Libre Office ReleaseNotes 7.6 | Hacker News Reader

Libre Office ReleaseNotes 7.6

wiki.documentfoundation.org

89 pointsdoener38 comments

Glad to see the community is doing well.

I really wish they'd fix their Options screen. It's 2023 and I still can't search for the options I want to change. Instead, they're arranged in an inscrutable order, and often have confusing names. Every time I use Libre Office on a new computer, I have go menu diving to turn off the god awful autocomplete. And as someone who writes in multiple languages, changing languages in a document is a huge pain (the language "For All Text"-option never seems to work).

I know this doesn't comfort anybody, but I have the exact same multilanguage problem in MS Office. You never know what you will get, even reopening the same document.

It also happens with documents going back and forth between different computers, and I blame MS Office. I edit manuscripts in LibreOffice on my end, and tag every foreign-language word as its respective language for the sake of spellcheck and proper hyphenation. Then I send the .docx to the other party. When they send a fresh version back to me, I see that all those foreign-language words were simply restored to some default language.

Have you read the manual? I haven't used MS Word for many years (luckily) but the last time I did I actually did figure out how languages work once and for all. It made sense and it's quite powerful. I also figured out how styles work and that you should never press the bold/italic etc buttons, only use styles.

One of the (maybe few) niceties of MS Office these days is that you can search through a list of most available commands through a simple Alt+Q and typing. This greatly improved my productivity for some common tasks, and it's the sort of discoverability that'd be helpful to make LibreOffice easier to use.

For my part, though, I'm typically authoring print documents in LyX, since I don't have to exchange documents routinely. If I do have to share Word-compatible documents, I'll sometimes use LO Writer or else convert from a text format to .docx using pandoc.

LibreOffice has the same feature. Type Shift+Esc or go to Help > Search Commands to activate the head-up display. You can then search for the command you want.

GIF demo: https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2021/08/libreoffice-7-2-release-...

Documentation: https://help.libreoffice.org/latest/en-US/text/shared/option...

TIL! Thanks a bunch, I'll definitely check this out.

I really miss the HUD feature the Unity DE had for searching through application menus, which I used for a similar purpose.

Closest I've seen is how it works on macOS.

There is a person doing gsoc on that exact thing. Maybe it will land in the next update

What's a gsoc?

LMGTFY: Google Summer of Code

What's LMGTFY?

Google Summer of Code

I fell in love with LibreOffice when I started using Opale [0].

[0] Opale (Free Software) https://download.scenari.software/Opale@4.0.5/

That looks interesting. I found the following link to be a slightly better overview of what Opale is: https://doc.scenari.software/Opale@4/en/

Fixes a CJK bug[1] that's been around since 2011. The bug was originally tested on Windows XP SP2.

[1] https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=43671

LibreOffice Writer is still keeping the old meme about image formatting in word document alive. I wonder, why is it impossible to define area, where I would like to place an image, and then fit the image there? Now images usually are inserted in original size, making a mess of everything else, and if there are more than one image on page - oh boy, you are going to have a bad time.

All in all this is probably due to my stubbornness and all problems would be solved by reading a simple tutorial, am I right?

- hiding unused styles in Paragraph Style dropdown - https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=152666

- highlighting for used Paragraph and Character styles - https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/File:Styles_highlighter_...

I'm using these alot, very welcome

I've been using their spreadsheet for over 5 years. I send them $50 every year or two, it's a lot cheaper than MS Office/Excel and does everything I need.

I like Writer and Calc, but Impress is completely unusable. You can't do basics like proper master slides. I wonder if anyone actually uses Impress.

I used it recently for a simple presentation. It did well for what I needed it. The result was nice and pleasing presentation. In a professional setting I always use PowerPoint thought.

I'm sure there's a fascinating reason they do it, but it makes upgrading via their .deb tar a PITA since they have different package names, so $(apt install ./*.deb) will cheerfully install it side-by-side

I'll also take this opportunity to remind folks they offer torrent downloads so you can take some of the download pressure off their infra if you already have a torrent client installed

Do they have "reveal codes" function (like Word Perfect has) yet?

Every one or two years im trying out libreoffice (or previously openoffice). Every time i coudnt use it, because its font rendering was so horrible. Apparently it finally got fixed in 7.4 . Just, in the meantime i switched most writing to a markdown system... :-/

Had to write a CV for a friend (wink wink) the other day and word professors failed spectacularly.

I write a line, something else has spacing issues. There is title on each section that gets around.

Markdown gave me the same text and I did not have to worry about output.

I guess you mean "word processors".

Yeah. Autocorrect fucks up.

Have you tried Latex? I believe there are many good Latex templates for CV.

yeah, that is what finally made sense but i suppose for most people, word processors are good enough

I don't understand how so many people can genuinely recommend Latex. I just spent the entire afternoon and evening debugging an issue that made nonsense errors pop up at random unrelated lines in my document, with only every second run somehow managing to spit out a mostly correct PDF (the rest produced nothing), despite me not touching any files between runs. I ended up deleting files one by one until I found the one causing the problem, then bisecting it to find the offending block. Removing the abstract from one of the bibliography items ended up fixing all of the 40 or so errors (none in that file!)

It's the most unreliable, poorly documented, full of footguns "tool" that I've ever had the misfortune of using.

That's why I build MonsterWriter

Does anyone else find it strange that the screenshots use different UIs and OSes regardless of the context? We got Ubuntu, Windows, white on black, black on white, font aliasing on and off etc. And don't tell me this is real in 2023 https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/File:SortByColor.png

Seems like everyone who made a commit highlighted by a screenshot made their own, instead of whoever wrote the patch notes made the screenshots on one single system

It's definitely not great for visual clarity but I kinda like it, it has that old school open source vibe where it's just a bunch of different people hacking on stuff they feel like hacking on

But which "one single system" would you choose?

If the answer is platform X, you put off the users of platform Y and Z.

For different reasons in each case! Really: try substituting Linux, Mac, Windows for any of X, Y or Z and then work it through.

If you can't make the document for each system, I think it's probably better to document it as this more messy reality.

I maintain documentation for a niche cross-platform product. I ended up going with the 3x solution.

> And don't tell me this is real in 2023

It looks like a high-contrast UI theme for people with vision impairment. In this context, what's wrong with it?

Assorted screenshots make clear that all those platforms are supported and look good. There's a common phenomenon in this style of screenshot gallery: second class platforms are only featured in screenshots from old releases, while recent screenshots are representative of what current developers care for. Sometimes maintainers who care redo screenshots on all platforms with the latest release to avoid giving an unwarranted bad impression.

It looks to me like it is a collaborative development environment. It seems like this method of building a release notes file will highlight all of the available options and give visibility to what the developers are using for that change. This could be a valuable clue to tracking down a bug.

IIRC Microsoft does similar things for the VSCode changelogs to highlight that all features work across all platform and colorschemes.

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