LibreOffice 7.0 stable version has been released, which is a new major version and provides important new features: support for OpenDocument Format (ODF) 1.3; using Skia graphics engine and Vulkan GPU-based acceleration to provide better performance; careful improvements Added compatibility with DOCX, XLSX and PPTX files.
Supports OpenDocument Format (ODF) 1.3
ODF has recently been updated to version 1.3 as an OASIS technical committee specification, and the most important new features are digital signatures of documents and encryption of XML documents based on OpenPGP.
LibreOffice 7.0 adds support for the new version of the ODF standard when exporting files. You can select the new version at Tools ▸ Options ▸ Load/Save ▸ General ▸ ODF Format Version: "ODF 1.3" and "ODF 1.3 Extension"; before the user If this setting has not been changed, "ODF 1.3 Extension" is the default version.
Skia graphics engine and Vulkan GPU-based acceleration
The OpenGL backend used for interface rendering on Windows was replaced by Skia and Vulkan. Skia is an open source 2D graphics library that provides a common API that supports working on a variety of hardware and software platforms and can be used to draw text, shapes, and images. Vulkan is a next-generation graphics and compute API with high efficiency and cross-platform access to modern GPUs.
Improved compatibility with DOCX, XLSX and PPTX files
DOCX format files were changed from saving in 2007 compatibility mode to 2013/2016/2019 native mode. This mode is to ensure that users of different versions of Microsoft Office can work together, so that documents created in older versions of Office will maintain the same display effect when opened in future versions of Office.
For XLSX files, improved export to XLSX format when sheet names are longer than 31 characters. In addition, checkboxes can now also be exported to XLSX format, and the problem that if the exported XLSX file contains shapes will cause an "invalid content error" when opening it is solved.
Finally, the PPTX import/export filter has also been improved, and now has better support for importing mathematical objects in PPTX format files, solving the problem of repeated imports. See this blog post for more information.
Other new changes
A new set of icon themes called Sukapura has been added, which follows the main visual design colors in Apple’s macOS Human-Computer Interface Guidelines. It will become the default icon theme for new LibreOffice installations on macOS systems.
Ending support for Adobe Flash, removing the export filter for the Flash format as the Flash player will be EOL at the end of 2020.
Performance improvements: Improved the speed of opening certain PPT format files and XLSX files containing many images.
Initial implementation of high-resolution screen (HiDPI) scaling based on Qt 5.
Support for compiling against the outdated CPython 2.7 version has been removed, and from now on all Python scripts execute under CPython 3.
New features to make documents more accessible (experimental): A check tool to review common accessibility issues in documents, and a support option for the PDF/UA standard in the PDF export dialog box.