LibreOffice (64-bit)

What's new in this version:

WRITER:
Various:
- Direct cursor: Add option to insert only spaces
- Find toolbar: Add drop down list to change search type
- The main menu (top level) now has an entry “Form”
- Page dialog: page orientation automatically adjusts based on manual input
- Default column spacing (aka gutter) changed to 0.5cm
- Support for split sections inside tables blog entry
- New set of default numbering list styles

Input fields:
- Improved input field behavior

Images rotation:
- Implement rotation of images in Writer to any angle

Mail Merge:
- Writer document as mail merge data source
- Mail Merge now can use XLSX files as data source
- Temporary connections created during mail merge are no longer stored

Tables:
- New default table style
- Default table style applied to inserted tables
- Default table border width changed to 0.5pt
- Old collection of autoformat table styles were replaced with a new collection of table styles: Default, Academic, Box List Blue, Box List Green, Box List Red, Box List Yellow, Elegant, Financial, Simple Grid Columns, Simple Grid Rows, Simple List Shaded

“Grammar By” spell checking:
- User dictionaries allow automatic affixation or compounding, supporting effective editing and technical dictionary creation in several languages. tdf#113739 (László Németh)
- This is a general spell checking improvement of LibreOffice, but it can speed up especially the work of Writer users. Instead of manual handling of hundreds of correct word forms of a new word in a language with rich morphology or compounding, Hunspell spell checker will recognize the new user dictionary word with affixes or in compounds, too, based on a “Grammar By” model word

CALC:
Various:
- Pivot table interop fixes
- Default 2-entry color scale conditional formatting colors changed to Yellow and Green
- Enhanced "Links" dialog
- Number format: accept English syntax keywords; some languages use localized keywords (AAAA for YYYY in French for instance). Now these languages can use English keywords to get valid format in any UI language

Exporting images:
- A cell range selection or a selected group of shapes (images) can be exported to PNG or JPG graphics format with File ? Export... if the Selection checkbox is marked in the file dialog. tdf#108317 (Eike Rathke (Red Hat, Inc.))

Pasting: unformatted text:
- The text/plain Unformatted text format results in unquoted/unescaped content as expected for external pastes. For single cell copy&paste embedded line breaks and tabs are preserved, for multiple cells they are replaced with spaces, effectively being a tab-separated-values (TSV) format. For intra-Calc on-cell pastes using the paste special toolbar button the Unformatted text [TSV-Calc] format can be used, which preserves embedded line breaks and tabs across multiple cells. tdf#113571 tdf#32213 (Eike Rathke (Red Hat, Inc.))
- Added "Paste unformatted text" command with its hot key Ctrl+? Shift+Alt+V tdf#50746

Protection, cells, sheets:
- Added new command to select unprotected cells on protected or unprotected sheet. Located Edit ? Select ? Select Unprotected Cells
- If a tab is protected, the lock symbol (??) appears at the beginning of the tab name

New spreadsheet functions:
- New ODFF1.2 compliant functions SEARCHB, FINDB and REPLACEB added

IMPRESS AND DRAW:
Various:
- Addition of 10 new Impress templates and improvement of two existing templates tdf#103317 (Ashisuto, Yousuf Philips, Heiko Tietze, Laurent BP)
- Removal of confirmation dialog when setting image as slide or page background tdf#112650 (Heiko Tietze, Samuel Mehrbrodt)
- Set default slide format 16:9 tdf#93244 (Heiko Tietze)
- Duplicate dialog

Layers in Draw:
- Better UI for handling layer attributes tdf#89130

CORE/GENERAL:
- Moving existing legacy parser contexts in sc and other modules to fast contexts and offloading unzipping and reading into a different thread (Mohammed Abdul Azeem)
- Added support for user icon themes via extension manager tdf#110742 (Caolán McNamara)

Fonts:
- Addition of Noto fonts (Noto Sans, Noto Serif, Noto Mono and others) tdf#103080 (Yousuf Philips)
- Addition of open source Hebrew fonts and new default order of Hebrew fonts tdf#113538 (Yousuf Philips)
- Addition of open source Arabic fonts tdf#113532 (Yousuf Philips)
- Removal of Open Sans and PT_Serif fonts tdf#103080 (Yousuf Philips)

