LibreOffice 7 Released, with support for ODF 1.3

August 5, The LibreOffice Project announced its latest major release of the open-source office suite “LibreOffice 7.0”. It includes support for OpenDocument Format (ODF) 1.3 and brings many big features like Skia graphics engine.

LibreOffice forked from OpenOffice (currently “Apache OpenOffice”) in 2010, and it is the project of The Document Foundation. It is composed of applications like word processor “Word”, spreadsheet “Calc”, and presentation program “Impress”, and it supports Linux, macOS, and Windows.

The latest release LibreOffice 7.0 is the successor of LibreOffice 6.0, released in January 2018.

This release has updated the LibreOffice-based office format OpenDocument Format (ODF) to version 1.3. Just recently approved by OASIS in January, ODF 1.3 added new features such as digital signatures, OpenPGP-based encryption of XML documents, and change tracking.

The Skia graphics engine has been implemented. It is an open-source 2D graphics library that provides common APIs that work across a variety of hardware and software platforms and can be used for drawing text, shapes, and images, along with bringing better performance. The implementation of Skia happened thanks to the sponsorship by AMD, and it is now the default on Windows.

This release also supports Vulkan GPU-based acceleration.

It has enhanced the compatibility with Microsoft Office. Most notable is the compatibility with DOCX, which now saves in 2013/2016/2019 mode, instead of 2007 compatibility mode.

This release also adds a new icon theme Sukapura, new shapes galleries, and more. There are also improvements added to each application.

LibreOffice
https://www.libreoffice.org/