LibreOffice News Archives

LibreOffice 7.5 released on-schedule this morning as the newest version of this cross-platform, free software office suite to rival Microsoft Office.

With LibreOffice 7.5 due out next week and that code already having been branched, in the LibreOffice mainline code this week they have dropped support for some old targets.

Ahead of the early February planned debut of the LibreOffice 7.5 open-source office suite, the release candidate was made available today for testing.

It was just earlier this month that the LibreOffice 7.5 Alpha was released and today it's been succeeded by the LibreOffice 7.5 Beta after landing more than one hundred fixes and more than 350 new commits.

Ahead of LibreOffice 7.5 expected to be released in February, today marks the availability of the first alpha build available for testing.

Back in 2013 when AMD was pushing their Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA) they joined The Document Foundation and wanted to make use of OpenCL acceleration within this open-source office suite. Shortly thereafter they added many OpenCL functions to LibreOffice but now a decade later it seems to be of little use but at least this week thanks to a Collabora engineer there has been some OpenCL code cleaning for this free software office suite.

While LibreOffice has supported some input gestures in the past like swiping and long presses with the GTK front-end as well as some Android and iOS specific additions, it looks like greater gesture support is on the way for this cross-platform, open-source office suite.

LibreOffice 7.4 is out today as the latest major update to this open-source, cross-platform office suite. This leading free software office suite now supports WebP images as well as a variety of other improvements to its various components.

Following GCC 12 introducing LoongArch support earlier this year, Linux 5.19 adding the initial LoongArch port, and Glibc 2.36 adding LoongArch, LibreOffice is now the latest high-profile open-source project adding support for this Chinese processor ISA that started out derived from MIPS64.

The Document Foundation has made available this morning the LibreOffice 7.4 release candidate as the newest test version of this cross-platform, open-source office suite.

Out today is the beta release of LibreOffice 7.4 as the newest feature release in development for this cross-platform, open-source office suite.

LibreOffice has already provided some support for Microsoft SmartArt Graphics while now they are working on more advanced diagram support for this open-source office suite.

While Advanced Vector Extensions (AVX) can provide some big performance boosts when software is properly tuned for it and most often we are writing about projects adding support for it, in the case of LibreOffice they are now going ahead and removing their AVX and AVX-512 tuning.

This week marked the release of LibreOffice 7.3 but already for LibreOffice 7.4 coming at the end of summer is a change many users will enjoy: the open-source office suite has finally decided to support the WebP image format.

The Document Foundation has released LibreOffice 7.3 as the newest half-year update to this leading open-source, cross-platform office suite.

Last May there was some work on compiling LibreOffice to WebAssembly as another means of getting this open-source office suite executing within the web browser and other environments. It had been quiet since on the LibreOffice WASM front but a number of new commits were merged this morning.

LibreOffice 7.3 is due out in early February while for ensuring it will be another successful feature release to this open-source office suite, LibreOffice 7.3 RC1 was made available today for some nice holiday testing.

The first beta of LibreOffice 7.3 is now available for testing as the next installment of this leading open-source, cross-platform office suite.

LibreOffice 7.3 Alpha 1 was tagged on Friday in the first step towards this next open-source office suite update due out early next year.

Merged this morning into the LibreOffice code-base is the initial Qt6 VCL plug-in.

LibreOffice 7.2 Community is out today as the newest version of this widely-used, open-source, cross-platform office suite.

LibreOffice 7.2 is expected for release before the end of August while today marks the availability of the first release candidate.

The OASIS standards organization has now officially approved of the ODF 1.3 revision of the OpenDocument Format as their newest ratified standard.

Following last month's LibreOffice 7.2 Alpha, the first beta for this open-source office suite update is now available for testing.

The first alpha release of LibreOffice 7.2 is now available for testing ahead of the planned stable release of this open-source office suite update in August.

Adding to the changes building up for LibreOffice 7.2 ahead of its debut in August is a "Command Popup" or a heads-up display (HUD) of sorts for easily running LibreOffice commands.

Ahead of this week's LibreOffice 7.2 Alpha and the feature freeze / branching next month, initial GTK4 toolkit support code has begun landing in this open-source office suite.

