LibreOffice 7 Continues Plumbing Its Vulkan Rendering Support

Landing last November in the LibreOffice development code was Skia drawing support to replace Cairo and in turn that opens up for Vulkan rendering of this cross-platform, open-source office suite.

Skia+Vulkan is working out for LibreOffice and in fact the debut version that was going to be LibreOffice 6.5 was renamed to LibreOffice 7.0 as the current version now under development following the recent LibreOffice 6.4 release.

The LibreOffice 7.0 Alpha release is expected to happen already in early May while by the end of that month will be the feature freeze and branching. Betas and release candidates will happen through the summer while ideally LibreOffice 7.0.0 will debut the first full week of August.

The Vulkan work for LibreOffice 7.0 has been ongoing and a few more improvements were merged over the past week. The latest happenings include Vulkan context creation for Windows after that code was mistakenly left out until a few days ago. Also added is Vulkan blacklisting support and sharing the OpenGL blacklist file handling with Skia/Vulkan.

The good news is that while the plumbing is added for allowing LibreOffice to blacklist buggy Vulkan drivers, so far there are not any Vulkan configurations being black-listed by the office suite. The SAL_SKIA=vulkan environment variable for forcing Vulkan support is also wired up in the latest LibreOffice activity. There is also new options added to the UI for forcing Skia's CPU-based rasterizing.

It's great seeing this Vulkan+Skia support come together quickly for LibreOffice 7.0 and that it should be set to sail by this August.