OpenPGP document signing and encryption:
- on all desktop platforms, you can now use OpenPGP keys to sign ODF documents. tdf#89037 (Katarína Behrens, Samuel Mehrbrodt, Thorsten Behrens - CIB)
- there is now (experimental) support for OpenPGP-based document encryption as well. On saving ODF documents, the file picker shows an extra checkbox to that effect
- you need auxiliary software to make use of that feature (LibreOffice will transparently merge available keys if you have the below installed)

TSCP Classification:
- Classification (TSCP-based) now allows multiple policies
- In Writer the marking and signing at paragraph level are possible
- All this is also saved in Microsoft OOXML-format

Save images modified in place:
- In previous LibreOffice versions when the user tried to save an embedded image through the "Save..." entry available in the context menu, the saved image was the original one more eventually applied filters (which are not removable).
- Further applied transformations like rotations, cropping, color effects were not included in the saved image.
- Starting from this release, LibreOffice offers the user to choose if saving the original image or the modified version through a simple pop-up dialog.
- The new feature is available in Writer, Calc and Draw. (Marco Cecchetti - Collabora)

Visualization of Borders for Tables:
- The visualization of Borders for Tables was largely redesigned/reimplemented for this release, enhancing display quality and unifying the core mechanisms for their graphical creation (basing them mostly on GraphicPrimitives). Matching and merging of overlapping corners is greatly improved, Multi-Line Borders are internally supported for more than three lines in the core. This Table Borders are used in various places - in Dialogs showing the Border Control Widget, in Writer Tables, in Draw/Impress Tables and (of course) in Calc itself. All of these support merged Cells which need to take incoming lines at merged edges into account correctly. Calc also has some 'extra' features like crossed lines and 'rotated' Cells.(Armin Le Grand, CIB)

LIBREOFFICE HELP:
New help online:
- The old wikihelp has been replaced by the new help online

Help Contents:
- Assorted updates to the content and code

FILTERS:
New filters:
- Implemented a new import filter from QuarkXPress v.3, v.4. For this, the libqxp library was created
- Implemented a new export filter to format EPUB from Writer. tdf#33226
- Improvements to OOXML filter
- Improved SmartArt import filter
- Import/export of ActiveX controls from/to DOCX format tdf#50097, tdf#91384
- Improved support embedded text documents (DOCX/DOC) and spreadsheets (XLSX/XLS) in files DOCX/DOC
- Correctly load RTL text direction tdf#87533
- Export into DOCX and DOC all character properties applied for fields tdf#38778
- Show digital signature status in signature line tdf#65393
- Improved OOXML support in presentation files
- DOCX export of cross-references to objects: tables, images, text frames and shapes tdf#42346
- Export MailMerge fields to DOCX and DOC tdf#67207 (Mike Kaganski, Collabora)
- Improvements in the PPTX filter to prevent from creating broken files tdf#104788 tdf#112086 tdf#112088 tdf#112089 tdf#112333 tdf#112334 (Szymon Klos, Collabora)
- Theme colors export was introduced in the PPTX (commit) (Szymon Klos, Collabora)
- Default text frame paddings are now exported correctly tdf#113399 (Tamás Zolnai - Collabora, privately sponsored)
- Preserve font attributes and size of chart's legend, during export to MS Office documents (eg. .xlsx and .docx) tdf#108066 tdf#114173 (Bartosz Kosiorek)
- Horizontal line imports with most attributes tdf#97648 (Justin Luth)
- Drop cap lines and spacing correctly imported tdf#109318 tdf#109319 (Justin Luth)
- Improvement to footnote character style import and export tdf#82173 tdf#109310 tdf#55427 (Justin Luth)
- Improvement to the import of strict OOXML tdf#79272 tdf#78508 tdf#82065 (Justin Luth)

Improvements in EMF+ import:
- Enhanced Metafile Format Plus (EMF+) import filters are used by .doc, docx, .xls, .xlsx, .ppt and .pptx file formats
- Complete rewrite of the EMF+ import filters (Armin Le Grand CIB, Patrick Jaap TU Dresden)
- Fix failure of displaying ChemDraw objects tdf#31814 (Patrick Jaap TU Dresden, Bartosz Kosiorek)
- Add support for EmfPlusRecordTypeFillRegion record tdf#113704 (Bartosz Kosiorek)
- Implement proper reading of the EmfPlusRegionNode record tdf#113704 (Bartosz Kosiorek)
- Add support for ResetClip record tdf#113707 (Bartosz Kosiorek)
- Add support to OffsetClip record tdf#113758 (Bartosz Kosiorek)

