This month two pleasant surprises happened at once. The first is the release of Linux Kernel 5.8 . The second is the release of the office suite LibreOffice 7.0. Packages for different OS are already ready , including Linux, Windows, MacOS.
There are many changes in the seventh version of the office suite . 74% were contributed by employees from organizations like Collabora, Red Hat, and CIB, the rest is the work of independent developers.
What's new?
Major changes
- The seventh version of the package received support for the OpenDocument 1.3 (ODF) format, which means that the ability to protect documents using digital signatures and encryption of content with OpenPGP keys. Added a separate type of header and footer for the main page, improved tracking of changes in the document.
- Thanks to the Skia 2D library, the possibilities for drawing text, curves and images are expanded. True, by default it is enabled only for Windows.
- Significantly improved package compatibility with formats like DOCX, XLSX and PPTX. Now documents can be saved in MS Office 2013/2016/2019 mode. Fixed an issue that resulted in an "invalid content error" when opening exported XLSX files with forms.
- The kf5 (KDE 5) and Qt5 plugins now support high pixel density screens.
- With a new installation, the panel is locked so that it cannot be accidentally removed.
- Developers have added new form galleries. They can be easily edited and styled as you like.
- A new icon theme has been developed - Sukapura, which fully complies with macOS design guidelines. For this OS, the theme is enabled by default.
Source: documentfoundation.org
- Updated the Colibre icon theme that is used on Windows. It follows the MS Office 365 style.
- The Windows installer has got new icons and visual style.
- Now, Writer can handle aligned numbers in page numbers and numbered lists. Where necessary, the editor will add zeros in the required amount.
- In addition, it is now possible to lock bookmarks and fields for editing in Writer. The display of empty fields with a gray background is provided, the processing of rotated text in table rows is improved.
- New functions RAND.NV () and RANDBETWEEN.NV () have been added to Calc. They generate the result once, without recalculating it when the cell changes.
- For various modules that support export to PDF, it is now possible to set the page size over 200 inches.
- lmpress templates converted to 16: 9 aspect ratio instead of 4: 3.
- For people with vision problems, a special tool has been added that allows you to customize the display of text for yourself.
- For Russian and Ukrainian languages, added autocorrect ASCII quotes with an apostrophe (') specified instead of a closing quote (“).
- Spelling dictionaries for languages such as English, Belarusian, Latvian, Catalan and Slovak have been significantly expanded. In addition to this, the Russian thesaurus has been updated.
- Added support for Java modules. There are currently two modules available - org.libreoffice.uno and org.libreoffice.unoloader. The juh.jar, jurt.jar, ridl.jar and unoil.jar files are merged into one libreoffice.jar archive.
- And one more important update: Python 3 is now required to execute scripts, Python 2.7 support has been removed. The export filter to Adobe Flash has also been removed.