ReleaseNotes/24.8

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Writer

• Performance of rendering text in CJK writing systems with font fallback was improved. (Jonathan Clark, TDF) tdf#81272
• The width of the Comment panel can now be adjusted. (Samuel Mehrbrodt, allotropia) tdf#73953 tdf#159145
• Bullets used in the document can now be selected in the bullets dropdown. (Samuel Mehrbrodt, allotropia) tdf#161056
• Improve support for multi-page floating tables. blog post. (Miklos Vajna, Collabora)
• Legal numbering in Writer: DOC and RTF support blog post. (Miklos Vajna, Collabora)
• Fixed an issue with shape positioning in DOCX import for RTL paragraphs. (Miklos Vajna, Collabora) tdf#160833
• Improved continuous endnotes to be based on sections, now enabled by default for all DOCX, DOC and RTF documents. blog post (Miklos Vajna, Collabora) tdf#160984
• Formatting characters are now treated independently from fields following toggle for non-printable characters (aka Pilcrow / Ctrl + F10), keeping and respecting the settings under Tools ▸ Options ▸ Writer ▸ Formatting Aids, and visualized all in blue. (Heiko Tietze, TDF) tdf#58434 tdf#161196

• 

  Appearance of various formatting characters

• The hyperlink tab was removed from character properties. Please use the dedicated dialog instead. (Heiko Tietze, TDF) tdf#132253
• A formatting aid was added to enclose selected text with parentheses, square brackets, curly braces or quotation marks when pressing the respective opening character. Configured using Tools ▸ Options ▸ Writer ▸ Formatting Aids ▸ Enclose with characters. (Yiğit Akçay) tdf#151710
• Style spotlight only applies to styles that are used in the document. (Jim Raykowski) tdf#158992
• Table Alignment and Left/Right spacing can be changed via the Sidebar. (Oliver Specht, CIB) tdf#159662
• Hyperlink names show as tooltips. (Tibor Nagy, allotropia) tdf#159899
• New "Find" deck in the Sidebar, which lists the results of a quick search along with their context. The shortcut Alt + 9 is assigned to it. (Khushi Gautam) tdf#95405

• 

  Quick Find deck in Sidebar

• 24.8.2
  Improved performance by about a 100 times when handling tables with horizontally merged cells that span through two pages and with Keep with next paragraph parameter enabled (Format ▸ Paragraph ▸ Text Flow). (Mike Kaganski, Collabora) tdf#152298

Navigator

• Insert various types of cross-references by drag-and-dropping items from the Navigator to the document, which pops up a list of options that apply to the content type. This feature replaces the "Drag mode" button (which only offered "Insert as Hyperlink/Link/Copy"). (Note that for an unsaved document, this feature only supports Bookmarks and Sections.) (Jim Raykowski) tdf#36310
• It is now possible to delete footnotes and endnotes using the Navigator. (Jim Raykowski) tdf#160598
• Headings display flat in the Navigator when sorted alphabetically. (Jim Raykowski) tdf#160657
• Navigator now has an indicator for images with broken links. (Jim Raykowski) tdf#158114

Hyphenation

Exclude words from hyphenation

Format ▸ Character... ▸ Position ▸ Exclude from Hyphenation is the first and ODF-compliant solution to disable the hyphenation of selected words in hyphenated paragraphs without losing spell checking and locale-dependent text layout. blog post. (László Németh) tdf#106733

• 

  Disabled hyphenation of the word “Ökobio” in paragraph 2 and 3. Using the old workaround in paragraph 2 (modifying language of the word to [None]) resulted lost text layout and spell checking. With the new “Exclude from hyphenation” character formatting in paragraph 3, the word “Ökobio” keeps spell checking and text layout: “Ö” (O with umlaut) gets wide dots only in German because of locale-dependent font features of Linux Libertine (Display G).

“No Break” context menu and visualization

Hyphenated words got a new context menu item “No Break” to disable their hyphenation using the new “Exclude from hyphenation” character formatting. (The context menu item remains available for the words with disabled hyphenation to enable their hyphenation again.) (László Németh) tdf#161563

Words with disabled hyphenation are visualized with light gray dotted underline in Show Formatting Marks mode. tdf#161565

• 

  New “No Break” context menu of hyphenated words, and light gray dotted underline visualization of words with disabled hyphenation. (Note: no visualization for the previous workaround, the word with language setting “None” in the second paragraph.)