Improvements to ODF filter:
- Metafiles which were previously saved in the internal SVM (Star View Metafile) format are now accompanied by a PNG fallback graphic. This makes it easier for other ODF readers to display the graphics. (Samuel Mehrbrodt, CIB)
- All exported images are annotated with their mimetype in the ODF (attribute loext:mime-type on draw:image) (Samuel Mehrbrodt, CIB)
- Flat ODF now also has fallback graphics for SVG, PDF and Metafiles (Samuel Mehrbrodt, CIB)
- Text grid lines not enabled by default when attribute isn't set tdf#77961 (Mark Hung)
- When converting documents via command line, the target image format can now be chosen via the new --convert-images-to command line parameter. See the output of libreoffice --help for usage information. tdf#109202 (Katarina Behrens, Samuel Mehrbrodt - CIB)

Improvements to XHTML Export:
- Images are now always exported in a browser-readable format (usually SVG or PNG). (Samuel Mehrbrodt, CIB)

Improvements in Adobe Freehand import:
- Read more features: text on path, stroke patterns, arrows, paragraph attributes, custom line and fill styles, text effects. (Laurent Alonso)
- Fix rotation center of a textbox. (Laurent Alonso)

Improvements in MS Visio import:
- Consider stencil txtxform in binary formats. tdf#67914 (Fridrich Strba)
- Parse font width scaling. (Fridrich Strba)
- Accept documents produced by lucidchart.com. tdf#98791 (David Tardon, Red Hat, Inc.)
- Output shape ID if set. (Fridrich Strba)
- Fix parsing of text block background color in some cases. (David Tardon, Red Hat, Inc.)
- Write bitmaps with color palette correctly. (David Tardon, Red Hat, Inc.)
- Deduce text encoding from font name. (Fridrich Strba)
- Parse theme fill and shadow color. (Fridrich Strba)
- Parse font scheme in VSDX documents. (Fridrich Strba)

Improvements in MS Publisher import:
- Parse table row and column sizes. tdf#89061 (David Tardon, Red Hat, Inc.)
- Extract more metadata from documents. (Miklos Vajna)
- Handle table cells containing multiple paragraphs correctly. tdf#89393 (David Tardon, Red Hat, Inc.)
- Parse more text formatting attributes: all underline types, small caps, all caps, outline, emboss, engrave, shadow. (David Tardon, Red Hat, Inc.)
- Parse text language. (David Tardon, Red Hat, Inc.)

Improvements in Adobe Pagemaker import:
- Fix parsing of page dimensions in Mac documents. (David Tardon, Red Hat, Inc.)
- Fix parsing of color tint in Mac documents. tdf#109126 (David Tardon, Red Hat, Inc.)
- Fix parsing of text formatting attributes in Mac documents. (David Tardon, Red Hat, Inc.)
- Properly handle all caps and small caps. (David Tardon, Red Hat, Inc.)
- Parse more text & paragraph formatting attributes. (David Tardon, Red Hat, Inc.)

Improvements in FictionBook import:
- Set default page margins. tdf#94162 (David Tardon, Red Hat, Inc.)
- Use document language as default language for text. (David Tardon, Red Hat, Inc.)
- Use note title as footnote mark. (David Tardon, Red Hat, Inc.)
- Handle subscript and superscript. (David Tardon, Red Hat, Inc.)
- Output content of in monospace font. (David Tardon, Red Hat, Inc.)

Improvements in Abiword import:
- Parse paragraph and cell borders. (Laurent Alonso)
- Improve parsing of lists. (Laurent Alonso)
- Parse fields. tdf#74466 (Laurent Alonso)
- Parse floating (not inline) images. tdf#74463 (Laurent Alonso)
- Parse text boxes. (Laurent Alonso)
- Set minimal width/height of inline images (which usually do not have dimensions set in the file) to 1 inch. tdf#74462 (David Tardon, Red Hat, Inc.)

