LibreOffice 6.1: Release Notes

    From The Document Foundation Wiki

    About this page

    This is the page with our 6.1 release notes. It should be final now that the 6.1 version itself has been released. However, if you spot any missing or incorrect information, then please let us know. Thanks in advance for your help!


    Writer

    General

    • Inline tooltips on tracked changes are optional now (Tools ▸ Options ▸ Writer ▸ View) plus are not shown when View ▸ Track Changes is off; UNO command .uno:ShowInlineTooltips ("Tooltips") available for customization tdf#114523 (Heiko Tietze, Michael Stahl)
    • Basic list styles were added to the Styles submenu in the Context Menu. tdf#85940 (Yousuf Philips)
    • Add insert page number option to header and footer menus. tdf#92685 (Gülşah Köse, Pardus)
    Insert page number option to header menu
    • Allow removing the whole ideographic variance sequence with one backspace. tdf#113481 (Mark Hung)
    • Support vertical ruby text format that is commonly used in traditional Chinese. tdf#35301 (Mark Hung)
    • Allow ruby text to export in docx format. tdf#115258 (Mark Hung)
    • Export comments with right-to-left text to .doc correctly for MS Word. tdf#45999 (Mark Hung)
    • Fix reversed text of column break mark in a RTL page. tdf#84522 (Mark Hung)
    • The Chapter Numbering dialog now allows multi-line headings for chapters by allowing a line break as separator between a chapter number and its name. For this case select tab Position and in drop-down list Numbering followed by select variant New line. tdf#112384 (Nithin Kumar Padavu)
    • DOCX change tracking: handle moveFrom and moveTo tdf#104797 (László Németh, NISZ)
    Result of Cut+Paste in Word, Writer 6.0 and Writer 6.1
    • Much improved performance of converting between small ODT and XHTML documents blog post (Miklos Vajna, Collabora)
    Improved ODT <-> XHTML conversion performance.

    Signature Lines

    It is now possible to generate a signature line using Insert ▸ Signature Line. tdf#83877 (Samuel Mehrbrodt, CIB)

    Insert Signature Line
    Generated Signature Line

    After that, you can also sign the signature line using a digital certificate.

    Sign Signature Line
    Valid Signature Line
    Invalid Signature Line

    Localized Settings

    Two Writer-specific settings that should have localized values did not work exactly as intended in the past:

    • Tools ▸ Options ▸ Writer ▸ General ▸ Settings ▸ Tab stops should default to 7.4 mm for Chinese (locale “zh-CN”) and to 12.5 mm for all other locales.
    • Tools ▸ Options ▸ Writer ▸ AutoCaption ▸ Caption Order should default to “Numbering first” for Hungarian (locale “hu”) and to “Category first” for all other locales.

    This has been fixed now (c7ab472b47023c94c06de9e3479a2e0271084dfc, 552bebc85d907748dcd72b7978a00a3eee7c4f34), but you may still see unexpected values if you either changed these settings manually in the past, or even if you merely keep using a pre-existing user installation. In either case, please check whether these settings have appropriate values now for you, and change them if necessary in the Tools ▸ Options dialog. (Stephan Bergmann)

    EPUB export

    • improved link support, table support, image support and font embedding blog entry (Miklos Vajna, Collabora)
    • cover image support, improved metadata support, footnote and image popup support, support for fixed layout blog entry (Miklos Vajna, Collabora)
    User interface for improved metadata support.
    • support vertical writing by export writing-mode in the page style as CSS body styles. tdf#115623 (Mark Hung)
    • export ruby text. tdf#116822 (Mark Hung)

    Mail merge

    • Now mail merge fields hide the paragraph for records that have relevant fields empty (tdf#35798; blog post) (Mike Kaganski, Collabora)
    • The Mail merge toolbar is now automatically shown for files that have mail merge fields in them (tdf#115386) (Mike Kaganski, Collabora)