Hyphenation across page

By disabling Format ▸ Paragraph... ▸ Text Flow ▸ Hyphenation across options, both parts of a hyphenated word shall lie within a single column, page or spread. blog post. (László Németh) tdf#132599

• By disabling Column (which disables also Page and Spread), Writer moves the last hyphenated line of the column or page to the next column or page, similar to the default behavior of MSO 2013 and newer.
• By disabling only Spread, Writer moves the last hyphenated line of the right pages to the next page (a spread is a set/pair of a left and a right page, which can be seen simultaneously, for instance when opening a book), according to New Hart’s Rules (Oxford University Press, 2005).
• By disabling Page, last hyphenated line of every page moves to the next page.
• By disabling Last full line of paragraph, the hyphenated word of the last full line of the paragraph moves to the last line (if there is enough place for it). This results in longer last lines, and removed hyphenation in the bottom right-hand corner of the paragraph.

• 

  Disabling Hyphenation across ▸ Page, the last hyphenated line of the page (“except that it has at-”) was shifted to the next page. Note: also prior “Don’t hyphenate...” options were moved to the end of the hyphenation settings, negating them to “Hyphenate” (similar to MSO and DTP).

Compound constituent characters at line end

In Format ▸ Paragraph... ▸ Text Flow ▸ Compound characters at line end, set 3 (or more) characters to improve the hyphenation in Danish, Dutch, German, Hungarian, Norwegian and Swedish by preferring the hyphenation between constituents of a compound word instead of breaking the second (third, etc.) constituent right after its first 2 (or more) characters. (László Németh) tdf#158885

For example, German “Computerprogramm” can be hyphenated as “Computerpro-gramm”, but setting 4, only “Computer-programm”, according to its compound constituents “Computer|programm”.

This can be useful for better typography, especially in headings or left-aligned text.

Calc

• Define ranges when exporting sheets to PDF. (Nick Wingate, Collabora) 13bd849f
• Improve localization for the status bar and the sidebar with multiple views. blog post. (Miklos Vajna, Collabora)
• The sheet protection dialog is async. (Hubert Figuière, Collabora) e86c6423
• Add FILTER, RANDARRAY, SEQUENCE, SORT, SORTBY, UNIQUE functions. (Balázs Varga, allotropia) tdf#126573 OASIS OFFICE-4156 OASIS OFFICE-4157 OASIS OFFICE-4158
• Add LET function. (Balázs Varga, allotropia) tdf#137543
• Add XLOOKUP function. (Winfried Donkers) (Balázs Varga, allotropia) tdf#127293 OASIS OFFICE-4154
• Add XMATCH function. (Balázs Varga, allotropia) tdf#128425 OASIS OFFICE-4155
• Improve copy and paste between Calc and Google Sheets. blog post. (Miklos Vajna, Collabora) tdf#159483
• Improve threaded calculation performance. Lockless Number Formatting and optimized reference counting. (Caolán McNamara, Collabora) tdf#160056
• Optimize redraw after a cell change by minimizing the area that needs to be refreshed. (Caolán McNamara, Collabora) 9bc2872d
• In multi-window view of a spreadsheet, allow spell-checking enabled in one window while disabled in another. (Caolán McNamara, Collabora) 7ecf1c5a
• Comments can now be deleted from the Navigator's right-click menu. (Rafael Lima) tdf#158704
• AutoFill can now be called via UNO commands without needing to use the mouse. (Bayram Çiçek, Collabora) 35c93c5f
• Improvements to the comment indicator in Calc. Use the expert setting NoteIndicator with values above 1 to have a fix size for the indicator. (Heiko Tietze, TDF) tdf#158958
• Cell focus rectangle moved apart from cell content. (Rafael Lima) (Heiko Tietze; TDF) tdf#143733

• 

  Cell focus rectangle outside the cell

• Support importing and exporting OOXML pivot table (cell) format definitions, which allow direct formatting of the pivot table cells (which survive pivot table update). (Tomaž Vajngerl, Collabora)

• 

  Pivot table looks different when import of pivot table cell formats is supported

• AutoFilter now has a Lock checkbox to prevent losing an unapplied selection when searching. (Sahil Gautam) tdf#133836
• Displaying comment authorship metadata is now optional. (Heiko Tietze, TDF) tdf#156885
• Data validity can now be made case-sensitive. (Balázs Varga, allotropia) tdf#157657
• Comments can be edited by right-clicking them in the Navigator. (Rafael Lima) tdf#158514
• The cell cursor was made more accessible to colour blind users. (Sahil Gautam) tdf#158891
• Sheet ▸ Insert Cells now allows adding more than one row or column at a time. (Sahil Gautam) tdf#80390
• New option to denote with background color if the active cell is in Edit Mode (Tools ▸ Options ▸ LibreOffice Calc ▸ View ▸ Edit Cell Highlighting). (Sahil Gautam) tdf#63374