Improvements in Apple Keynote import:
- Improve reconstruction of gradients. (Laurent Alonso)
- Parse non-RGB colors. (Laurent Alonso)
- Convert table cell values to text. (Laurent Alonso)

Improvements in Apple Pages import:
- Handle following-paragraph and following-layout styles. (Laurent Alonso)
- Improve lookup of parent styles. (Laurent Alonso)
- Never insert a page break in a footnote. (Laurent Alonso)
- Convert table cell values to text. (Laurent Alonso)

Improvements in Apple Numbers import:
- Correctly compute cell row and column. (Laurent Alonso)
- Improve resolution of cell styles. (Laurent Alonso)
- Improve handling of table border lines. (Laurent Alonso)

Improvements in Quattro Pro import:
- Fix reading of formulas with references. (Laurent Alonso)
- Parse Quattro Pro for Windows 1.0-6.0 files (.wb1, .wb2). (Laurent Alonso)
- Parse charts. (Laurent Alonso)

GUI:
- Height of tab bar in Calc adjusts to system font size/resolution (commit) (Bernhard Widl, CIB)
- Upper limit of user interface font size removed (was capped in relation to screen height) (tdf#113444) (Bernhard Widl, CIB)
- Hidden in the Standard toolbar is a new drop-down version of the Insert Special Characters button (commit 800ac37021e3f8859)(Akshay Deep, Yousuf Philips)
- The elementary icon theme, previously exclusive of Xubuntu, has been made available in all builds commit

START CENTER:
Window. Dialogs:
- Special characters dialog was reworked tdf#34882
- It is now easier than ever to customize LibreOffice UI based on your needs, thanks to improved user experience and accessibility of the newly reworked Customize dialog (Tools ▸ Customize...). tdf#88896
- Calc : Width and height of page style scaling mode "Fit print range(s) to width/height" can now be set to unspecified tdf#113455

MENU:
Configuration Memory:
Memory configuration page has been removed from Options dialog tdf#110448 (Mike Kaganski, Collabora)

Basic Editor:
- Basic IDE main menu reorganized: some items were added, renamed and moved (commit 4378108d) (Lera Goncharuk)

Notebookbar:
- New variant of Notebookbar - Groupedbar Full for Writer, Calc and Impress (experimental feature)
- New variant of Notebookbar - Tabbed Compact for Writer (experimental feature)

ONLINE:
Server part:
- Use seccomp’s Berkley Packet Filters to drastically restrict the kernel APIs surface available to our contained document processes (Michael Meeks, Ashod Nakashian, Collabora)
- Support for hashed admin passwords, and loolconfig tool (Michael Meeks, Pranav Kant, Jan Holesovsky, Collabora)
- New authorization method via a custom http header via WOPI (Jan Holesovsky, Collabora)
- Extended document conversion API (Jan Holesovsky, Collabora)

General:
- New Insert Special Characters dialog (Henry Castro, Collabora)
- State of the Change tracking is now visible in the menu via check marks (Pranav Kant, Collabora)
- Improved animation of the comments (Henry Castro, Collabora)
- Content Security Policy now includes the Referer too, for easier integration in multi-host environments (Pranav Kant, Collabora)
- New file types that can be edited were added or improved, including PDF and HTML (Ashod Nakashian, Collabora)
- Support for avatars: The integrators can specify a pictures / avatars for the users of the documents via WOPI extension. (Ashod Nakashian, Pranav Kant, Collabora)
- Find & replace dialog (in addition to the previously available Search functionality) (Aditya Dewan, GSoC)
- Support for custom buttons in the toolbar (Pranav Kant, Collabora)
- Automatic detection of links in the comments (Pranav Kant, Collabora)
- Improvements in the Admin Console (Aditya Dewan, GSoC)
- Switch to follow the editor in the list of users (Aditya Dewan, GSoC)
- Better handling of conflict between editing and uploading documents (Pranav Kant, Collabora)
- Spell checking support in all Writer, Calc and Impress (Michael Meeks, Henry Castro, Collabora)
- Status bar indicates the current language (Henry Castro, Collabora)
- Save As support + document name in the user interface (Aditya Dewan, Jan Holesovsky, Collabora)

Performance:
- Improved user experience of the startup - menu and toolbar show already before the document is loaded (Henry Castro, Collabora)

Writer:
- Interactive horizontal ruler (Aditya Dewan, GSoC)

Calc:
- Increased amount of rows available in the Online Calc to half million (Marco Cecchetti, Collabora)
- Active cell reference (Name Box) (Marco Cecchetti, Collabora)
- Basic editing of charts (Marco Cecchetti, Collabora)

LOCALIZATION:
Additional languages in the language list:
- Fon [fon-BJ]. tdf#113835

