General Activities LibreOffice 7.0.0 was announced on August, 5 LibreOffice 6.4.6 was announced on August, 13 Olivier Hallot (TDF) updated the help for inserting layers and added a page for Comparison Options Stephan Bergmann (Red Hat) made renovations in the internal handling of strings. He also made many cleanups as well as build and test fixes Noel Grandin (Collabora) made many code cleanups, increased the use of the fast XML parser and fixed some memory leaks Justin Luth (Collabora/SIL) fixed issues with odd/even footers in exported DOCX, section breaks in exported DOCX, missing images in DOC/DOCX/RTF export and placement on images in table cells in imported DOCX Caolán McNamara (Red Hat) improved the behaviour of Area fill tab and fixed some very old issues with Writer table properties dialog. He also continued the crucial user interface backend work and did many cleanups and crash fixes Szabolcs Tóth and Regényi Balázs (NISZ) fixed some issues with imported and exported OOXML shapes and objects Dániel Arató (NISZ) fixed line spacing with inline pictures in imported DOCX Vasily Melenchuk (CIB) added support for paragraph mark formatting with character style for DOCX export Luboš Luňák (Collabora) continued polishing the Skia graphics engine integration. More
Month: September 2020
Investing in bug reports pays off
Document compatibility between office suites is a common concern for LibreOffice users. People take sample documents, expecting a pixel-perfect similarity with other office applications and rightly so. While we cover most aspects of formats outside the OpenDocument Format specification, LibreOffice’s native format, there are pieces that have not been implemented yet (for example smooth shadows, which have been implemented recently and will be available in LibreOffice 7.1). Of course we sometimes fail as well, like any other software producer. Microsoft’s “transitional” formats often include undocumented or obscure content that is hard for other office suites to parse. One enormous advantage of open source software is that you can talk more or less directly to the developers. All bug reports and enhancement requests are taken seriously and will receive immediate response unlike what happens when you complain about issues to companies without open development models. Unfortunately not everyone knows about this advantage so we thought it’s time to recall. The people doing quality assurance for LibreOffice is an ever-changing group of around 30 contributors. They analyse user reports tirelessly and always appreciate problem descriptions delivered in a clear and understandable way. In a recent article about LibreOffice appearing on dedoimedo.com, several