LibreOffice 7.5 Community: Release Notes
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Writer
- Content controls: added a new plain text type. blog post (Miklos Vajna, Collabora)
- Content controls: added a new combo box type and PDF export. blog post (Miklos Vajna, Collabora)
- Content controls: added titles and tags. blog post (Miklos Vajna, Collabora)
- Now tabs can be edited for multiple paragraphs with different settings at a time. Tabs dialogue (9f7b3 (Pranam Lashkari) ▸ ▸ ) is available even when multiple paragraphs are selected which has different settings.
- Improved kashida insertion position validation, to prevent inserting kashida between contextually substituted glyphs breaking word shape. 9a6b6 (Khaled Hosny)
- Correctly calculate text caret position inside ligatures, and use caret positions from the font when available. tdf#30731 (Khaled Hosny)
- Fix broken colored Arabic text when enabling Show Formatting Marks. tdf#150726 (Khaled Hosny)
- It is now possible to define a custom color for Grammar mistakes in the Application Colors dialog (0aa61 (Rafael Lima) ▸ ▸ ▸ ).
- AutoTexts created using "New (text only)" no longer insert a new line at the end of the AutoText. The currently embedded AutoTexts have been adjusted accordingly by explicitly adding a new line at the end of the text. User-created AutoTexts, relying on the trailing new line, should be re-created including the trailing empty paragraph. tdf#53023 (Andreas Heinisch)
- Page number in status bar now uses a range when the view spans several pages. tdf#90150 (Jim Raykowski)
- Elements can be highlighted on page by hovering over their name in the Navigator sidebar deck. tdf#152029 (Jim Raykowski)
Spell checking
- Better recognition of typos, and better suggestions in Danish, Dutch, Estonian, German, Hungarian, Norwegian and Swedish with the improved compound word recognition algorithm of Hunspell spell checker. Hunspell 1.7.2 commit (László Németh, FSF.hu)
- Moving text cursor Up/Down triggers pending spell checking of the last modified word. tdf#124603 (László Németh, NISZ)
- Spell checking of plain words of hyperlinks tdf#45949 (László Németh, based on tdf#126657 (Khaled Hosny) and tdf#152492)
- Keep comment of the corrected words, instead of removing it without being noticed tdf#65535 (László Németh) Note: continuation of the following improvements, which were left out of the previous release notes: d08e4137 tdf#66043 sw: fix spell checking of word with deletion (László Németh, introduced in version 7.2) and a6555eb8 tdf#65535 sw spell: ignore comment marker when checking spelling (Justin Luth, introduced in version 7.3).
Tables
- Better column deletion when it intersects with merged cells. tdf#46733 (Justin Luth)
- Allow table row/column selection, if last cell starts with a nested table. tdf#47979, tdf#151478 (László Németh, NISZ)
- Allow tracked table row/column deletion, if last cell starts with a nested table. tdf#150976, tdf#151657 (László Németh, NISZ)
Bookmarks
Bookmark editing in Insert Bookmark dialog window
- Bookmark text content can be edited in the dialog. aa6ec (Michael Stahl, allotropia)
- The Bookmark dialog accessed from 9cc6a (Michael Stahl, allotropia) ▸ ▸ ▸ now opens with the clicked bookmark already selected.
- Hidden _Toc and _Ref bookmarks imported from OOXML are shown as Hidden in the dialog, allowing sorting the not hidden (user-defined) bookmarks before them by a single click on header Hidden. tdf#150955 (László Németh, NISZ)
Colored bookmarks for metadata visualization
Show visible marks in custom color defined in bookmark metadata. tdf#150717 (László Németh)
See also Custom color metadata field shading, introduced in LibreOffice 7.2.
Bookmark accessibility
Screen readers get text equivalent of visible bookmarks. tdf#150947 (László Németh)
In the form of
- BookmarkName1 Bookmark
#BookmarkName2 Bookmark Start #BookmarkName2 Bookmark End
Where Bookmark, Start and End are localized words.