    New “spell out” chapter numbering styles

    • Ordinal indicators (1st, 2nd, 3rd...), cardinal (One, Two, Three...) and ordinal numbers (First, Second, Third...) tdf#117171 (László Németh, FSF.hu Foundation, Hungary):
      • Localized in more than 30 languages, using libnumbertext
      • DOCX export/import of the new chapter numbering styles
      • It works also with sequence and page number fields (only in OpenDocument)
    New numbering styles in Tools ▸ Chapter Numbering... window

    Calc

    Handling

    Ability to save a Calc file to Excel 2003 XML format has been moved from the File ▸ Save menu to File ▸ Export menu. The Excel 2003 XML format is selected from a list of formats available on the save as dialog.

    Images

    Image handling in Calc has been much improved (Samuel Mehrbrodt, CIB)

    • Images anchored to Calc cells can now be sorted. tdf#98931
    Calc-image-sort.gif
    • Anchor types have been reworked tdf#114552. There are now three choices:
      • Anchor to cell -> Image will just move with the cell (new)
      • Anchor to cell (resize with cell) -> Image will move and resize with the cell
      • Anchor to page -> independent of any cells
    • When resizing images with the cell, the aspect ratio is now considered. This only works when the image fits into its cell. If it's larger than the cell, the start and end cell are always kept.
    • Inserted images are again anchored to cell by default. By default they only move with the cell, and don't resize.
    • There's an option to set image anchor type in the insert image dialog. tdf#86739
    86739-anchor.jpg.jpg
    • Added option to fit images into their cell. This obviously only works with cell anchored images. tdf#116108
    • When copying/pasting cells, cell anchored images are now copied with the cell tdf#116510

    User Interface

    • Now, when the cursor is in on the last non-protected cell of the column in a protected sheet and moves with the Enter key, it return to the first non-protected cell of the next column. This works in the opposite direction if the Shift key is used too. tdf#68290 (Lera Goncharuk)
    • Highlight color customization tdf#116241 blog entry (Szymon Kłos, Collabora)
    Higlight Values mode and customization

    Context Menu

    • New "Manage Name" UNO command which works if cursor is in a named range, has been created and added in context menu. tdf#108989 (Gülşah Köse, Pardus)
    • New "Data Validation" UNO command which works if cursor is in a field has valitation attiribute, has been created and added in context menu. tdf#108989 (Gülşah Köse, Pardus)
    • New "Conditional Formatting" UNO command which works if cursor is in a field has a condition, has been created and added in context menu. tdf#87357 (Gülşah Köse, Pardus)
    • Added context menu into Formula bar input field tdf#57000 (Maxim Monastirsky)
    • Merge cells dialog shows supportive images now tdf#106544 (Heiko Tietze)
    Merge cells dialog

    Data

    Link to External Data supports CSV

    • Sheet ▸ Link to External Data supports Text/CSV files to insert their content as data and update. tdf#114995 (Eike Rathke (Red Hat, Inc.))

    Parallel formula evaluation on the CPU

    • Parallel formula compiling on the CPU conference talk (Dennis Francis, Luboš Luňák, Michael Meeks, Tor Lillqvist - Collabora)
    Performance benefits of parallel formula compiling

    VLOOKUP performance

    • The VLOOKUP() function is now much faster in certain cases tdf#115490 (Dennis Francis - Collabora)
    Performance benefits of the VLOOKUP work

    Impress & Draw

    • Draw's menus were reorganized and with the addition of a new Page menu. tdf#95827 (Yousuf Philips)
    • Fix incorrect bracket / parentheses order in right-to-left paragraph in Impress, judging the writing direction of the text from the paragraph instead of the content alone. tdf#60533 (Mark Hung)
    • New Drawing Styles and clean-up of legacy styles tdf#117455 (Roman Kuznetsov, Heiko Tietze)
    New Drawing Styles

