14 DAY TRIAL // As reported the other day, The Document Foundation announced that the first bug hunting session for the upcoming LibreOffice 5.4 office suite would take place on April 28, 2017, debugging the first Alpha build that'll be released early next week.
However, as promised, in this article we'll take a look at the upcoming features of LibreOffice 5.4, at least those that have been already revealed. These include new "Edit Section" and "Footnotes and Endnotes" entries in the context menu of the Writer, which work if the cursor is in a section, as well as in a footnote or endnote. Check out the screenshot gallery below to see them in action.
Calc can now remember CSV export settings, new "Hide All Comments" and "Show All Comments" commands are implemented in the View -> Comments menu, it's possible to change the priority of conditional formatting rules using the new up and down buttons, and calculate with the "Precision as shown" option now supports fraction format, several subformats, engineering notation, and thousands divisors.
Support for drawing rectangles, arcs, Bézier curves, and Pie charts, as well as support for translating the current world and for scaling world are among the improvements brought to the EMF+ vector images import filters used by .doc, docx, .xls, .xlsx, and .ppt file formats. Additionally, pdfium is now used for rendering inserted PDF images.
Notebookbar and LibreOffice Online get new features
The experimental Notebookbar gains support for themes and a toolbar with shortcuts, allowing users to add and edit shortcuts using the Customization dialog. For LibreOffice Online, the document iframe gets a responsive design and read-only mode, undo and redo notification when there are conflicts between edits, as well as client notification about non-availability or recycling of the server.
Also for LibreOffice Online, the number of rows available in the Online Calc component was increased to 10.000, and thanks to Collabora's Michael Meeks and TOR Lillqvist, the overall performance of the office suite got a boost by avoiding compression of PNG compression of un-changed tiles and sending of PNGs that are available on the client side.
The proofing tools and language support will be improved as well in LibreOffice 5.4, and a few things were removed, such as the PlaceWare export filter, the Telepathy Tubes interface, and the Web wizard. It also looks like Mac OS X 10.9 or later is supported, and there are numerous API and SDK changes as well. We hope to have a more in-depth article as soon as the LibreOffice 5.4 development advances.
