LibreOffice 7.2 RC2 Up For Testing With Its Initial GTK4 Work, Command Pop-Up / HUD

LibreOffice 7.2 is preparing to ship this month while out today is LibreOffice 7.2 RC2 for facilitating last minute testing of this leading open-source office suite.

LibreOffice 7.2 brings a command pop-up / heads-up display (HUD), 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 prefetching of large images. The default templates for LibreOffice have also been refreshed with a better appearance.

LibreOffice 7.2 overall is another nice incremental update to this cross-platform open-source alternative to Microsoft Office.

LibreOffice 7.2 RC2 is available for testing now with more details over on the Document Foundation QA blog.

A third and final LibreOffice 7.2 release candidate is expected next week followed by seeing the official LibreOffice 7.2 office suite release one week later.