    Base

    • The ODBC, JDBC and Firebird SDBC drivers/bridges previously applied named parameter substitution (for ODBC and JDBC: when enabled) to all SQL commands, including those that were tagged in the GUI as "execute SQL command directly", thereby not preserving the SQL command exactly as typed. Named parameter substitution now is applied only to SQL queries that are generated from a LibreOffice SQL parse tree, leaving "execute SQL command directly" commands completely untouched.
    • Embedded HSQLDB is deprecated, though still available in this release.
      • Embedded Firebird engine full support now available in experimental mode. tdf#116968, tdf#117081 (Tamas Bunth - Collabora)
      • Embedded HSQLDB remains the default for new Base files with this release, however, now when experimental mode is enabled embedded Firebird becomes the default.
      • People are encouraged to migrate Base files using embedded HSQLDB to embedded Firebird or to continue using HSQLDB long term the data must be migrated to an external HSQLDB server.
        • To assist users with this task an embedded HSQLDB to embedded Firebird migration assistant debuts in this release. The migration assistant does not use the HSQLDB engine and will be available in LibreOffice releases even after embedded HSQLDB support is fully removed. This includes:
          • Support for reading HSQLDB schema when HSQLDB is not available blog post (Tamas Bunth - Collabora, funded by TDF donors)
          • Support for reading HSQLDB data when HSQLDB is not available blog post (Tamas Bunth - Collabora, funded by TDF donors)
          • Various follow-up fixes to the firebird backend and to the reader that parses the data out of hsqldb-based ODB files blog post (Tamas Bunth - Collabora, funded by TDF donors)
    • Access2Base basic library updated (Jean-Pierre Ledure)
      • german translation (Gisbert Friege)
      • support of dialog and database events, forms with multiple data sources, apostrophes in table names
    • (6.1.3) Forms (also in other LibreOffice applications) now enforce the "Input Required" property. Alas, this was also the default, so all forms created in versions 6.1.3 or earlier must be updated to not require input where they should not.

    Chart

    Math

    BASIC

    • VBA Macro: add XLSX support to Workbooks.Open tdf#118153 (Balázs Varga, NISZ)

    Core / General

    Images

    • Now, Calc, Draw, Impress ask users if they want to apply EXIF rotation when images are inserted or replaced as Writer currently does. This only applies to images with orientation 3, 6 and 8. tdf#116438 (himajin100000)
    • New expert option was added: "AddReplacementImages" to control during export whether to add fallback images or not tdf#115005 (Serge Krot, CIB)

    Image handling rework

    • Improved lifecycle handling blog post (Tomaz Vajngerl - Collabora, funded by TDF donors)
    • Deprecation of accessing embedded images by URL blog post (Tomaz Vajngerl - Collabora, funded by TDF donors)
    • A much improved, new graphic manager blog post (Tomaz Vajngerl - Collabora, funded by TDF donors)
    • On-demand loading of images from OOXML and MSO binary formats blog post (Miklos Vajna - Collabora, funded by TDF donors)
    Lazy-loading images from OOXML/MSO binary formats.

    Fonts

    • New default order for Traditional and Simplified Chinese fonts. tdf#114768 (Yousuf Philips)

    .UNO commands

    • Cycle case now includes sentence case tdf#116315 (Heiko Tietze)
    • The command .uno:ShowInlineTooltips has been introduced to allow customization of inline tooltips (see changes for Writer) tdf#114523 (Heiko Tietze, Michael Stahl)

    Document signing

    • Added support for signing (not only verifying) ODF documents with ECDSA keys on Linux and macOS tdf#109180 (Miklos Vajna - Collabora)

    User data central configuration

    • Improved the existing LDAP configuration backend blog post and implemented a new Windows-specific configuration backend blog post to allow efficient user data configuration in AD domains using group policy (Mike Kaganski - Collabora)

    LibreOffice Help

    New Help

    • Online Help pages now hold collateral files to support textual description of a feature (Olivier Hallot)
    Collateral files
    • Several improvements in online page layout (Adolfo Jayme Barrientos, Ilmari Lauhakangas, Olivier Hallot)
    • New Help user interface fully translatable tdf#115685 (Olivier Hallot)
    • Default icons are now Colibre (A. Kainz)
    • Improvements in gbuild process for Help (S. Bergman)