Impress

• Notes are now available as a collapsible pane under the slide in Normal view. This can be turned on with View ▸ Notes Pane. (Sarper Akdemir, allotropia) tdf#33603

• 

  Notes pane in Normal view

• By default, the running Slideshow Presentation is immediately updated when applying changes in EditView or in PresenterConsole, even on different Screens. It can be switched on/off using Slide Show ▸ Slide Show Settings... ▸ Live-mode slideshow editing. (Armin Le Grand, allotropia)
• Show text formatting toolbar when editing a text box in second toolbar row. (Samuel Mehrbrodt, allotropia) dee3e2d7
• The default number of slides per row, that is used in the Slide Sorter (View ▸ Slide Sorter) can now be set in Expert Configuration (Tools ▸ Options ▸ LibreOffice ▸ Advanced ▸ Open Expert Configuration) - search property SorterSlidesPerRow. Previously this number was hard coded. (Cor Nouws, Collabora) tdf#160601

• 

  Default number of slides per row in Sorter can now be set.

• Bundled Templates: refactoring of the templates from Indonesian community (Candy, Freshes, Grey Elegant, Growing Liberty and Yellow Idea) to replace dummy texts with localized placeholders to ease user workflow. (Laurent Balland) tdf#160712

• 

  Fixed dummy texts (Lorem Ipsum) were replaced with placeholders.

• A dialog was added for jumping to a specific slide or page in Impress and Draw. (Akshay Warrier) tdf#159372
• Pressing Enter in an empty list item ends the list. (Gülşah Köse, Collabora) tdf#160213
• Scrolling between slides is now possible in Normal view. (Sarper Akdemir, allotropia) tdf#38164
• PPTX files with heavy use of custom shapes now open faster. (Áron Budea, Collabora) tdf#148616

Draw

• Support was added for tiling patterns in imported PDF files. (David Gilbert) tdf#113050
• Hovering over a layer's tab highlights the objects it contains. (Jim Raykowski) tdf#157255

• 

Base

• Firebird: Saving of data should be done automatically. (Juan C. Sanz) tdf#117118
• Firebird: Solved DATALOSS Data updated (new/edit) using the data Beamer window or Dataform in odt/ods files when they are closed. (Juan C. Sanz) tdf#117513
• Connect to MS Access mdb files by means of "ACE.OLEDB.12.0" provider. (Juan C. Sanz) tdf#158056 tdf#43187 tdf#137252 tdf#157561

Chart

• New chart types "Pie-of-Pie" and "Bar-of-Pie" break down a slice of a pie as a pie or bar sub-chart respectively. This also enables import of such charts from OOXML files created with Microsoft Office / 365. (Kurt Nordback) tdf#50934

• 

  A Bar-of-Pie chart breaking down the Australian Energy mix for the year 2021-2022

• Text inside chart's titles, text boxes and shapes (and parts thereof) can now be formatted with the Character dialog (available with the Character button in the Formatting toolbar, with the right-click context menu, or with the top-bar menu: Format ▸ Character). This allows, for example, to use subscripts and superscripts in formulas annotating the chart. (Balázs Varga, allotropia) tdf#39052 tdf#58038

Core / General

• Diacritics no longer being clipped on screen. (Jonathan Clark) tdf#152024
• The "Special Characters" dialog allows typing the Unicode (U+NNN) to filter the matching glyphs. (Mike Kaganski, Collabora) tdf#111816
• The recent document list will now only show documents for the current module (Writer only showing text documents, Calc only showing spreadsheets, etc). The change simply toggles the ShowCurrentModuleOnly setting from False to True, and can be changed back in Expert Configuration. (Samuel Mehrbrodt, allotropia) tdf#159120
• The user is now notified of the need to reload the document to take into account a change in Macro Security Level. (Rafael Lima) tdf#159985
• LevelBar widget is now implemented for JSDialog. (Hubert Figuière, Collabora) 460a7103
• Although it was already possible to type their ISO 639-2 codes by hand, "[Multiple]" (mul) and "[Undetermined]" (und) are now listed at the top of language lists (along with "[None]", zxx). (Eike Rathke, Red Hat) tdf#160256
• Chinese and Japanese word selection is now based on ICU rules. Issues can be reported on the ICU website. (Jonathan Clark, TDF) tdf#49885
• New "Sinusoid" shape added to the Basic Shapes category. (Ritobroto Mukherjee) tdf#50998

