control Fontwork font effects.
- In the main Notebookbar panel, the ability to scroll through elements in the style selector has been implemented.
- Writer adds support for hyperlinks in tables of contents and indexes.
The ability to place a background image both in the visible borders of the document and in the borders of the text is provided.
A new "gutter" field type has been implemented to add extra padding.
Improved work with bibliography. Added display of tooltips for bibliographic fields. Added display of clickable URLs in the bibliographic table.
Support for merged cells has been improved in the MS Word-compatible mode of drawing table borders. When exporting a document to PDF, bidirectional links between labels and footnotes are preserved. By default, spell checking is disabled for indexes. In the Image Properties dialog (Format ▸ Image ▸ Properties… ▸ Image) the image file type is displayed.
- Added support for list formatting strings in ODT files, allowing you to use complex list numbering rules from DOCX documents.
- Improved font caching for faster text rendering.
- Performance optimizations have been made in the Calc spreadsheet processor: the insertion of formulas with VLOOKUP functions has been accelerated, the time for opening XLSX files and scrolling has been reduced, and filters have been accelerated. The Kahan's compensation summation algorithm has been implemented, which allowed to reduce the number of numerical errors in the calculation of the total values by some functions. Added new options to select only visible rows and columns (Edit ▸ Select). The HTML tables shown in the External Data dialog (Sheet ▸ Link to External Data…) are provided with headers to make it easier to identify the tables.
A new 'fat-cross' cursor shape has been implemented, which can be enabled via the Tools ▸ Options ▸ Calc ▸ View ▸ Themed menu.
The design of the Paste Special dialog has been changed (Edit ▸ Paste Special ▸ Paste Special…), a new preset "Formats Only" has been added.
Autofilter provides support for filtering cells by background or text color, including the ability to import and export from/to OOXML.
- Updated template collection in Impress. Removed Alizarin, Bright Blue, Classy Red, Impress and Lush Green templates. Added Candy, Freshes, Gray Elegant, Growing Liberty and Yellow Idea.
Provided options to background fill the entire page or just the area within the page boundaries.
In text blocks, the ability to place text in several columns is provided.
- The PDFium package is used to check digital signatures of PDF documents.
- In Draw, a button is implemented in the status bar for changing the document scaling factor.
- Impress and Draw speed up document loading by loading large images as needed. Improved slide rendering speed by proactively loading large images. Accelerated rendering of translucent images.
- Charts provide the ability to display data series labels.
- A new UNO object inspection tool has been added for developers.
- In the dialog for working with document templates, an output mode has been added in the form of a list with the ability to sort by name, category, date, modules, and size.
- Import and export filters have been improved, many issues have been resolved when importing and exporting WMF / EMF, SVG, DOCX, PPTX and XLSX formats. Speed up opening of some DOCX documents.
- Added initial support for compiling to WebAssembly.
Source: opennet.ru