Bookmark visualization
Various improvements of bookmark visibility (see
▸ ▸ ▸ ▸ . (László Németh, NISZ)Note: this is a continuation to Michael Stahl’s fix for tdf#45589 ("create and paint text portions for bookmarks"), introduced in LibreOffice 7.0.
- ⌶-shape point bookmark (The previous shape, a single vertical line was overlapped with visible page margin at beginning of the paragraphs, also it was very similar to the NBSP and narrow NBSP shading.) tdf#150791
- ][-shape (i.e. double) marks for neighboring bookmark ranges (instead of a single vertical line, which could not be distinguished from point bookmark symbol previously). tdf#150790
- All bookmarks at the same character position are visible now, e.g. instead of a single |, neighboring bookmarks with point bookmarks are shown e.g. as ] ⌶ [ or ] ] ⌶ ⌶ [ [
- Do not show visible marks for hidden _Toc and _Ref bookmarks imported from OOXML, like Microsoft Office does. tdf#150956
- Multiple start marks of range bookmarks positioned before the character position, multiple end marks of range bookmarks positioned after the character position, i.e. single type boundary marks are there outside of the bookmark text:
some |text| here
[[ ]]
- Neighboring end and start marks are centered around the character position:
|text1|text2|
[ ]] [[ ]
- Marks of the same character position are sorted based on their type: ], ⌶, [, e.g.
] ] ⌶ ⌶ [ [ [
- Same type marks of the same character position are sorted based on their color:
[c1 [c2 [c3 ... c3] c2] c1]
Accessibility
- Images, embedded objects and text frames can now be marked as decorative, which allows assistive technology to ignore them in exported PDFs. (Michael Stahl, allotropia) tdf#143311 31084
- Hyperlinks, table of content and other indices keep their language, and with this, their accessibility. tdf#39794 tdf#145104 (fixed in tdf#126657 by Khaled Hosny, follow-up fixes: tdf#152492 and tdf#45949 by László Németh)
Accessibility checker
- Add several accessibility checker rules. (Paris Oplopoios, Collabora) b4586 f9eb5 f03d2 2c44f de02e 043f0 a1ae3 76615 5c893 3c0be
- Add Rescan button to Accessibility Check dialog. (Samuel Mehrbrodt, allotropia) tdf#148999
- Make Accessibility Check dialog non-modal. (Samuel Mehrbrodt, allotropia) tdf#148971
- Automatic (Online) Accessibility Check has been added, which scans for accessibility issues while the user is editing the document. The accessibility status is shown in the status bar. You can enable it in the main menu ( ▸ ). Currently it is only available when experimental mode is enabled, as it doesn't take all document objects into account. (Tomaž Vajngerl, Collabora)
Machine translation
Performance
- Cutting hundreds of pages with numbered lists in Writer tdf#129101 (Noel Grandin, Collabora)
- Export to EPUB in Windows tdf#133768 (Noel Grandin, Collabora)
- Opening Writer documents with large tables tdf#126788 (Noel Grandin, Collabora)
Calc
- Cell input with leading ' apostrophe in cells that are not formatted as Text was changed to always strip the first apostrophe and force the remainder as text content. Previously, the user had to know (or guess) whether an input could be converted to a numeric type (number, date, ...) and prefix only that to force text, but not prefix a textual type that could not be converted, which was confusing and bad UX. The handling is not changed for cells already formatted as Text, where every input is continued to be accepted literally as content and a leading apostrophe is not removed. tdf#149665 (Eike Rathke, Red Hat)
- Add support for Kamenický and Mazovia encodings. tdf#150877 (Stephan Bergmann, Red Hat)
- Conditional formatting's begins-with/ends-with/contains are now case-insensitive like the rest of the conditions were. tdf#123990 (Justin Luth, Collabora)
- Preserve tab characters and line-breaks in cell contents. tdf#75702 (Justin Luth, Collabora)
- tdf#112641 (Justin Luth, Collabora) ▸ ▸ now always works even when first row or column are not visible.
