LibreOffice 7.6.1 Community available to download; this is what's new

The Document Foundation (TDF) has announced the availability of LibreOffice 7.6.1 Community. It’s the first point release for the LibreOffice 7.6 series which debuted in late August. The Community edition of LibreOffice is suitable for most users but the TDF has an Enterprise tier for big organizations that want ‘value-added features and other benefits such as Service Level Agreements’.

This latest update brings improvements to Writer, Calc, Impress, and Draw as well as general updates. Some highlights include support for zoom gestures when using touchpads in the main view, support for document themes and the import and export of theme definitions for ODF and OOXML, and improvements to font handling, especially for right-to-left scripts and Asian alphabets.

The full list of improvements in this update is as follows:

GENERAL

• Support for zoom gestures when using touchpads in the main view.
• Support for document themes, and import and export of theme definitions for ODF and OOXML documents.
• Many improvements to font handling, especially for right-to-left scripts, CJK and other Asian alphabets.

WRITER

• New Page Number Wizard in the Insert menu, for easy one-step insertion of the page number in the header/footer.
• The Paragraph Style dropdown in the Formatting toolbar shows a list of styles used in the document, rather than the full list of the available styles.
• Tables of Figures can be generated more flexibly based on paragraph styles, and not only from categories or object names.
• Bibliography entries can be edited directly from a bibliography table, and bibliography marks hyperlink by default to the matching row in a bibliography table.
• Highlighting for used paragraph and character styles and direct formatting in text.
• Phrase checking: multi-word dictionary items of Hunspell and custom dictionaries are now accepted.

CALC

• Number format: “?” is now supported when exporting to ODF to represent an integer digit, replaced by blank if it is a non significant zero, and decimals for formats in seconds without truncation like [SS].00 are now accepted.
• Spreadsheets copied to another document now retain a user-defined print range.
• Solver settings are saved with documents, and page styles are exported even if they are not in use.
• Support for drawing styles for shapes and comments, including a dedicated style for comments that makes it possible to customize the default look and text formatting of new comments.
• New compact layout for pivot tables.
• Autofilter support for sorting by colour. Filter/sort by color considers colours set by number format.
• The Import Text dialog (as CSV file or as unformatted text) has a new option to not detect number in scientific notation (only if “Detect Special Numbers” is off).

IMPRESS & DRAW

• New navigation panel for switching slides while viewing a presentation (option is enabled by flagging a checkbox in Slide Show Settings).
• Objects can now be listed in front to back order in the Navigator, with the top-most object at the top of the list.
• Support for free text annotations to PDFium import, plus support for ink, free text and polygon/polyline annotations in PDFium export.
• Modified the auto-fitting text scaling algorithm to work in a way similar to MS Office. Text scaling now separates scaling for space (paragraph and line) and scaling fonts, where space scaling can be 100%, 90% and 80%, and font scaling is rounded to the nearest point size. Horizontal spacing (bullets, indents) is not scaled anymore.
• Several improvements to font management for CJK and Arabic languages.

According to the announcement, LibreOffice 7.6.1 Community is available for Windows 7 SP1 or above and macOS 10.15 or above. Of course, it’s also available on Linux but different Linux distributions will ship a particular version of the office suite and it’s generally best to use the version provided as it may contain customizations to the theme and so on.

Source: LibreOffice