LibreOffice in 2023 – TDF’s Annual Report

In 2023, LibreOffice celebrated its thirteenth birthday. Two new major versions of the suite introduced a variety of new features, while minor releases helped to improve stability as well

(This is part of The Document Foundation’s Annual Report for 2023 – we’ll post the full version here soon.)

LibreOffice 7.5

On February 2, LibreOffice 7.5 was officially released after six months of work. Developers at Collabora, allotropia, CIB, Red Hat, NISZ, The Document Foundation (TDF) and other companies and organisations – along with volunteers – worked on many new features.

For instance, there were huge improvements to the dark mode thanks to Caolán McNamara (Red Hat), Rafael Lima, Michael Weghorn, Rizal Muttaqin and others. The single toolbar was updated by Maxim Monastirsky, while Michael Stahl (allotropia) added code so that images, embedded objects and text frames could be marked as decorative, which allows assistive technology to ignore them in exported PDFs. On top of the new features, there were many other general improvements to performance, compatibility and stability.

With the help of the Indonesian community, TDF produced a video to explain and demonstrate many of the new features in LibreOffice 7.5. This was linked to in the announcement, and embedded into various news websites that covered the release. The video is also available on PeerTube.

LibreOffice 7.6

Later in the year, on August 21, TDF released LibreOffice 7.6. Based on the LibreOffice Technology platform for personal productivity on desktop, mobile and cloud, it provided a large number of interoperability improvements with Microsoft’s proprietary file formats.

In terms of features, this release added support for document themes thanks to Tomaž Vajngerl at Collabora, while Jim Raykowski implemented highlighting for used Paragraph and Character styles along with highlighting for used Direct Formatting in text. Paris Oplopoios and Justin Luth (both Collabora) worked on a new page number wizard, and Samuel Mehrbrodt (allotropia) made sorting by colour possible in AutoFilter.

Many other features were added as well, and there were a large number of compatibility improvements. As with the previous release, TDF staff worked with the Indonesian LibreOffice community to make a video (PeerTube version) to demonstrate the new features:

Regular improvements

We also released 16 minor updates with bug and security fixes:

• LibreOffice 7.4.4 – January 12
• LibreOffice 7.4.5 – January 26
• LibreOffice 7.5.1 – March 2
• LibreOffice 7.4.6 – March 9
• LibreOffice 7.5.2 – March 30
• LibreOffice 7.5.3 – May 4
• LibreOffice 7.4.7 – May 11
• LibreOffice 7.5.4 – June 8
• LibreOffice 7.5.5 – July 20
• LibreOffice 7.5.6 – September 7
• LibreOffice 7.6.2 and 7.5.7 – September 26
• LibreOffice 7.5.8 – November 2
• LibreOffice 7.6.3 – November 23
• LibreOffice 7.6.4 and 7.5.9 – December 7

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