LibreOffice 5.3 Is Coming This Week, A Look At The New Features

[quikee]

Not really. There was a proper effort to address it. But it's stalling: https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/...g.cgi?id=94632

LO 5.3 will have "Breeze Dark" icons.

[Hi-Angel]

The compatibility improves with each new version, but unfortunately it can't be made flawless. Sometimes our internal model (and/or a similar feature in ODF) is not compatible with a feature in OOXML and we have to make a compromise to make it work.

May be it's rather time to improve the internal model? LibreOffice should not stick with just OOXML, because it already supports a bunch of formats, and in the future might newer appear. E.g. LaTeX support would be really nice — for the time being it's one of the biggest issue for researchers/scientists/engineers, i.e. that documents written in LaTeX is impossible to convert to Office formats. You can't imagine, how awesome it is to write a document in something like Markdown/LaTeX, and convert it after. And no, please don't mention pandoc, it's terrible, it supports almost nothing from LaTeX besides just formulas. For the time being the solution doesn't exist.

[quikee]

May be it's rather time to improve the internal model?

We do that, but we are bound to ODF and every time we extend the model we automatically need to extend ODF. But then you get to a feature that is conflicting between the formats and can't be mapped losslessly, then you're screwed and need to compromise. In many cases this is not such a big deal however. BTW - MS is in the same boat with regards to their ODF support.

[TitanFighter]

Would be very cool if they fixed horizontal scroll in spreadsheets (to make scroll by pixels instead of columns)

[Hi-Angel]

We do that, but we are bound to ODF and every time we extend the model we automatically need to extend ODF. But then you get to a feature that is conflicting between the formats and can't be mapped losslessly, then you're screwed and need to compromise. In many cases this is not such a big deal however. BTW - MS is in the same boat with regards to their ODF support.

I've been suspecting something alike, and it's sad to be right. Why not just use some unstable easy-to-change internal format, and decoders/encoders from/to the format to save.

[shmerl]

LO 5.3 will have "Breeze Dark" icons.

Good!

[starshipeleven]

But "flawless" — no, it's just impossible. TL;DR version of the link: MS Office support of docx is so broken (sick! their own format!), that different versions of Office sometimes even behave differently for the same document.

This. Many times this. Goddamn Office isn't 100% compatible even with itself.

[quikee]

Why not just use some unstable easy-to-change internal format, and decoders/encoders from/to the format to save.

Again, we do that already (we have export/import for ODF). But in the end you need a format that supports all your features - in LO this is ODF. So extending internal format means extending ODF - you don't need to do it but that's the general rule. The reason is that we don't want a situation where you load OOXML file and can only losslessly save it to OOXML again but not to ODF. Then you get a problem when OOXML and ODF don't mix.. and you need to compromise.

But yeah - maybe we should allow for such instances in the future. However we need to communicate it clearly to the user when he tries to change the format of the source file.

[Guest]

To be honest, they did a lot more than code conformation fixes, wayland support, and gui/icon fixes.
I have 15 year old unmodified .doc files (which I wrote in ms office 2000). They rendered terribly in openoffice.org. Tables were cut. Text was in the wrong cells.
Now those same files look almost exactly the same in libreoffice-5-3 branch as they did in microsoft office with only minor font size differences.

[sheldonl]

CLA of course. The suffering from CLA was one of the reasons why LO was conceived. Ignorance or apathy cant hide this.

https://lwn.net/Articles/443989/

Would McNamara be able to contribute copyleft code to Qt like he can do on GTK? No! Any fixes on the toolkit side would be non-free, non-copyleft CLA.
https://git.gnome.org/browse/gtk+/co...0cbb016f47ac31

Who would expect Qt to care about Wayland anyway? Kwin Wayland just broke on Qt 5.8 because no one cared to test it before release.

And for GTK is there no CLA required at all? I'm not familiar with GTK, but I know a lot of other open source projects do copyright assignment back to FSF/GNU/Apache orgs, etc. In the case of GTK does nobody who contributes code to GTK/GDK, etc. assign copyright back to some particular entity?

Note, that on the QT site it does say "It is important to note that the contributor retains ownership of the contribution as the Qt Project does not require copyright assignment for contributions made to the Qt Project."

https://www.qt.io/contributionagreement/