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

Re:Too much, too late

[Hognoxious]

It also lacks an init system, a mail server, a DNS resolver, a process monitor, an ssh client and an init system.

Re:Too much, too late

[arth1]

It also lacks an init system, a mail server, a DNS resolver, a process monitor, an ssh client and an init system.

I'm fairly certain it can send e-mail already, and I wouldn't be surprised if it offers sshfs support through fuse, or have plans for it in the next release.
Give it time, and it will surely have all of the above. At the expense of being able to do simple work in a timely manner.

Are you using it on a 1999 Mac?

[dbIII]

Since I can use it on a eeepc netbook I can't see where your speed complaints are coming from.
It kind of looks like you are making them up unless you are using it on hardware from last century.

Re:Are you using it on a 1999 Mac?

[arth1]

My pc from 2009 opens it in about a second.

What's "it"? A 100,000 word book?

My dads first generation atom takes about 5 seconds... in what world does this count as slow?

In the world of computer engineering, the frustration thresholds are usually defined as 0.1, 1 and 10 seconds. 5 seconds is way above the second frustration threshold.

Re:Are you using it on a 1999 Mac?

[Oligonicella]

Well, in my case I use OO 3.1 and the document I referenced in another comment is 186,274 words and opened in less than half a second. That's from no OO running, double clicking an icon for the document until ready to type. That is not slow.

Anyone with a frustration level of 1 second (much less .1) has the problems, not the software.

Re:Are you using it on a 1999 Mac?

[arth1]

Interesting, I've always taught it as 3 sec = perceived as slow, 7 seconds = people will go do something else.

It depends on what the operation is. For things like scrolling or rendering a complex menu, 0.1 seconds might be acceptable, but for typing, 0.1 second latency will hit the frustration threshold for many. For other operations, like seeing a web site start to render, or doing a sort, 1 second can be fine. And 10 seconds can be ok to load a level in a game, but if it takes longer, people will start bitching. Yes, there are plenty of games that take longer, and yes, there are plenty of people bitching too.

Re:Too much, too late

[EzInKy]

So it's not quite equal to emacs yet?

Re:Too much, too late

[arth1]

Having a thesaurus integrated is a near must for a writer. And most publishing houses don't take typeset - they want to do that part themselves, at least if you're not a famous author with lots of clout.

An ideal writer's program is one that is chapter-oriented and doesn't impose the tyranny of pages. With good support for version control, footnotes, internal notes, syllabus and other indices, a searchable bin to toss snippets and outtakes in, but most of all, one that doesn't lag behind. Libreoffice is probably the most laggy program out there, closely followed by Word. The problem is most manifest whenever you hit the artificial "page" boundary, especially if you edit the start or middle of a book, and it needs to recalculate all following "pages".

Scrivener isn't bad, but it's only for Windows.
I'd pay good money to get something similar for Linux.

Which version?

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you actually talking about Open Office or go-OO or the newer Libreofice? or are you trying to conflate a decade old issue to tarnish a modern product?

The original Sun OpenOffice download for a number of reasons (like Sun) was a slower than the patched go-OO version which was used by the major Linux distributions. It had a reputation for being glacial in comparison, and go-OO wasn't fast by any means, Apache have really hardly started fixing this yet.

Go-OO and early Libreofice still had a number of quite significant problems with file loading as well as graphics performance due to Sun's tendency to want to leave working code alone or patch minimally even when it worked poorly or got in the way. The early part of Liberofice 's history involved tearing a lot of cruft out, as such many of the most blatant issues where fixed quite early but many remain. For an example see https://people.gnome.org/~michael/blog/2012-01-09-unused.html , but much used and outdated code was also a problem.

Newer Libreofce is significantly faster, removal and replacement of a lot of old manual timer stuff for GUI events, for example (along with a lot of other work), has made things snappier to use. Performance profiling and upgrading of the input filters has progressed to the point that for my small documents loading is effectively instant and start-up is less than 1 second on my old machine. Despite this speed is still dependant on OS, and the specific document loaded. It is not unusual for the newer versions of Libreofice to be better than Microsoft Office in speed but it is also not unusual to be worse. In addition some windows graphics performance upgrades will have to wait on the deprecation of XP.

Re:Too much, too late

[Tough Love]

What kills Libreoffice is bloat and feeping creaturitis.

Nothing "kills" Libreoffice. It is a staple feature of any Linux installation, widely used on Windows, and a credible threat to Necrosoft's cozy monopoly.

Now if they could only...

[ckatko]

...stop crashing my file explorer in Windows 7 with their crappy API hooks.

Re:Now if they could only...

[antdude]

Did you report this issue to them?

Re:Too much, too late

[jon3k]

What kills LibreOffice is that no one uses a desktop office suite anymore. Google Docs does everything 99% of people need and you don't have to worry about where your files are, unless you're some kind of weird basement troll. And even then you can just back them up regularly.

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.

Outline numbering

[peterofoz]

I've been using LIbreOffice and previously OpenOffice for over 5 years now for writing requirements and system documentation. One of the features that is seriously confusing and frustrating is how outline numbering and heading numbering works (or doesn't). Near as I can figure there are 2 subsystems/modules to handle numbering: one for bullet/list numbering, and the other for headings, and they don't play well together.

Re:Too much, too late

[Oligonicella]

Well, you started with "What kills LibreOffice is that no one uses a desktop office suite anymore." which is factually incorrect. (no one includes businesses) Perhaps you could cite for us which applications are more used.

Re:Too much, too late

[Tough Love]

aoo is just better

In September 2016, OpenOffice's project management committee chair Dennis Hamilton began a discussion of possibly discontinuing the project, after the Apache board had put them on monthly reporting due to the project's ongoing problems handling security issues

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:New Feature Request

[CanadianMacFan]

They got the lace curtains I asked for?!?! Awesome!

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.