Ahead of the early February planned debut of the LibreOffice 7.5 open-source office suite, the release candidate was made available today for testing.
Following the alpha and beta builds from earlier in December, The Document Foundation is closing out 2022 with today’s issuance of the LibreOffice 7.5 RC1. Two more release candidates are expected in January along with the hard code freeze and branching while the stable LibreOffice 7.5.0 release is expected by the first week of February.
Some of the new changes to find with the LibreOffice 7.5 office suite include:
– LibreOffice’s support for dark and high contrast operating system themes has been greatly improved. This dark and high contrast theme work helps LibreOffice across Linux, macOS, and Windows platforms.
– Support for rotate and zoom gestures when using touchpads.
– Support for embedded fonts on macOS.
– Various fixes to the text layout handling and editing engine.
– LibreOffice’s PDF exporting filter has added support for embedding color fonts using color layers and color bitmaps, such as for emojis. There is also PDF support for embedding variable fonts and applying font variations to glyph shapes.
– LibreOffice 7.5’s Writer (word processor) added a new plain text type content control.
– Various bookmark improvements for Writer.
– LibreOffice Impress now supports cropped video for media shapes.
– A new set of default table types for Impress and Draw.
The LibreOffice QA blog today announcing the RC1 candidate noted there are more than 200 commits that landed following the recent beta release. Binary builds of this Microsoft Office competitor are available for Linux, macOS, and Windows for easy testing.