The Document Foundation has unveiled LibreOffice 5.4 64-bit and LibreOffice 5.4 32-bit. Again, it’s on time, arriving six months after the release of LibreOffice 5.3.
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.
Calc gains support for pivot charts using data from pivot tables, which are dynamically updated as the table data is amended.
Menu commands have been added to make comments easier to manage through 'show', 'hide' and 'delete all comments' options. Calc also adds up and down buttons to make it easier to change the priority of conditional formatting rules.
Extra sheet protection options are in place for optionally allowing the inserting and deletion of rows and columns, and user settings for CSV export are retained for the next export operation.
LibreOffice Impress sees improvements to its object duplication tool, with settings saved for the next operation and an option to specify fractional angles added.
As always, these changes scratch the surface of what’s been implemented in LibreOffice 5.4 -- check out the extensive release notes for a full rundown.
LibreOffice Productivity Suite 5.4 64-bit is available now as a free, open-source download for Windows, Mac and Linux. LibreOffice Productivity Suite 5.4 32-bit is also available for 32-bit Windows and Linux machines.