- Paste Special of cells now remembers last used settings between sessions. tdf#69750 (Siddhant Chaudhary)
- Searching for a term in the Function Wizard now matches the function descriptions as well as their names. tdf#146781 (Andreas Heinisch)
Default “spell out” number and currency formats
Number format dialog windows of Calc and Writer got default NatNum12 ("spell out") format codes. tdf#115007 (László Németh, FSF.hu)
- Spell out numbers and currencies;
- in 71 locales of 38 languages;
- based on libnumbertext 1.0.11;
- NatNum12 title case is fixed for English language: lowercase “and” and title case “-Five” e.g. in “One U.S. Dollar and Twenty-Five Cents”.
Performance
- Replacing strings with numbers in Calc tdf#126109 (Noel Grandin, Collabora)
- Find and replace in very large Calc sheets tdf#150749 (Noel Grandin, Collabora)
- Opening large Calc spreadsheets with row height differences tdf#124098 (Balázs Varga, allotropia)
Impress & Draw
- Impress now supports cropped video for media shapes. blog post (Miklos Vajna, Collabora)
- Fix bug causing EMF graphics to appear blurry. tdf#150888 (Paris Oplopoios, Collabora)
- The in-presentation pen function can be turned off with Ctrl + A (on top of the existing toggle Ctrl + P), which should make more presenter devices compatible. tdf#149351 (Gabor Kelemen, allotropia)
- Objects can be drag-and-dropped in the navigator, allowing reordering and moving them in and out of groups. tdf#145359 (Jim Raykowski)
- Available since 7.5.5The Navigator is now functional in Notes View too. tdf#155393 (Jim Raykowski)
Table Design
- Added a new set of default table styles. daab6 (Rafael Lima)
Base
Chart
- Data tables are now supported in Charts. See blog post for furter details (Tomaž Vajngerl, Collabora)
Math
- Elements pane from left side of Math's window was moved to Sidebar. tdf#150489 (Mike Kaganski, Collabora)
Core / General
- Added support for rotate and zoom gestures when using touchpads. (Povilas Kanapickas)
- Allow searching for combining marks from so-called complex scripts. tdf#91764 (Khaled Hosny)
- Support font embedding on macOS. tdf#72456 (Khaled Hosny)
- Fix disabled spellchecking and language-sensitive text layout (e.g. digit replacement) in table of contents and hyper link text. tdf#126657, tdf#145104 (Khaled Hosny)
Design
- New application and file-type icons tdf#132398 (Galdam Jitsu)
- Available since 7.5.2A proper distinction between application and file-type icons was added to the Colibre and Sukapura icon themes. tdf#152595 tdf#153848 (Rizal Muttaqin)
Accessibility
- Restored automatic detection of HighContrast (HC) mode while providing user ability to disable in tdf#151522 (Caolán McNamara, Red Hat) ▸ ▸ ▸ .