    Help Contents

    • New help pages for Pivot Charts (Olivier Hallot, after Tomaž Vajngerl)
    • Help pages on Export to EPUB (Olivier Hallot, after Miklos Vajna)
    • Many fixes in Help contents (Sophia Schröder, Adolfo Jayme Barrientos, Stanislav Horáček, Gabor Kelemen, Caolán McNamara, Dennis Roczek, A. Gelmini...)
    • Added screenshots for Math help pages (Olivier Hallot)

    Filters

    Improvements to Excel 2003 XML import

    The import filter for the Excel 2003 XML format has been overhauled, and the previous XSLT-based filter has been replaced by the one provided by the orcus library. (Kohei Yoshida)

    SVG filter

    Replaced existing SVGFilter using SVGIO. 3ca7be09834a26fbd1c371deabd7a58111092676 (Armin Le Grand)

    GUI

    • Background images in Gallery and Area Fill dialog completely reworked tdf#114817 (Andreas Kainz, Heiko Tietze)
      New Areafill backgrounds
    This change breaks documents with relative links to the gallery, which was possible some time ago. Affected users can install the legacy background images per extension (https://extensions.libreoffice.org/extensions/legacy-gallery-backgrounds).
    • New RYB Standard palette, based on Itten RYB color ring theory providing Red, Yellow, Blue primaries; Orange, Green, Purple secondaries; Gold, Brick, Magenta, Indigo, Teal, Lime tertiaries. All RGB values were algorithmicly generated (Eddy's Gossett & Chen tensor cube) for color Hues, Tints (30%, 45%, 60%, 75% white added), and Shades (20%, 40%, 60%, 80% black added) tdf#114719 (Heiko Tietze, V Stuart Foote).
    Standard RYB Palette
    • New set of default gradients tdf#114006 (Andreas Kainz, Heiko Tietze).
    Gradients
    • Insert Table dialog presents now a list of table styles instead then button AutoFormat tdf#113558 (Furkan Tokac)
    • Distracting tooltips in tables removed ("Adjust table column/row", "Select whole table/row/column") tdf#116297 (Heiko Tietze)
    • Function to modify tables within 3 seconds removed, freeing the hard-coded Alt + Delete and Alt + Insert shortcuts tdf#116452 (Heiko Tietze)
    • New set of app icons. (Andreas Kainz)
    • The different Notebookbar implementations get a lot of UI improvements and bugfixing it's just in experimental mode but the UI is stable for an initial release (Kshitij Pathania, Szymon Kłos, Andreas Kainz).
      NotebookBar.png

    Icon Theme

    • Colibre introduced as default under Windows tdf#90194 (Andreas Kainz, Heiko Tietze)
      Colibre the new LibreOffice icon theme
    • Colibre get 32px icon theme support (Andreas Kainz)
      Colibre icons are available in 16px, 24px and 32px
    • Elementary is now the default icon theme on Gnome based desktop environments tdf#116695 (Heiko Tietze)
      Elementary default on Gnome based desktops
    • High contrast theme is now Sifr tdf#75398. Legacy theme hicontrast available as extension. (Heiko Tietze)
    • Icon themes Industrial and Oxygen removed because of missing maintenance and SVG support (made available as extension). (Heiko Tietze)
    • Karasa Jaga icon theme added, originally created for Sundara OS, heavily inspired (and derived) from (now discontinued) Oxygen icon theme tdf#117342. (Rizal Muttaqin)
    Karasa Jaga

    Start Center

    Windows

    • Now message "JRE Required" for Windows contains information on bitness of required JRE tdf#115002 (Lera Goncharuk)
    • Dialog windows now use native GTK3 interfaces on Linux. blog entry (Caolán McNamara)