Improvements to proofing tools and language support:
- Albanian. A new spelling dictionary is available, based on linguistic tools created by Luan Kelmendi. (Lior Kaplan and Áron Budea)
- Arabic. In locales that use the ٫ U+066B ARABIC DECIMAL SEPARATOR, the normal dot . can be used as a decimal separator alternative for input. tdf#81671 (Eike Rathke, Red Hat, Inc.)
- Breton. The spelling dictionary was updated to version 0.15. (Denis Arnaud and András Tímár)
- Bulgarian. The hyphenator was updated to version 2017.09.30 to correct hyphenation points in short words, provide many more for longer words, account for rule changes in the language, and update its encoding to UTF-8. tdf#112750 (Stoyan Dimitrov and Hristo Hristov)
- English (Australian, Canadian, British and US). Updated dictionaries to version 2017.08.24. (Marco A. G. Pinto and Kevin Atkinson)
- Tibetan. The spelling dictionary was updated to version 0.4. tdf#112065 (Elie Roux and Áron Budea)
- Hungarian. The spelling dictionary and Lightproof module were updated tdf#95024 (László Németh)
- Spanish. The spelling dictionary was updated to version 2.2. (Ricardo Palomares)
- Slovenian. The thesaurus was updated. (Martin Srebotnjak)

FEATURE REMOVAL / DEPRECATION:
- Internal file pickers removed (access is still possible via Tools ▸ Options ▸ LibreOffice ▸ Advanced ▸ Expert configuration ▸ org.openoffice.Office.Common.Misc ▸ UseSystemFileDialog) tdf#114484

PLATFORM COMPATIBILITY:
- Removed support for Windows XP and Windows Vista. The minimum supported Windows version is now Windows 7 SP1
- Program installation folder in Windows no longer contains a version number, just LibreOffice. tdf#62303 (Mike Kaganski, Collabora) [note 2]
- Microsoft Visual C++ 2015 Redistributable installation with LibreOffice installer is restored. Due to changes in the redistributable, it is now installed in the separate process, after other LibreOffice components had been installed, and requires separate UAC confirmation. It is not installed when LibreOffice is installed in unattended mode (e.g., using command line switches, or using AD GPO), and in this case, separate installation of the redistributable is required (the redistributable is available from Microsoft website, and redistributable's bitness (32- or 64-bit) must match LibreOffice's bitness)

API CHANGES:
The following configuration schemas were removed:
- /org.openoffice.Office/Logging/OOoImprovement/ and /org.openoffice.Office/OOoImprovement/ commit
- /org.openoffice.Office/Common/Java/Applet/Enable commit
- /org.openoffice.Office/Common/View/SplitWindow/ commit
- /org.openoffice.Office/Common/Setup/Product/ooXMLFileFormatName and /org.openoffice.Office/Common/Setup/Product/ooXMLFileFormatVersioncommit
- /org.openoffice.Office/Common/Setup/Product/ooOpenSourceContext commit
- /org.openoffice.Office/Common/Image/Color/ and /org.openoffice.Office/Common/Image/Effect/ commit
- /org.openoffice.Office/Common/Accessibility/IsSystemFont commit
- /org.openoffice.Office/Common/Misc/TemplateRepositoryUrls and /org.openoffice.Office/Common/Misc/TemplateRepositoryNames commit
- /org.openoffice.Office/Office/Common/Save/ODF/UseSHA1InODF12 and /org.openoffice.Office/Office/Common/Save/ODF/UseBlowfishInODF12 commit

Command Line:
- Add --script-cat parameter to allow dumping VBA and StarBasic macros from files to the console (Michael Meeks - Collabora)

UNO API changes:
The following UNO interfaces and services were removed:
- com.sun.star.xml.crypto.XMLEncryption was unused and removed
- com.sun.star.resource.OfficeResourceLoader com.sun.star.resource/XResourceBundle com.sun.star.resource/XResourceBundleLoader were removed as part of the migration from the legacy binary resource file format to gettext

The following UNO interfaces and services were changed:
- com.sun.star.xml.sax.XFastDocumentHandler
- com.sun.star.awt.XToolkitExperimental
- com.sun.star.ui.test.XUITest
- com.sun.star.security.XCertificate
- com.sun.star.security.XDocumentDigitalSignatures
- com.sun.star.xml.crypto.XSecurityEnvironment
- com.sun.star.security.DocumentSignatureInformation
- com.sun.star.embed.XEncryptionProtectedStorage

LibreOfficeKit changes:
- various previously unstable methods were published commit and C99 types "bool" and "uint64_t" were replaced with pre-C99 types "int" and "unsigned long long" commit

LibreOfficeKitClass:
- registerCallback
- getFilterTypes
- setOptionalFeatures
- setDocumentPassword
- getVersionInfo
- runMacro

LibreOfficeKitDocumentClass:
- getDocumentType