Text Layout
- Improve kashida insertion by making the insertion positions explicit to avoid unwanted and spurious kashida insertion. tdf#104921, tdf#87731, tdf#106309, tdf#108604, tdf#112849, tdf#114257, tdf#127176, tdf#145647, tdf#146199 (Khaled Hosny)
- Fix kashida position when inserted after a letter with a combining mark. tdf#139627 (Khaled Hosny)
- Fix gaps inserted instead of kashida with some fonts. tdf#106653 (Khaled Hosny)
- Fix justification of text containing spacing combining marks (e.g. in Malayalam). tdf#150665 (Khaled Hosny)
- Disable ligatures when character spacing is set. tdf#66819 (Khaled Hosny)
- Correctly enable variable fonts variation setting during text layout, as well as font metrics. tdf#103596 (Khaled Hosny, Caolán McNamara / Red Hat)
- Use underline size and position as well as strike-through size and position values from the font when available ba03e, and make overline size the same as underline size 8da25. (Khaled Hosny)
- Use the same skew angle for artificial (synthetic) italic text across graphics backends and PDF export. f88e7 (Khaled Hosny)
- Improve glyph positioning of artificial italic text, especially combining marks. 1f9b2 (Khaled Hosny)
- Available since 7.5.5Fix glyph positioning of Hangul Jamo in vertical text layout. tdf#107718 (Khaled Hosny)
Edit Engine
- Sync kashida insertion algorithm with Writer one to include fixes and enhancements from Writer that other LibreOffice components were missing. tdf#137528 (Khaled Hosny)
- Fix bad Arabic letter spacing when text starts with left-to-right characters. tdf#103492 (Khaled Hosny)
- Fix gaps in justified Arabic text when the font does not have usable kashida glyph. tdf#137528 (Khaled Hosny)
- Correctly calculate text caret position inside ligatures, and use caret positions from the font when available. tdf#83581 (Khaled Hosny)
Performance
- Opening tdf#152301 (Caolán McNamara, Red Hat) ▸ ▸
LibreOffice Help
- Help contents updates and fixes
- Help build optimization
Filters
doc
- Re-allow .doc files to be renamed as .dot. tdf#125216 (Justin Luth, Collabora)
VBA Support
- Added support for WordBasic.ScreenUpdating. a8209 (Justin Luth, Collabora)
- Added support for WordBasic.MsgBox. 55628 (Justin Luth, Collabora)
- Run AutoNew, AutoOpen, AutoClose events properly in Writer and Calc. tdf#148806 (Justin Luth, Collabora)
- Added FormFields and ContentControls support for managing form objects. tdf#151548 (Justin Luth, Collabora)
- Support embedding color (e.g. Emoji) fonts using color layers (using COLR/CPAL OpenType tables). tdf#104403 (Khaled Hosny)
- Support embedding color (e.g. Emoji) fonts using color bitmaps (using CBLC/CBDT or sbix OpenType tables). tdf#121327 (Khaled Hosny)
- Support embedding variable fonts and apply font variations to glyph shapes. tdf#108497 (Khaled Hosny)
- Correct set Postscript name when embedding for some broken fonts. tdf#138325 (Khaled Hosny)
- Fix invalid PDF font subsets when subsetting blank glyphs. tdf#112152 (Khaled Hosny)
- Fix visual artifacts in glyphs that use fractional point coordinates. tdf#126242 (Khaled Hosny)
- Fix missing accent chars in glyphs that use deprecated arguments to CFF endchar operator. tdf#123234 (Khaled Hosny)
- Apply artificial italic to fallback fonts. tdf#102914 (Khaled Hosny)
- When exporting to PDF, you can now choose to export comments in the page margin. tdf#77650 (Samuel Mehrbrodt, allotropia)
- When inserting a picture and using PDF as a source file, now it is possible to use larger files. a5c1c (Szymon Kłos, Collabora)
SVG
- Remove "ghost" lines (extra semi-transparent white outline) of semi-transparent shapes tdf#149800 (László Németh)
GUI
General changes
- Support for dark and high contrast operating system themes on Windows, macOS and Linux was greatly improved. More than 40 bugs were fixed by contributors including Caolán McNamara (Red Hat), Rafael Lima, Michael Weghorn and Rizal Muttaqin.
- Available since 7.5.1Add support for switching dark or light mode manually. (Caolán McNamara, Red Hat) blog post
- When previewing styles in the side bar and the styles menu, use the CTL and Asian fonts set on the style for respective text instead of always using Western fonts. tdf#87535 (Khaled Hosny)
- Remove redundant tdf#55922 (Khaled Hosny) ▸ menu from macOS dock icon.
- An improved version of a single toolbar user interface was implemented, supporting context-aware controls and their customization. It can be activated via tdf#125040 (Maxim Monastirsky) ▸ ▸ . Customization can be done either with a right click context menu actions, or via ▸ ▸ , for various "Standard (Single Mode) - <context name>" targets. For now, context aware controls were added to Writer only. This largely makes the Contextual Single user interface obsolete, and it might be removed in future versions.
