LibreOffice 7.3 Community: Release Notes

    From The Document Foundation Wiki


    Writer

    General improvements

    • Hyperlinks can now be attached to shapes tdf#123626 (Samuel Mehrbrodt, allotropia)
    • Footnote and endnote anchors in the end of a paragraph are now treated exactly as they already were treated in the middle for the purposes of search/replace with regular expressions, i.e. they match [\p{Control}] or [:control:] regular expression. That means that they need to be taken into account when matching text against end-of-paragraph tdf#137737 (Mike Kaganski, Collabora)
    • Footnotes and endnotes are now listed in the Navigator. tdf#144788 (Jim Raykowski)
    • Start of list level support in Writer paragraph styles blog post (Miklos Vajna, Collabora)
    • Start of linked character and paragraph styles blog post (Miklos Vajna, Collabora)

    Tracked table row deletion/insertion

    Add visualization and Manage Changes support for tracked deletion and insertion of tables and table rows. (László Németh, NISZ)

    Basic support of table change tracking (introduced by LibreOffice 7.2, see tdf#60382, tdf#79069) was extended by the following improvements:

    • Hide deleted table rows and tables in Hide Changes mode instead of showing empty cells tdf#144057
    • Show table and table row insertions in cyan and deletions in pink in Show Changes mode tdf#146120
    • In Manage Changes, accept or reject deletion/insertion of tables or consecutive table rows with a single click tdf#144270
    • Clicking on a table row, accept or reject its deletion/insertion tdf#146145
    • Add tooltip to table rows with change tracking tdf#146144
    • Accept/reject all text/row changes of a selected table or cell range (not only changes of their first cell) tdf#147182
    Highlighted tracked row changes, and improved Manage Changes dialog window with the new table (row) changes

    Tracked text moving

    During track changes, show moved text in green color and with double strikethrough or underlines to speed up reviewing. Add new tooltip captions and Manage Changes Action icons for tracked text moving. Re-ordered list elements or changed paragraph or sentence order is more visible this way. Tracked moving is detected at Move Up/Down, drag & drop, cut & paste and deletion + re-typing, also during ODT and DOCX import (including documents created with editors which lack of tracked text moving support, like Google Docs or web version of Microsoft Office). tdf#145233 tdf#145718 tdf#145719 tdf#145721 (László Németh, NISZ)

    Tracked list item moved by Move Down, with new tooltip caption and Manage Changes Action icons

    Other improvements in track changes

    Related to changes of paragraph formatting etc. (László Németh, NISZ).

    • Fixed table formula calculation at track changes tdf#39828
    • Track changes: fix table deletion at paragraph join tdf#144058
    • Track changes: keep format of hints. When a text has multiple character formatting settings enabled and a new one is applied with tracked changes, only one of the former settings is restored upon rejecting the changes. tdf#144173
    • Track format changes of the actual word. If there is no text selection, character formattings are applied on the word under the text cursor, now with storing the original direct character formatting in a redline "extra data" for rejection of the tracked formatting change. tdf#143939
    • Show bullet and numbering changes at the moved list item, not at the next one. tdf#145068
    A list item moved by Move Down: show changes only in two items, not in four items.
    • Fix order of tracked deletions at same position. tdf#107292

    Performance

    • Increased a PDF export speed of some complex documents tdf#125892 (Noel Grandin, Collabora)
    • Speed up loading large RTL documents tdf#64991 (Noel Grandin, Collabora)
    • Improved rendering speed with some complex documents 71429b93,d13b63a9 (Luboš Luňák, Collabora)

    Calc

    General improvements

    • The "Link to External Data" dialogue (Sheet ▸ Link to External Data...) now lists HTML tables in the order they appear in the source. tdf#142600 (Andreas Heinisch)
    HTML table list in the "Link to External Data" dialogue. LibreOffice 7.3 (on the right) now lists the tables in the order they appear in the source. (LibreOffice 7.2 on the left.)
    • Whitespace line feed and character tabulation in cell formula expressions are now preserved and survive round-tripping between OOXML and ODF file formats. Tabs however can not be entered in the cell input UI and are converted to one space character. tdf#76310 (Eike Rathke, Red Hat)
    • CSV import/export support a sep=; and "sep=;" field separator setting. When reading CSV the separator is taken from an initial sep=; or "sep=;" single field if that is the only row content. The quoted form is preserved as (unquoted) cell content, of the unquoted form the separator is discarded as contextually it is a real field separator. When writing CSV an existing single top left cell's content sep=; if that is the only cell in the row is adapted to the current separator in the quoted form "sep=;" (if quotes / text delimiters aren't set empty ...) and always uses the ASCII " double quote character. If the line containing the sep=; is not to be imported as data (and thus also is not preserved when re-saving) then the From row number in the dialog must be set to 2. tdf#117868 (Eike Rathke, Red Hat)
    • A new Evaluate formulas option in the CSV Import and Paste Special and Text to Column dialog determines whether formula expressions starting with a = equal sign character are to be evaluated as formulas or imported as textual data. In the programmatic FilterOptions string this is the 13th parameter (token 12) with arguments either false or true. tdf#114878 (Eike Rathke, Red Hat)
    • Bash like autocompletion for Calc autoinput was implemented. tdf#145198 (Dennis Francis, Collabora)
    Consider an example of the following data in a column:
    ABCD123xyz
    ABCD345qwel
    ABCD123pqr
    ABCD123xyz
    PQR
    