    Menu

    Configuration

    • Ctrl/⌘ Cmd + Tab ↹ and ⇧ Shift + Ctrl/⌘ Cmd + Tab ↹ can be used as shortcuts now and have been assigned to next/previous sheet in Calc tdf#86404 (Heiko Tietze)
    • Ctrl + F5 assigned to View ▸ Sidebar tdf#86404 (Heiko Tietze)
    • Shortcuts for number formatting in Calc (decimal, scientific, date...) are now ⇧ Shift + ⌃ Ctrl + 1..⇧ Shift + ⌃ Ctrl + 6 on macOS (was ⌘ Cmd before) tdf#78777 (Heiko Tietze)
    • Customization of MOD3 ⌃ Ctrl on macOS is now possible. tdf#34704 (Heiko Tietze)
    • Tooltips show the correct symbol for MOD3 (⌃) tdf#117033 (Heiko Tietze)

    Customize Dialog

    • It is now even easier to customize toolbars and top level menus according to your taste, thanks to the newly added gear button/menu of the Customize dialog (Tools ▸ Customize...). tdf#114260 (Muhammet Kara, Pardus)
    • With the new gear menu on the Toolbar and the Menu tabs, you can now;
    • The plus and minus buttons, which allow you to add or remove top-level menus and toolbars, are also coming as options of the new menu, reducing the clutter on the UI.
    Gear Menu for a Custom Menu
    Gear Menu for a Custom Toolbar

    Basic Editor

    • Now there is repeat search by shortcut tdf#94498 (Lera Goncharuk)

    Online

    General

    • Implementation and considerable improvement of IME for Asian languages (Pranav Kant - Collabora)
    • Improved key and mouse events handling in order to avoid possible freezes (Pranav Kant - Collabora)
    • Reduced dialog flicker (Pranav Kant - Collabora)
    • Improved session stopping & saving (Ashod Nakashian - Collabora)
    • Reworked the l10n framework to decrease the duplication between the Online and Desktop variants (Jan Holesovsky - Collabora)

    Security Improvements

    • Admin Console can authenticate via PAM (Andras Timar - Collabora)
    • Support HTTP public key pinning (Pranav Kant - Collabora)

    GUI

    • Exposed various dialogs in LibreOffice core to browser. Some screenshots.
    • Implemented Chart creation (in all Writer, Calc, Impress) (Marco Cecchetti, Pranav Kant - Collabora)
    • Context menu spell checking (Jan Holesovsky, Henry Castro, Marco Cecchetti - Collabora)

    Performance

    Writer

    • Following dialogs enriching user's editing experience (Pranav Kant, Jan Holesovsky, Henry Castro - Collabora)
      • Find & Replace (Previous dialog written in JS is removed)
      • Edit Style
      • Hyperlink Dialog
      • Special Character Dialog (Previous dialog written in JS is removed)
      • Index Entry
      • Character
      • Paragraph
      • Bullets & Numbering
      • Table properties dialog
      • Spelling & Grammar dialog
      • Word Count dialog
      • Change tracking management
      • Insert header and footer
      • Column formatting

    Calc

    • Various dialogs were exposed (Marco Cecchetti, Henry Castro, Pranav Kant - Collabora)
      • Ability to add autofilter
      • Ability to filter items via autofilter popup
      • Format Cell Dialog is available
      • Sorting functionality
      • Support for hidden tabs in Calc
      • Support for chart data series editing
      • Data validation

    Column/Row Grouping

    In this new release it is possible to collapse or expand any group of columns or rows with a simple click (Marco Cecchetti - Collabora)

    Collabora-Online-Calc-Grouping-01.png

    Groups are organized in levels and a levels header (for both column and row groups) is available in the top-left corner of the outline. By clicking on a levels header entry, groups belonging to the relative level are collapsed or expanded altogether (Marco Cecchetti - Collabora)

    Collabora-Online-Calc-Grouping-02.png

    Impress

    • Following object & shape dialogs are added (Pranav Kant, Jan Holesovsky - Collabora)
      • Position & Size
      • Line dialog
      • Area dialog

