LibreOffice 7.2 RC1 Released Ahead Of Official Debut Next Month

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

Since last month's LibreOffice 7.2 beta process began, more bug fixes have been accumulating into this major half-year update to this cross-platform open-source office suite. LibreOffice 7.2 introduces a command pop-up / heads-up display, initial GTK4 toolkit support, the ability to compile to WebAssembly, font caching for faster rendering, Calc spreadsheet performance improvements, the usual assortment of import/filter export work, and dropping its OpenGL-based drawing code in favor of routing all the code through Skia. Among the filter work is faster importing of Microsoft DOCX files. Also in the name of greater performance is large images will now be loaded on-demand while there is also faster slide rendering in LibreOffice Impress by pre-fetching of large images. The default templates for LibreOffice have also been refreshed with a better appearance.

There are more than 200 new commits with 100+ bug fixes found in today's LibreOffice 7.2 RC1 release compared to the beta. The official LibreOffice 7.2.0 release should happen in mid-August.

Downloads and more details on today's LibreOffice 7.2 RC1 via The Document Founation QA blog.