- GTK3 scrollbars now benefit from the "smooth scrolling" feature. Long-press on a scrollbar or use ⇧ Shift + Click for more precise scrolling. tdf#117388 (Caolán McNamara, Red Hat)
- The Start Center can now filter recent documents by type. tdf#80934 (Heiko Tietze, TDF)
- The Document Recovery dialog now has checkboxes for individual documents. tdf#114508 (Heiko Tietze, TDF)
آئیکان تھیم
- The Sifr icon set was refreshed to follow GNOME Adwaita’s new rounded style. tdf#151071 (Rizal Muttaqin)
Labelling
- In Calc, the "language" label was changed to the more accurate "locale" label in the (HTML) Import Options and Text Import dialogs. tdf#138748 (Pedro Silva, Collabora)
Font Features Dialog
The Font Features dialog (
▸ ▸ ▸ ) received some improvements:- Font features that are enabled by default (e.g. Standard Ligatures) can now be disabled. tdf#127423 (Khaled Hosny)
- Stylistic Sets and Character Variants features each is now grouped together in a separate section, so they stand out from other common font features. 3f9a8 (Khaled Hosny)
- Stylistic Sets and Character Variants features can have user-friendly labels defined in the font, these are now shown in the dialog instead of the generic feature names. Additionally, localized versions of these labels that are provided by the font are also shown when LibreOffice user interface is in the respective languages. 19787 (Khaled Hosny)
Localization
Improvements to proofing tools and language support
Dictionaries
- Ukrainian dictionary was updated. tdf#149980 (Aron Budea, Collabora)
- Added Persian (fa-IR) dictionary commit (Aron Budea, Collabora)
- Slovenian thesaurus was updated (Martin Srebotnjak, OdprtiTezaver).
Language tags
- The language list combo-box now accepts input of art-... BCP 47 private-use language tags like art-x-mylang or art-Latn-x-mylang (with every valid script subtag for Latn of course). This is an exception to the otherwise not accepted input of private-use subtags preventing mis-spreading arbitrary private-use tags, to support language attribution of artificial constructed languages. tdf#150370 (Eike Rathke, Red Hat)
- Language list entries can be permanently added by dropping an auto-correction file acor_*.dat into the shared or user profile's autocorr/ directory with the corresponding well-formed and valid BCP 47 language tag in its name. The file can be empty (0 bytes length) with no auto-correction data being present, data can be added and edited as usual in AutoCorrect Options. For example, autocorr/acor_de-DE-1901.dat will add the de-DE-1901 tag's language entry that will be displayed as
German (Germany, Traditional German orthography) {de-DE-1901}
If the tag in the file name is not a well-formed BCP 47 language tag or not valid, it is silently ignored and no language list entry will be added. tdf#150371 (Eike Rathke, Red Hat) - For information about IETF BCP 47 language tags, see Wikipedia and W3.org
New languages/locales with locale data
Available as default document language and for locale specific formatting.
- Portuguese (Mozambique) {pt-MZ}. tdf#148792 (Eike Rathke, Red Hat)
Currencies
- As Croatia joins the Eurozone on the 1st of January 2023, Croatian kuna (HRK) conversion to and from euro (EUR) is now supported in the
EUROCONVERT()
function, and the new default currency for Croatia is the euro. tdf#150011 (Eike Rathke, Red Hat)
Scripting
- The Macro Selector dialog (792e4 - Rafael Lima). ▸ ▸ ) now remembers the last run macro (
- The Basic IDE now has a Zoom Slider that allow users to more easily increase/decrease the zoom factor applied to the code editing window. It can also be controlled with Ctrl + Scroll. The font size defined in the Options dialog (0d923 - Rafael Lima). ▸ ▸ ▸ ) is used as the 100% zoom factor (
LibreLogo
LibreLogo programming language is more usable for graphics design with the following improvements (László Németh):
- Up to 6 times speed increase of LABEL command by temporary layout locking of font settings. (Note: locking was suggested by Noel Grandin in tdf#105575, also he made several other performance improvements previously.)