    Localization

    New “spell out” NatNum modifier

    • NatNum12 in user-defined format codes of Calc and Writer: tdf#115007 (Mike Kaganski, Collabora; László Németh, FSF.hu Foundation, Hungary; Eike Rathke, Red Hat, Inc.)
      • To spell out numbers in various number, currency and date formats, use the [NatNum12] modifier with the chosen arguments at the beginning of an user-defined number format code.
      • For example, [NatNum12 USD]0 formatting code formats cell values (or number fields) 0, 1, 2 as “zero dollars” (plural in English), “one U.S. dollar”, “two U.S. dollars” etc.
      • Based on libnumbertext, see supported native languages and functions (choose “help” as spell out format) in online demo.
      • NatNum12 usage can replace NUMBERTEXT/MONEYTEXT LibreOffice extension. Both generalize BAHTTEXT spreadsheet function, a function of Microsoft Excel for number to Thai number name and currency conversion, standardized by ECMA–376 and ISO/IEC 29 500:2008 Office Open XML format.
      • Details and examples in LibreOffice help

    New languages/locales with locale data


    Additional languages in the language list

    • Malay Arabic [ms-Arab-MY] and [ms-Arab-BN], both CTL. (Eike Rathke (Red Hat, Inc.))
    • Juǀ’hoan [ktz-NA] and Naro [nhr-BW]. (Eike Rathke (Red Hat, Inc.))

    Incorporation of other languages

    • Brand-new UI translation into Frisian (fy). Kudos to our volunteer translator, Berend Ytsma, for undertaking this effort.
    • Brand-new UI translation into Upper Sorbian (hsb). Kudos to our volunteer translator, Michael Wolf, for undertaking this effort.
    • Brand-new UI translation into Kabyle (kab). Kudos to our team of volunteer translators, Belkacem Mohammed, Yasin Bouklif, Yazid Bouhamam, Merzouk Ouchenem, Nabil Semɛun, Slimane Amiri, and others, for undertaking this effort.
    Note pin.svg

    If you speak an endangered language and want to help us to achieve our goal of providing free tools for every single person on Earth, please join us.

    Improvements to proofing tools and language support

    • Arabic. The spelling dictionary was updated to version 3.5. (Ayaspell and Yousuf Philips)
    • Croatian. The spelling dictionary was updated to version 2.1.1.
    • English (GB). The spelling dictionary was updated to version 2018-05-01.
    • Greek. Autocorrect word ending greek character σ (sigma) to ς (final sigma), also add Autocorrect exceptions to common Greek abbreviations. tdf#116387 (László Németh)
    • Hungarian. The spelling dictionary was updated to version v1.7. Hungarian grammar checking rules were improved (v1.6.4). (László Németh, FSF.hu Foundation, Hungary)
    • Indonesian. An Indonesian thesaurus and spelling dictionary was added.
    • Korean. The data for the Hangul/Hanja conversion feature has been updated for completeness and accuracy. (DaeHyun Sung)
    • Spanish. The spelling dictionary was updated to version 2.3 (Ricardo Palomares)

    Feature removal / deprecation

    General

    The Linux Quickstarter is removed.

    Icon Themes

    • The following icon themes have been removed:
      • Galaxy (use Tango instead)
      • Industrial
      • Oxygen

    Platform Compatibility

    Mac

    • Various macOS-specific fixes: blog post (Tor Lillqvist - Collabora)
      • Improved use of various 3rd-party fonts
      • Fixes for notifications of screen parameter changes
      • Improved inserting videos in Impress presentations

    Windows

    Linux

    API changes

    Configuration changes

    • When a localized, nillable property has no value for a requested locale, nor any "en-US", "en", nor "" fallback value, nil is now returned instead of a value for some unrelated locale. a26adf6679aa13dc5821047f6aa1f05e7d0d00fd See tdf#121412 for how this can affect .oxt extensions that do not provide fallback "Title" values in their Addons.xcu files.

    UNO API changes

    SDK changes