    When user types A, it will show the partial suggestion BCD.
    User can accept the suggestion with the right arrow key and then the cursor will be placed after the letter D, waiting for more input. User can choose to not accept the suggestion either by typing more or by ending the edit mode by pressing Esc key.
    If the user accepts the suggestion BCD by right arrow key, and types 1, it will show a partial suggestion of 23. User can accept this by pressing the right arrow key.
    If the user accepts the suggestion in the 3rd step and types x it will show the final suggestion yz. Again user can choose to accept or decline the suggestion as mentioned in the 1st step.
    • Cell cursor now uses the system's highlight color instead of the default font color to improve visibility tdf#142121 (Natalia Gavrilova)
    Note that the cursor in cell C4 now using the highlight color instead of the default font color
    • Support Color Filter in "Standard Filter" dialog tdf#143103 (Samuel Mehrbrodt, allotropia)
    Standard filter supports filtering by colors
    • Queries and filters using some text-based operations such as 'contains' now properly work even with numeric data 0d1971a8 (Luboš Luňák, Collabora)
    • Quick find will now search for values instead of formulas (the search dialog offers both options). tdf#102506 (Julien Nabet)
    • Available since 7.3.1
      : Fixed a bug that caused table cells incorrectly placed when pasting a HTML table content. tdf#74577, tdf#92960 (Eike Rathke)
    • Diagonal borders are now accessible from "Toolbar > Borders" tdf#143919 (Bayram Çiçek)
    Diagonal down/up and criss-cross borders are accessible from "Toolbar > Borders"
    • Header and Footer can now be set independently between the first page and the rest, which improves consistency with Writer and interoperability with Microsoft Office. The setting "Same content on first page" can be found in the respective tabs in Format ▸ Page Style. (Daniel Arato, NISZ) tdf#142763

    Changed spreadsheet functions

    • Option "Search criteria = and <> must apply to whole cells" has been fixed to apply properly in lookup functions when turned off (tdf#139612). For better performance it is recommended to leave the option on unless partial cell matching is required. (Luboš Luňák, Collabora)
    • The IF() function now unconditionally propagates the condition's error value, if any. Previously a given ELSE-path was executed as the condition is never TRUE on error, which wasn't significant unless the ELSE was an error evaluating function like IFERROR() or ISERROR() or other IS...() functions.
      This changes behaviour of an undocumented side effect, so might break existing expressions that (unwillingly?) relied on it. tdf#146377 (Eike Rathke, Red Hat)

    Performance

    • Improved speed of some XLSM files opening tdf#95549 (Noel Grandin, Collabora)
    • Speedup inserting large charts (for over 800000 cells) tdf#144052 (Noel Grandin, Collabora)
    • Improved speed of some XLSX files opening tdf#130795 (Noel Grandin, Collabora)
    • Improved use of threads for Calc calculations a0e27322, 871d5fe3 (Luboš Luňák, Collabora)

    Impress & Draw

    General improvements

    • Added PowerPoint-compatible screen sizes in Slide ▸ Slide Properties... ▸ Slide ▸ Paper Format. "Widescreen" is used in current PowerPoint, "On-screen show" is used in previous PowerPoint versions and Google Slides. (see here) If you create a file with these sizes, the exported file will be treated as a preset size instead of a user size. It will also be treated as a preset size when you import it. tdf#142286, tdf#142288 (Jun Nogata)
    • Unshare shape properties for the same type before insertion blog post (Miklos Vajna, Collabora)
    • tdf#140321 (Regina Henschel)
      Wire Frame - Matt - Plastic - Metal
      The dialog "3D-Settings" opens if you toggle a shape to "Extrusion on". The dialog has a drop-down list "Surface" with items "Wire Frame", "Matt", "Plastic" and "Metal". In the old version the items "Matt", "Plastic" and "Metal" did nothing, but the solid was always rendered as "Plastic". Now you get different surfaces. "Matt" is really matte. "Metal" is similar to "Plastic" but has more contrast.
    Unfortunately the old versions have written wrong and invalid values into the file. Such values might result in unwanted rendering now. To repair such shapes, mark the shape, then first switch to item "Matt" and then to "Plastic" or "Metal" respectively.

