LibreOffice 7.3 office suite release

The Document Foundation presented the release of the office suite LibreOffice 7.3. Ready-made installation packages are prepared for various Linux, Windows and macOS distributions. 147 developers took part in preparing the release, of which 98 are volunteers. 69% of the changes were made by employees of the companies overseeing the project, such as Collabora, Red Hat and Allotropia, and 31% of the changes were added by independent enthusiasts.

The LibreOffice 7.3 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:

• The marking of grammatical and spelling errors in the text has been reworked - the wavy lines that highlight errors are now more visible on screens with high pixel density and adapt to changes in scale.
• The default Colibre icon theme on the Windows platform has been updated, and icons related to graphics, saving, formatting, and undoing changes have been redesigned.
• The ability to generate one-dimensional barcodes in addition to QR codes has been implemented.
• All LibreOffice components have unified values ​​that determine line width.
• Changes in Writer:
  • Added support for tracking changes in tables. Implemented tracking of deletions and additions of table rows, including empty rows. An interface has been added for visual analysis of the history of deleting/adding tables and individual rows, as well as for managing changes in tables (you can now accept or discard deletions and additions of rows and entire tables with one click). The display of deleted and added changes in different colors is ensured, as well as the correct hiding of deleted rows and tables when the hiding changes mode is enabled. Tooltips with change history have been added for table columns.
  • The change tracking system now supports text movement tracking. When analyzing changes, moved text is now highlighted in green, and in the place from where the text was moved it is shown as strikethrough, and where it was moved – underlined. In change management mode, a tooltip and a special icon have been added to track text movements. Operations such as changing the order of paragraphs or items in lists are also visually marked.
  • Improved tracking of formatting and paragraph style changes. When moving list elements, it is ensured that only the moved elements are shown, without touching other intermediate parts of the list.
  • The ability to attach hyperlinks to shapes is provided.
  • Footnotes and notes indicated at the end of a paragraph are now processed similarly to footnotes in the text, i.e. fall under the regular expressions "[\p{Control}]" and "[:control:]".
  • To improve compatibility with DOCX documents, when importing paragraph styles, information about the list levels and character styles associated with the paragraph is now carried over.
  • Rendering of complex documents has been accelerated. Improved performance for exporting complex documents to PDF. Loading of large RTL documents has been accelerated.
  Changes in Calc:
  • The “Sheet ▸ Link to External Data” dialog ensures that HTML tables are shown in the order in which they appear in the source file.
  • The Kahan compensatory summation algorithm has been implemented, to speed up the calculation it uses vector CPU instructions, such as AVX2.
  • Cells containing formulas can be indented using spaces or tabs. Indentations are now also preserved and reproduced when writing and reading in OOXML and ODF formats.
  • When importing and exporting data in CSV format, the ability to configure the field separator has been added by specifying the 'sep=;' parameter or '»sep=;»' in a string instead of data.
  • In the dialog for importing and inserting data in CSV format, an option has been implemented for calculating formulas (“Evaluate formulas”), when enabled, data starting with the “=” symbol are perceived as formulas and are calculated.
  • Added support for Bash-style input completion. For example, if a column contains cell "ABCD123xyz", typing "A" will prompt the user to add "BCD", the user can accept by clicking the right arrow, then enter "1" and receive a recommendation of "23".
  • Cell cursor display now uses the system highlight color instead of the default font color.
  • In the “Standard Filter” dialog, the ability to filter elements by background or text color in a cell has been added.
  • Queries and filters that use text operations such as 'contains' provide the ability to work with digital data.
  • Quick search mode now searches among values ​​rather than formulas (an option to select a mode is available in a separate search dialog).
  • Increased speed of opening files in XLSM format. Inserting large diagrams has been accelerated. Improved performance of search and filtering functions. The use of multithreading in calculations in Calc has been expanded.
  • Screen sizes compatible with PowerPoint and Google Slides (Slide ▸ Slide Properties… ▸ Slide ▸ Paper Format) such as “Widescreen” and “On-screen show” have been added to the Impress presentation software. Resolved an issue with sharing shape properties between shape groups. In the “3D-Settings” dialog, correct rendering of surfaces is ensured when selecting the “Matte”, “Plastic” and “Metal” properties, which were previously displayed as the same type.
• Added a new content provider (UCP, Universal Content Provider) for WebDAV and HTTP, based on the libcurl library.
• Windows and macOS use the TLS stack provided by the platform.
• Significant performance optimizations have been made when working with multiple instances of the same document (for example, when different parts of the same document are open in different windows, or when multiple users are collaborating on the same document in LibreOffice Online).
• Improved rendering when using a backend based on the Skia library.
• When building official executable files, optimization is enabled at the linking stage (Link-Time Optimization), which allows for an overall performance increase.
• Numerous improvements have been made to import documents in DOC, DOCX, PPTX, XLSX and OOXML formats, as well as export to OOXML, DOCX, PPTX and XLSX. Overall, there is a significant improvement in compatibility with MS Office documents.
• Added support for the Inter-Slavic language (a language understandable to speakers of different languages ​​with Slavic roots) and the Klingon language (a race from the Star Trek series).
  
  Source: opennet.ru