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).

With the release of LibreOffice 7.0 in a few months, the open-source office suite will now prefer building at least portions of its code-base with the LLVM Clang compiler over GCC or Microsoft MSVC even if the default compiler is not Clang.

With the in-development LibreOffice 7.0 one of the headlining changes is making use of Google's Skia library and with that is Vulkan rendering support. That initial implementation was using Skia to draw the UI while now it's also picking up text rendering responsibilities.

The LibreOffice open-source office suite's Qt5 tool-kit integration so far has lacked HiDPI scaling support for dealing with modern high pixel density displays. But adding to the excitement for the LibreOffice 7.0 release later this year is now the Qt5 HiDPI scaling capability.

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.

LibreOffice 6.4 is out today as the latest feature update to this cross-platform, open-source office suite.

LibreOffice 6.4 is set to be released in the coming days while succeeding that will now be LibreOffice 7.0.

While LibreOffice 6.4 isn't even coming out until the end of January, we are already stoked about the follow-on release to this open-source office suite... Currently the development builds are towards LibreOffice 6.5 (though given the big impact we wouldn't be surprised if it morphed into LibreOffice 7.0) and one of the features that landed at the end of November is the Cairo drawing being replaced by Skia and with that Vulkan-based rendering support for this free office suite.

With LibreOffice 6.4 branched ahead of its release next year, feature development is open on what will be the next follow-on release for later in 2020. And this week one big underlying code change was merged... Using Skia for drawing the interface in an effort to ultimately replace the Cairo usage.

As of this morning LibreOffice 6.4 was branched from master and the beta release tagged with those LO 6.4 Beta binaries expected out shortly.

After a slight delay, The Document Foundation this morning announced the release of the LibreOffice 6.3 cross-platform open-source office suite.