• 

  New sinusoid shape

• There is now an option to disable active content and OLE Automation in Tools ▸ Options ▸ LibreOffice ▸ Security ▸ Security Options and Warnings. (Sarper Akdemir, allotropia) tdf#158375
• Buttons that control Font, Highlight and Background colors now retain their value between sessions. (Andreas Heinisch) tdf#72991
• Improved WebDAV/HTTP UCP authentication with Microsoft SharePoint, depending on server configuration. (Michael Stahl, allotropia) d7492813
• Improved CMIS UCP authentication with Microsoft SharePoint, depending on server configuration. (Michael Stahl, allotropia) d2d97395
• The MAR-based automatic update available on TDF Windows builds is no longer experimental-mode--only. See Tools ▸ Options ▸ Online Update ▸ Automatic Update. (Stephan Bergmann, allotropia)
• Objects can now be searched in the Gallery sidebar deck. (Oliver Specht; CIB) tdf#81880

• 

  Search box filtering for object names that contain the string "check".

Filters

• If the option Tools ▸ Options ▸ LibreOffice ▸ Security ▸ Options ▸ Remove personal information on saving is enabled, then personal information will not be exported. This includes author names and timestamps (created, modified, printed), editing duration, printer name and config, the template associated with a document, as well as author and date information for comments and tracked changes. (Samuel Mehrbrodt, allotropia)
  • ODF: c479944e ba891193
  • ODS/UOS: 2d60017a
  • OOXML: 1e49f469
  • RTF: 16c7a6f7 63b46c21 09c5cdfe
  • DOC: 21120ae0 b6cdd1d7
  • PPT: a298ba36
  • PPTX: 5fe7062f
  • XLS(X): 9d0d9d8a 0acac1a2

• Writer can now retain the default page style's background when saving as DOCX. (Justin Luth, Collabora) tdf#126533

SVG

• Support feMerge, feComposite and feBlend. (Xisco Fauli, TDF) tdf#159660 tdf#160171 tdf#160721 tdf#160726 tdf#160782

ODF Wholesome Encryption

A new mode of password-based ODF encryption has been implemented, with the following advantages:

• more performant due to deriving a key only once per package
• more tamper-resistant with authenticated encryption (AES-GCM)
• better hiding of metadata to reduce information leaks
• higher resistance to brute forcing using memory-hard Argon2id key derivation function (Michael Stahl, allotropia) tdf#105844

Warning: You will need LibreOffice 24.2 or newer to open these encrypted files. To disable this feature, change Tools ▸ Options ▸ Load/Save ▸ General ▸ ODF format version to a version that is not "Extended". If you try to open these encrypted files with an older version of LibreOffice, it reports that the file is corrupt and therefore cannot be opened, which is actually a misleading info.

User Interface

• The default bullet selection can now be modified. (Samuel Mehrbrodt, Tibor Nagy; allotropia) tdf#108697 tdf#69724
• The Keep Ratio setting in the Position and Size dialog was made more intuitive. (Heiko Tietze, TDF) tdf#158531

Accessibility

• Buttons and combo boxes in Writer's Navigator now set the properties needed for proper announcement by screen readers. (Michael Weghorn, TDF) tdf#159910
• Toggling formatting like bold or italic in Writer is now announced by the NVDA screen reader (version 2024.3 or newer). (Michael Weghorn, TDF) tdf#160695
• Previously incorrect position-reporting of UI elements on the accessibility layer when using the GTK 3 UI variant on Linux was fixed, which, for example, makes GNOME Magnifier reliably show the right portion of the screen while typing when zoom is enabled on Wayland. (Michael Weghorn, TDF) tdf#159369
• For the GTK 3 UI variant on Linux, a problem resulting in an incorrect accessibility tree being reported was fixed, improving announcement by the Orca screen reader. (Michael Weghorn, TDF) tdf#160806
• Accessibility for comboboxes has been improved. (Michael Weghorn, TDF) tdf#160971

Changes in UI strings

• The legacy Fontwork command in Impress and Draw was renamed to Text along Path. (Olivier Hallot, TDF) tdf#94535
• The label "Structure:" in the Function Wizard dialog has been changed to "Content:". (Bayram Çiçek, Collabora) tdf#161502
• Organizer was renamed to General in style dialogs. (Samuel Mehrbrodt, allotropia) tdf#161388

Scripting

JavaScript

• Rhino was updated to 1.7.14 version. The Rhino JavaScript Debugger window is removed with this change. (Stephan Bergmann, allotropia) 58c4457a

Basic IDE

• New Color Scheme dialog to pick one of six syntax highlighting color schemes independently from the current Application Colors. Find it in View ▸ Color Scheme. (Rafael Lima) tdf#156925

