LibreOffice 6.1: Release Notes
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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 ( ▸ ▸ ▸ ) plus are not shown when ▸ 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)
- 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)
- Much improved performance of converting between small ODT and XHTML documents blog post (Miklos Vajna, Collabora)
Signature Lines
It is now possible to generate a signature line using ▸ . tdf#83877 (Samuel Mehrbrodt, CIB)
After that, you can also sign the signature line using a digital certificate.
Localized Settings
Two Writer-specific settings that should have localized values did not work exactly as intended in the past:
- ▸ ▸ ▸ ▸ ▸ should default to 7.4 mm for Chinese (locale “zh-CN”) and to 12.5 mm for all other locales.
- ▸ ▸ ▸ ▸ 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 ▸ 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)
- 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, Second...) 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)
Calc
Handling
Images
Image handling in Calc has been much improved (Samuel Mehrbrodt, CIB)
- Images anchored to Calc cells can now be sorted. tdf#98931
- 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
- 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)
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)
Data
Link to External Data supports CSV
- ▸ 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)
VLOOKUP performance
- The VLOOKUP() function is now much faster in certain cases tdf#115490 (Dennis Francis - Collabora)
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 (Kompilainenn, Heiko Tietze)
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)
- 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:
- 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
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)
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)
- 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)
- 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).
- New set of default gradients tdf#114006 (Andreas Kainz, Heiko Tietze).
- 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).
Icon Theme
- Colibre introduced as default under Windows tdf#90194 (Andreas Kainz, Heiko Tietze)
- Colibre get 32px icon theme support (Andreas Kainz)
- Elementary is now the default icon theme on Gnome based desktop environments tdf#116695 (Heiko Tietze)
- 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)
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 ▸ 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 ( ▸ ). tdf#114260 (Muhammet Kara, Pardus)
- With the new gear menu on the Toolbar and the Menu tabs, you can now;
- rename the custom toolbars and menus, and the standard sub-menus, a21744a72637a2e3044f55450df85f94a9fc0bf9
- move and rearrange the top-level menus, 51617878ddc8f9816af7d63d0b483eefd3aed27d
- see the current display style of toolbars, and change it with a single click. 3ba75bf050336bef3738a92a7a942622b9326498
- 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.
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.
New Special character tunneled dialog in writer
Character dialog in writer with custom color widget
Bullet and numbering dialog in writer
Spelling and grammar dialog in writer
Word count dialog in writer
Format Cell Dialog in Calc Online
Position and size dialog in Impress Online
Area dialog in Impress Online
Auto filter dialog in Calc Online
- 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)
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)
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
- Iloko [ilo-PH]. tdf#117617 tdf#117655 (Joseph S Maza, Eike Rathke (Red Hat, Inc.))
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 tamaziɣt/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.
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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
Feature removal / deprecation
General
The Linux Quickstarter is removed.
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
UNO API changes
- When loading a document via XComponent::loadComponentFromURL, Dialogs (like the "Enable Macros" dialog) will now be shown if the document is user-visible. (Samuel Mehrbrodt, CIB) tdf#118238
- The unused macro
SAL_CALL_ELLIPSEhas been removed fromsal/types.h, 6cbbe3a6c35cde186351315ddb189366bcca1deb - The parameter
quantum_cache_maxofrtl_arena_create(which was typically specified as zero in calls to that function) is no longer observed by the implementation, and should always be specified as zero in calls. 6da400912e8c69ae86650e799767da54ee422392