    Base

    Chart

    Math

    Core / General

    • LibreOffice can now generate one-dimensional barcodes in addition to QR codes. tdf#141193 (Akshit Kushwaha)
    QR and Barcode dialog next to inserted barcode on page.
    • new WebDAV/HTTP UCP based on libcurl. tdf#101094, tdf#102499 (Michael Stahl, allotropia; Giuseppe Castagno)
      • using the OS native TLS stack on Windows and macOS, so users can now manage trust of CAs with OS UI on these platforms
    • Border line widths have been unified throughout LibreOffice. tdf#48622 (Samuel Mehrbrodt, allotropia)
      • New defaults are:
        • Hairline (0.05pt)
        • Very thin (0.5pt)
        • Thin (0.75pt)
        • Medium (1.5pt)
        • Thick (2.25pt)
        • Extra thick (4.5pt)
        • Custom values are still possible
    New line width defaults
    • VCL graphics tests can be run from Tools ▸ Options ▸ LibreOffice ▸ View ▸ Run Graphics Tests. Blog post (Akshit Kushwaha, GSoC contributor)

    Performance

    • Fixed a mistake that was making CJK text rendering slower over time 5b38b574 (Luboš Luňák, Collabora)
    • Various rendering improvements in the Skia-based rendering backend (Luboš Luňák, Collabora)
    • Official binary packages are now built using Link-Time OptimizationWikipedia logo v3.svg, which should improve overall performance (Luboš Luňák, Collabora)

    LibreOffice Help

    • Help pages for the ScriptForge scripting library (J.P. Ledure, A. Romedenne, R. Lima)
    • Focus search results to user's current module tdf#123506 (Ross Johnson)
    • Switch from Fuzzysort to FlexSearch for index search [commit] (I. Lauhakangas)
    • Close navigation menus when clicking outside them [commit] (I. Lauhakangas)

    Filters

    Improvements of DOC import/export filter

    Improvements of DOCX import/export filter

    • Hyperlinks attached to shapes are now imported/exported tdf#123626 (Samuel Mehrbrodt, allotropia)
    • DOCX import: fix permission for editing tdf#89383 (Tünde Tóth, NISZ)
    • DOCX export/import: track change of paragraph style tdf#144272 (László Németh, NISZ)
    • DOCX import: fix user index and index entry support defined by field code \f. This is a reworking of a previously patch. Now the import uses com.sun.star.text.UserIndex and com.sun.star.text.UserIndexMark index and index entry fields, which support the requested user index not only during the DOCX and OpenDocument round-trip, but its run-time functionality, the multiple user-defined indices tdf#77051 (László Németh, NISZ)
    • DOCX import: handle ZOrder of chart objects tdf#144798 (Miklos Vajna, Collabora)

    Improvements of XLSX import/export filter

    • XLSX import: decreased a row height for XLSX files created by MS Office tdf#144642 (Attila Szűcs, NISZ)
    • XLSX export: cell indent doesn't increase on each save now tdf#130104 (Kevin Suo)
    • XLSX import: fix permission for editing tdf#115933 (Tünde Tóth, NISZ)
    • XLSX import/export: fix permission for editing. The password for editing wasn't asked, also wasn't exported in XLSX documents. tdf#118938 (Tünde Tóth, NISZ). Now it's exported in Calc using the following steps, also verified before editing:
      • In File->Save As, choose Excel 2007–365 (.xlsx) format;
      • enable checkbox "Save with password" and click Save;
      • in the dialog "Set password", click on "Options" and enable checkbox "Open file read-only", and enter a password for editing (i.e. skip the password for opening).
    • Calc buttons with macros: better XLSX support blog post (Miklos Vajna, Collabora)
    • OOXML chart import/export: Chart labels from cell-range tdf#143942 (Dennis Francis, Collabora)
    • OOXML chart import/export: Chart date categories - improved support for formatting, scaling, range-selection(min/max), increments f547cf17 (Dennis Francis, Collabora)