• 

  Color Scheme dialog in action

• The current line in Basic Editor now has a highlight color for better visibility. (Rafael Lima) tdf#158750
• The visibility status of the UI elements Object Catalog, Watched Expressions and Call Stack (which can be toggled in the View menu) is now remembered after closing and reopening the Basic IDE. (Rafael Lima) tdf#155381
• Clicking the line number in the status bar will open the Go to Line dialog. (Rafael Lima) tdf#158749
• A command was added for toggling code block commenting. (Rafael Lima) tdf#140004

ScriptForge

• Advanced Python IDE's like PyCharm or VSCode utilize type hints to offer autocomplete suggestions during code writing by analyzing type annotations and combining them with the code context. Type hints, also referred to as type annotations, are comments embedded in the code specifying the data types of variables, parameters, and return values. Python scripts may benefit from the support of type hints when using the ScriptForge API. (Jean-Pierre Ledure) c5e0c65b

• 

  Documentation popup appearing when hovering a ScriptForge method in the PyCharm Community IDE

Command Line

• For Impress files, the --show parameter can now take an optional ={slide-number} to specify at which slide the slideshow should start. For example, start a slideshow directly at the fifth slide with: libreoffice --show=5 presentation.odp. (Justin Luth, Collabora) tdf#69192

Localization

Changes to locale data

• For the English (South Africa) {en-ZA} and other South African {*-ZA} locales, the decimal separator was changed to period dot (".", previously comma ",") and the group separator was changed to comma (",", previously the space character). This is done in order to align with common practices and the latest changes in the Unicode Common Locale Data Repository (CLDR). (Eike Rathke; Red Hat, Inc.) tdf#159829
• For the Danish {da} locale, the words for cross-referencing as "above/below" (as in "see the figure above") have been changed from "over/under" to "ovenfor/nedenfor". (Lars Jødal) d1bcb2f8

LibreOffice Help

• Add Help pages for some Calc functions. (Olivier Hallot) tdf#159596 tdf#159771 tdf#159872
  • FILTER
  • RANDARRAY
  • SEQUENCE
  • SORT
  • SORTBY
  • UNIQUE
  • XLOOKUP
  • XMATCH
• Add VBA function ExportAsFixedFormat. (Olivier Hallot) tdf#159725

Help content updates and fixes:

• O. Hallot
• D. Maddern
• Pierre F.
• A. Romedenne
• I. Lauhakangas
• A. Barrientos
• J. Nabet

Platform Compatibility

Windows 7 and 8/8.1 are now deprecated platforms. The Extended Security Updates program on Windows Embedded POSReady 7 expires on October 8, 2024. Mainstream support for the Embedded Standard edition of Windows 8 ended on July 10, 2018, and extended support ended on July 11, 2023.

Extensions and features relying on Python will not work on Windows 7. This is because the minimum Python version had to be raised to 3.9, which has no official support on Windows 7. There are unofficial ways to make Python 3.9 and newer work on Windows 7.

Starting with LibreOffice 25.2, there will be no guarantee that LibreOffice will work on Windows 7 or 8/8.1. Support will not be intentionally removed at this point and fixes to problems exclusively affecting these platforms will still be accepted.

On non-Windows platforms, a random device (/dev/urandom) is now required to exist and be readable by LibreOffice. (Michael Stahl, allotropia) e9531b79

API Changes

• New UNO command .uno:ChangeTheme to toggle between Light and Dark modes. (Justin Luth, Collabora) tdf#160349
• Draw: new UNO command .uno:SetLayer to move objects to a different layer. (Jim Raykowski) tdf#122587

Configuration Changes

• Remove unused printing options. (Samuel Mehrbrodt, allotropia) tdf#158041
• Remove some unused config keys. (Samuel Mehrbrodt, allotropia)
  • EvolutionPreferences bf817a07
  • PaintBuffer_Writer 4e53ccfb
  • ShowAlienFilterWarning a13d138b
• Bootstrap variables are now looked-for first in a fundamental.override.ini file next to the application. LibreOffice itself does not bring along such a file, but it can be convenient for an administrator to place one in an installation. (Stephan Bergmann, allotropia) 8b53fa72
  • The Windows-specific tunables LimitMaximumMemoryInMB and ExcludeChildProcessesFromLimit are now looked-for in the [Bootstrap] section of fundamental.override.ini rather than in a [Win32] section of bootstrap.ini. c84e8a14
  • Similarly, the Windows-specific EnableAttachThreadInputHack is treated as a normal bootstrap variable now, rather than being looked-for in a [Win32] section of bootstrap.ini. 6047341f
  • For backwards compatibility, the above are all additionally still looked-for in a [Win32] section of bootstrap.ini. This behavior is deprecated and will be removed in a later version. ebd3f097