- Up to 32 times speed increase of drawing by custom layout locking using SLEEP -1 & SLEEP 0 command pairs. For example, 800 vector shapes drawn by 4 seconds instead of more than 2 minutes (e50f0)
- LABEL command supports more HTML-like tags for formatting: localized color names, hundreds of OpenType and Graphite font features, font family, font size, strikethrough and highlighting. (43570) Note: bold, italic and underline formatting have been introduced by LO 7.4 in 89c34.
- Portable SVG export for OpenType/Graphite font features, also for rotated text with text portions: font features (glyphs and other settings) and positions of text portions are exported correctly by converting text to curve, as a workaround for the bugs and incompleteness of the SVG export. (fe5cc) Test code with a rotated text containing OpenType/Graphite scientific inferior and red text portion:
PICTURE “test.svg” [
LEFT 45° LABEL “CO<sinf>2</sinf> <red>level</red>” ]
Note: see also #SVG for SVG export which was improved during these LibreLogo developments.
- Fix regression of parsing of default commands in 37d86.
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 28 services each with a bunch of methods and properties.
New in LibreOffice 7.5:
- The (new) Datasheet service, to manage tabular views of database data. A datasheet may be opened from a Base window or at any moment (without the Base component being open). Cursor movement and current selection content may be processed by a user script.
- The RunCommand() method may receive arguments (see .UNO:Commands wiki page).
- Error messages provide direct access to the help page of the failing method.
- A new Normalize() method in the FileSystem service.
- In the Calc service, new uses of the FilterFormula concept to selectively clear or format cells, rows or columns.
- Support of 16,384 columns in the Calc service.
- In the Dialog service, a new SetPageManager() method synchronizes automatically dropdown lists, next/previous buttons and tab headers while the user browses through the dialog pages.
- A new basic.CreateUnoStruct() method for Python scripts.
The whole set of services (except when not relevant) is made available for Python scripts with identical syntax and behaviour as in Basic.
The English version of the documentation of the ScriptForge libraries (7.5) is fully integrated in the LibreOffice help pages (https://help.libreoffice.org/7.5/en-US/text/sbasic/shared/03/lib_ScriptForge.html?DbPAR=BASIC). Their translation into other languages is underway. (Alain Romedenne, Rafael Lima)
LOK API
Added sending unique window id along with other data to LOK API. 05a77 (Gökay Şatır, Collabora)
Feature Removal / Deprecation
- In the SDK, the deprecated tools
idlc
andregmerge
(using the legacy type registry format) have been removed in favor ofunoidl-write
(using the incompatible new type registry format internally introduced in LibreOffice 4.1). a8485d55 - Experimental Emoji toolbar button has been removed. Using system Emoji insertion tools is preferred. tdf#151197 (Khaled Hosny)
- The following font families are no longer bundled with LibreOffice, Users using these fonts are advised to install them on their system:
- EmojiOne Color tdf#144348 (Khaled Hosny)
- Source Code Pro and Source Serif Pro. tdf#136604 (Khaled Hosny)
- KacstBook and KacstOffice. tdf#152376 (Khaled Hosny)
- The options "Use printer metrics for document formatting" and "Use printer metrics for text formatting" (
UsePrtMetrics
internally) were removed from various places in the Options dialog. tdf#131136 (Heiko Tietze, TDF)
Platform Compatibility
Mac
- LibreOffice 7.5 requires macOS 10.14 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 2023 → 10.15 Catalina
API Changes
- The obsolete UNOIDL method
com.sun.star.registry.XSimpleRegistry::mergeKey
has been deprecated (without a replacement), and its implementation now unconditionally throws aRuntimeException
. 25fc5 (Stephan Bergmann, Red Hat) - Added a new property
JobName
to the com::sun::star::view::PrintOptions service to allow specifying a job name which is sent to the printer. (Samuel Mehrbrodt, allotropia)