    Improvements of PPTX import/export filter

    • PPTX export: fixed interactions and hyperlinks on images tdf#124232 (Tibor Nagy, NISZ)
    • PPTX import: Impress doesn't drop the read-only password in PPTX file now tdf#144943 (Tünde Tóth, NISZ)
    • PPTX import: fix hyperlinks on shapes tdf#144616 (Tibor Nagy, NISZ)
    • PPTX import: fix hyperlinks on images tdf#141704 (Tibor Nagy, NISZ)
    • Fix the incorrect import of slide footers from PPTX tdf#142221 (Sarper Akdemir, Collabora)
    • Make slide footers get exported to PPTX tdf#59323 (Sarper Akdemir, Collabora)

    Other

    • TXT file extension is no longer associated with T602 file format, which used to lead to mis-detections in some cases (Jan Holešovský, Collabora)

    GUI

    General

    • The wavy lines indicating spelling or grammar issues have been improved to be more discernible in high-resolution screens. Now, they will match the document’s zoom level instead of staying thin unconditionally. tdf#70519 (Heiko Tietze, TDF)

    Icon theme

    • Tweaks to Colibre icons related to graphics, saving, formatting and undo/redo. (Rizal Muttaqin)

    Localization

    Note pin.svg

    If you speak an endangered language and want to help us to achieve our goals of providing libre tools to every person on the planet, please help translate our software.

    New languages/locales with locale data

    Available as default document language and for locale-specific formatting.

    • English (Israel) {en-IL}. tdf#145173 (Eike Rathke, Red Hat)

    Additional languages in the language list

    Available for text attribution.

    • Klingon, tlhIngan Hol {tlh}. tdf#143946 (Eike Rathke, Red Hat)
    • Interslavic Latin {art-Latn-x-interslv} and Interslavic Cyrillic {art-Cyrl-x-interslv}. tdf#145853 (Eike Rathke, Red Hat)

    Improvements to proofing tools and language support

    • Language entries in language listboxes created by spellchecker or hyphenation dictionaries or extensions that support languages without a predefined language listbox entry are now displayed using a possibly translated language/locale name obtained from the ICU (International Components for Unicode) library. Previously such entries were displayed as language tags in curly brackets, for example {en-SG}. (Eike Rathke, Red Hat)
    • Old Hungarian has got full-text transliteration support: Tools ▸ AutoCorrect ▸ Apply and Tools ▸ AutoCorrect ▸ Apply and Edit Changes transliterate right-to-left Hungarian text to Old Hungarian (only if the paragraph style of the text is Default Paragraph Style). tdf#143176 (László Németh). More info in Release Notes 7.0
    • Added Brazilian Portuguese (pt-BR) thesaurus (Olivier Hallot)

    Scripting

    The ScriptForge libraries

    An extensible and robust collection of macro scripting resources for LibreOffice to be invoked from user Basic or Python scripts. (Jean-Pierre Ledure)

    The libraries expose a total of 23 services each with a bunch of methods and properties.

    New in LibreOffice 7.3:

    • The (new) Chart service, to define chart documents stored in Calc sheets. Most parameters available in the user interface can be set by script.
    • The (new) PopupMenu service, to describe the menu to be displayed after a mouse event (typically a right-click). The menu may contain usual items, checkboxes or radio buttons. Each item can be decorated with icons and tooltips.
    • Management of printers: list of fonts and printers, printer options, printing documents.
    • Export of documents to PDF and management of PDF options.
    • Dialogs may host table controls. Provide tabular data, the data is displayed with headers and sort buttons. The selected row is returned by the Value property.
    • Titles, tooltips, list- or comboboxes, labels of dialogs can be translated on-the-fly based on tools provided in the L10N service.
    • The Calc service has been improved with facilities to identify cell ranges when their size is unknown, f.i. after the import of data, and to apply formulas with absolute and relative references on them.
    • The whole set of services is made available for Python scripts with identical syntax and behaviour as in Basic.

    BASIC

    • Up to and including LibreOffice 7.2, missing optional procedure arguments would be treated as an object of type Error, with error code '448', which would be coerced to e.g. numerical value '448' or boolean true in expressions depending on expression context. This now raises an error, as expected tdf#144353. In particular, expressions like "if IsMissing(FOO) or FOO" used to work "by accident", but now don't any more.

