LibreOffice 5.4 Adds More New Features, Improves Office File Format Compatibility (betanews.com)

The Document Foundation has released LibreOffice 5.4. Again, it's on time, arriving six months after the release of LibreOffice 5.3. From a report: LibreOffice 5.4 is "the last major release of the LibreOffice 5.x family," and like other point releases is a major one, adding features across all components and incrementally improving compatibility with Microsoft Office document formats. Highlights include a new standard color palette based on the RYB (Red Yellow Blue) color model. File format compatibility improvements include better support for EMF vector images and higher quality rendering of imported PDF files (with support for embedding video in exported PDFs from Writer and Impress). Also added is OpenPGP key support for signing ODF documents in Linux. LibreOffice Writer adds new context menu items for working with sections, footnotes, endnotes and styles. Users can now import AutoText entries from Microsoft Word .dotm templates. The full structure of bulleted and numbered lists is now preserved when pasted as plain text, and users gain the ability to create custom watermarks for their documents via the Format menu.

Comments

PSA: 64-bit available

[nowsharing]

You can get a 64-bit version of LibreOffice, but you have to select it at the download page. On my system it starts much faster and handles large documents perfectly.

Re:Too much, too late

[jwhyche]

I don't know, he might have something to bitch about. It took me over a minute to open a 50,805 page document in libreoffice 5.3, 230mb file. Lord knows what I would do if I had to open a serous document ....

Yes, I'm being sarcastic, but on another note. I did just now open a 50,000 page log file. While it did take it over a minute to open and display that file, but 50,000 pages. That is damn impressive.

Re:Too much, too late

[jwhyche]

I turned around and loaded the same document in to Word 2016. Word crashed. :)

Re:Too much, too late

[jwhyche]

The problem is that it continues "loading" and doesn't render the first page (or last edited page) and give control to the user while loading the rest in the background. It appears to want to parse ALL of it before displaying SOME of it, which is a design flaw in my opinion.

Yes, I can actually see where this could be a design flaw. I just loaded a random log file in to libreoffice to see if it could handle it. The log file was over 50,000 pages long. While I was actually impressed that it could load the file at all, I did notice it took it several more minutes before I could actually do anything with the file. Libreoffice seemed to want to format the tire file in memory before letting me access any of it.

While I don't work on documents every day of even a few 100 pages, I could see where this process could be frustrating if you had to do it all day. It may only add a few seconds to your work time but to a professional that few seconds can add up very quickly.

But at least libreoffice did load and handle the 50,000 page document. After it got through loading and formatting I found that it to be quiet responsive. I was even able to search and replace in the file with a good response time. On the other page Word 2016 loaded the file and I was able to start work in it almost instantly, but promptly crashed when I paged into the file.