Merged into LibreOffice yesterday is initial support for an EmScripten-based cross-build and compiling to WebAssembly (WASM) for in-browser execution or potentially running on the desktop in a portable manner with the likes of Wasmer.

While there has been LibreOffice Online as a collaborative, web-based version of LibreOffice making use of the HTML5 Canvas for its UI, there hasn't been much activity there recently outside of the Collabora Online commercial variant. But developers are working on a current port of LibreOffice to the web browser using WebAssembly.

LibreOffice 7.1 has just been released as the latest version of this cross-platform, open-source office suite that now carries "Community" branding and promoting of "Enterprise" variants as well.

LibreOffice 7.1 should be released at the start of February while now the second to last release candidate is available for testing of this leading cross-platform, open-source office suite.

LibreOffice has various "AVMedia" back-ends for supporting the playback of audio and video within the open-source office suite with GStreamer and other platform-specific options. LibreOffice also supported a VLC back-end for audio/video playback but after years of that code being experimental and not maintained, it's now been eliminated.

For those with extra time around the holidays, the first release candidate of LibreOffice 7.1 is now available for testing.

LibreOffice 7.1 was branched this weekend that also marked the hard feature freeze for this next half-year update to this open-source office suite. LibreOffice 7.1 Beta has now shipped ahead of next month's release candidate and the additional test releases in January before going gold in early February.

While LibreOffice 7.0 was just released back in August, LibreOffice 7.1 is now in alpha as the first step towards this next open-source office suite release.

The ODF 1.3 Open Document Format specification was approved by the OASIS Committee at the start of the year and now as we approach the end of the year The Document Foundation is hoping to see ODF 1.3 support completed soon for this leading open-source office suite.

While LibreOffice 7.0 was just released earlier this month, with the code branching having already happened earlier this summer, there are a number of changes already accumulating in the code-base for LibreOffice 7.1.

It was just one week ago that LibreOffice 7.0 was released and it has already seen around a half-million downloads for this leading open-source, cross-platform office suite.

The Document Foundation that is behind the cross-platform LibreOffice open-source office suite has published their 2019 annual report.

LibreOffice 7.0 has been released! Making LibreOffice 7.0 so exciting is that the Cairo code was replaced with Google's Skia library and in the process gaining optional support for GPU accelerating the user-interface with Vulkan.

Surprising many in the open-source community in recent weeks was the LibreOffice 7.0 release candidate branded as a "Personal Edition". While still being free/open-source software and no licensing change, the traditional LibreOffice build was going to be marketed as "Personal Edition" to differentiate from other stakeholders that may market their professional/enterprise services around this cross-platform, open-source office suite. Those Personal Edition plans are now officially being reverted from next month's LibreOffice 7.0 release.

Ahead of the official release expected in early August, the second release candidate of LibreOffice 7.0 is now available for testing.

In response to the largely critical feedback of LibreOffice 7.0-RC1's branding as "Personal Edition" for the standard version of this open-source office suite, the branding is being reconsidered to either delay it until LibreOffice 7.1 or potentially relabel it as the "Community Edition" version.

Yes, it's true the LibreOffice builds in recent days -- including the new LibreOffice 7.0 RC1 -- have "Personal Edition" branding for the open-source builds. But given user concerns, The Document Foundation board has issued some clarifications to try to ease any immediate rumors, etc.

With just about one month to go until the official release, the first release candidate is out today of the LibreOffice 7.0 open-source, cross-platform office suite software.

LibreOffice 7.0 is aiming for release in early August but for that release to be a success they need help in testing.

There still is two months to go until the stable release of LibreOffice 7.0 but today marks the availability of the first beta.

The first alpha release of LibreOffice 7.0 is out this week for testing ahead of the planned official release of this big open-source office suite update in August.

Last month we reported on LibreOffice now preferring its new rendering code be built with LLVM Clang over alternative compilers. When falling back to CPU-based software rasterization, the Clang-generated code performs much better than alternative compilers given Google's own emphasis with Skia on being Clang-focused. LibreOffice 7.0 is now beginning a hard requirement on Clang when building for Windows.

Many likely didn't realize the functionality was still in place, but LibreOffice 7.0 will finally phase out its export support for Adobe Flash (SWF).