    Python

    VBA changes

    Platform Compatibility

    Mac

    • LibreOffice 7.3 requires macOS 10.12 or newer to run.
    Due to Apple's policy regarding C++ standard library features, the minimum macOS version requirement will be raised in the future like so:
    • release in Aug 2022 → 10.13 High Sierra
    • release in Feb 2023 → 10.14 Mojave
    • release in Aug 2023 → 10.15 Catalina
    • A rendering backend based on the Skia library is now used also on macOS [1] (Luboš Luňák, Collabora)

    Windows

    • The IAccessibleTable2 and IAccessibleTableCell interfaces from the IAccessible2 specification have been implemented (839dbf9e, 97a88e30) (Michael Weghorn)

    API Changes

    • The C functions rtl_str_toFloat, rtl_str_toDouble, rtl_ustr_toFloat, and rtl_ustr_toDouble, and the C++ member functions rtl::OString::toFloat, rtl::OString::toDouble, rtl::OUString::toFloat, and rtl::OUString::toDouble no longer accept a “+” or “-” sign before “NaN” when parsing the XML Schema–style Not a Number notation. (But they still accept an optional “+” or “-” sign before the legacy “1.#NAN” notation.) 9d27a44e
    • osl_demultiplexSocketEvents and its support functionality, all of which were deprecated, have been removed from the UNO C/C++ API. db392a8a

    UNO API changes

    • com.sun.star.resource.XLocale has been removed. a74d15ad
    • In com.sun.star.i18n, various enum members have been renamed (to no longer use reserved identifiers): 04af4e4f
      • in com.sun.star.i18n.TransliterationModules:
        • from ignoreTraditionalKanji_ja_JP to IgnoreTraditionalKanji_ja_JP
        • from ignoreTraditionalKana_ja_JP to IgnoreTraditionalKana_ja_JP
        • from ignoreMinusSign_ja_JP to IgnoreMinusSign_ja_JP
        • from ignoreIterationMark_ja_JP to IgnoreIterationMark_ja_JP
        • from ignoreSeparator_ja_JP to IgnoreSeparator_ja_JP
        • from ignoreZiZu_ja_JP to IgnoreZiZu_ja_JP
        • from ignoreBaFa_ja_JP to IgnoreBaFa_ja_JP
        • from ignoreTiJi_ja_JP to IgnoreTiJi_ja_JP
        • from ignoreHyuByu_ja_JP to IgnoreHyuByu_ja_JP
        • from ignoreSeZe_ja_JP to IgnoreSeZe_ja_JP
        • from ignoreIandEfollowedByYa_ja_JP to IgnoreIandEfollowedByYa_ja_JP
        • from ignoreKiKuFollowedBySa_ja_JP to IgnoreKiKuFollowedBySa_ja_JP
        • from ignoreSize_ja_JP to IgnoreSize_ja_JP
        • from ignoreProlongedSoundMark_ja_JP to IgnoreProlongedSoundMark_ja_JP
        • from ignoreMiddleDot_ja_JP to IgnoreMiddleDot_ja_JP
        • from ignoreSpace_ja_JP to IgnoreSpace_ja_JP
        • from smallToLarge_ja_JP to SmallToLarge_ja_JP
        • from largeToSmall_ja_JP to LargeToSmall_ja_JP
      • in com.sun.star.i18n.TransliterationModulesNew:
        • from ignoreTraditionalKanji_ja_JP to IgnoreTraditionalKanji_ja_JP
        • from ignoreTraditionalKana_ja_JP to IgnoreTraditionalKana_ja_JP
        • from ignoreMinusSign_ja_JP to IgnoreMinusSign_ja_JP
        • from ignoreIterationMark_ja_JP to IgnoreIterationMark_ja_JP
        • from ignoreSeparator_ja_JP to IgnoreSeparator_ja_JP
        • from ignoreZiZu_ja_JP to IgnoreZiZu_ja_JP
        • from ignoreBaFa_ja_JP to IgnoreBaFa_ja_JP
        • from ignoreTiJi_ja_JP to IgnoreTiJi_ja_JP
        • from ignoreHyuByu_ja_JP to IgnoreHyuByu_ja_JP
        • from ignoreSeZe_ja_JP to IgnoreSeZe_ja_JP
        • from ignoreIandEfollowedByYa_ja_JP to IgnoreIandEfollowedByYa_ja_JP
        • from ignoreKiKuFollowedBySa_ja_JP to IgnoreKiKuFollowedBySa_ja_JP
        • from ignoreSize_ja_JP to IgnoreSize_ja_JP
        • from ignoreProlongedSoundMark_ja_JP to IgnoreProlongedSoundMark_ja_JP
        • from ignoreMiddleDot_ja_JP to IgnoreMiddleDot_ja_JP
        • from ignoreSpace_ja_JP to IgnoreSpace_ja_JP
        • from smallToLarge_ja_JP to SmallToLarge_ja_JP
        • from largeToSmall_ja_JP to LargeToSmall_ja_JP
      • in com.sun.star.i18n.UnicodeScript:
        • from k_CJKUnifiedIdeographsExtensionA to kCJKUnifiedIdeographsExtensionA

    Configuration changes

    SDK changes