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LibreOffice 6.1 Released
The Document Foundation said on Wednesday it is releasing LibreOffice 6.1, the latest major update to its productivity suite. It is available to download for Linux, Windows, and macOS platforms. The new version offers, among other features, Colibre, a new icon theme for Windows based on Microsoft's icon design guidelines, which it says, makes the office suite visually appealing for users coming from the Microsoft environment. The Document Foundation also reworked the image handling feature on LibreOffice to make it "significantly faster and smoother thanks to a new graphic manager and an improved image lifecycle, with some advantages also when loading documents in Microsoft proprietary formats." Other new features and changes include: The reorganization of Draw menus with the addition of a new Page menu, for better UX consistency across the different modules. A major improvement for Base, only available in experimental mode: the old HSQLDB database engine has been deprecated, though still available, and the new Firebird database engine is now the default option (users are encouraged to migrate files using the migration assistant from HSQLDB to Firebird, or by exporting them to an external HSQLDB server). Significant improvements in all modules of LibreOffice Online, with changes to the user interface to make it more appealing and consistent with the desktop version. An improved EPUB export filter, in terms of link, table, image, font embedding and footnote support, with more options for customizing metadata. Online Help pages have been enriched with text and example files to guide the users through features, and are now easier to localize.
LibreOffice 6.1's new features have been developed by a large community of code contributors: 72% of commits are from developers employed by companies sitting in the Advisory Board like Collabora, Red Hat and CIB and by other contributors such as SIL and Pardus, and 28% are from individual volunteers. In addition, there is a global community of individual volunteers taking care of other fundamental activities such as quality assurance, software localization, user interface design and user experience, editing of help system text and documentation, plus free software and open document standards advocacy at a local level. You can read the full changelog here. Here's a video that walks through the new features and changes that LibreOffice is receiving with v6.1.
LibreOffice 6.1's new features have been developed by a large community of code contributors: 72% of commits are from developers employed by companies sitting in the Advisory Board like Collabora, Red Hat and CIB and by other contributors such as SIL and Pardus, and 28% are from individual volunteers. In addition, there is a global community of individual volunteers taking care of other fundamental activities such as quality assurance, software localization, user interface design and user experience, editing of help system text and documentation, plus free software and open document standards advocacy at a local level. You can read the full changelog here. Here's a video that walks through the new features and changes that LibreOffice is receiving with v6.1.
I have never had spellcheck stop working on me, and I have a massive spelling and hyphenation dictionary installed in it (not the standard one that comes with it) as well as a bunch of other third party extensions. Not a single hiccup through writing 3 complete novels.
As for Ms Office formats not converting properly, I did an experiment a few months back (while still in college) and found that a single .doc file opened across 5 different versions of Ms Office had inconsistencies in 4 of the other versions. So it's not just Libre Office that is the problem, it is Ms Office itself at times.
>> what happened when Microsoft inflicted everyone with the ribbon
Well that was evil brilliance. Microsoft introduced the ribbon in part to stave off the challenge from open-source office projects. People grumbled but switched because the open source alternatives were really primitive back then. Microsoft then copyrighted/patented the ribbon and made it free to anyone who was developing anything BUT an office product so open source projects couldn't easily follow it. Over time, the ribbon has become a de-facto barrier to user switching because the bulk of office users are now used to it...and open source projects can't license the ribbon.
e.g., https://forum.openoffice.org/en/forum/viewtopic.php?f=49&t=26031
From Microsoft's site (https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/jensenh/2006/11/21/licensing-the-2007-microsoft-office-user-interface/):
"...licensing program for the 2007 Microsoft Office system user interface which allows virtually anyone to obtain a royalty-free license to use the new Office UI in a software product, including the Ribbon, galleries, the Mini Toolbar, and the rest of the user interface."
"For almost everyone, there's no catch at all. Just sign up for the license, and follow the guidelines. That's all there is to it. You can use the UI in open source projects as long as the license terms are consistent with our license. You can use it on any platform: Windows, Mac, Linux, etc. If you're an ISV, you can build and sell a set of controls based on the new Office UI. There's only one limitation: if you are building a program which directly competes with Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, or Access (the Microsoft applications with the new UI), you can't obtain the royalty-free license."
Yes, this is something you can do with LibreOffice and some related tools.
(Your other option I guess would be Microsoft Office 365 Online, but I find - ironically perhaps - that their implementation of web and mobile "Office" to have poor compatibility with the desktop versions.)
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Is it serious that you've never seen the difference between one text with proper kerning and one text without kerning? Really?
In editors like MsOffice kerning is used by default, it is rarely necessary to tinker with the default setting. That's why you hardly ever hear of kerning, because it's usually done correctly by default (and also on most applications that need to show text, Firefox for example). Except in LibreOffice after version 5, in LibreOffice kerning is done so bad that it is common for certain character sets to be printed with no space between them.
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time