
LibreOffice 5.4 released with new features for Writer, Calc and Impress - mksaunders
https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2017/07/28/libreoffice-5-4/
======
bbayles
Love LibreOffice - I've used it and OpenOffice for over 15 years. I've been
heartbroken by recent releases, however - the keyboard shortcuts in Calc (and
other components) have changed.

This is like breaking my fingers - I'm so much slower now. It's not just that
there's a difference - I can adapt to that. It's that they've re-labeled menu
entries with duplicate index keys. You can't do some things quickly now (e.g.
optimize column widths with Alt-O-M-O, which worked for years).

There's a reason why MS Excel has keyboard shortcuts that make no sense - they
match to menu entries from old versions, and they've kept them in so people
who have been using it for decades don't have a reason to switch.

Please, LibreOffice developers, make your menu shortcuts sensible again!

~~~
frik
Just for your info, no better in MS-land, Microsoft broke most shortcuts
between Office 2003 and Office 2007, a few got reverted with 2010. Still it's
mind blowing how bad shortcuts are nowadays. Instead of Ctrl+<char> one has to
type Alt+<char>+<char> and other nonsense for many shortcuts. (Sure system
wide shortcuts and a few ones like Ctrl+C still work) But try to paste a text
as plain unformatted text, good luck with that.

~~~
EvanAnderson
Interesting observation. I've had the opposite experience. Perhaps it is
sbecause I'm not using "shortcuts" but rather am operating the pull-down menus
with accelerator keys via muscle-memory. Inserting columns, rows, formatting
cells, and many other functions continued to work with the various ALT-x-x
combinations that I was used to. I never used any of the CTRL-x variants,
except for cut/copy/paste.

~~~
frik
The position of CTRL on the keyboard is ideal for shortcuts. CTRL+x is short
and can be used with one hand. I guess you started with 2007 or 2010. For me
the ribbon related shortcuts are inefficient.

~~~
EvanAnderson
I started w/ Office 95 (well, standalone Excel 4.0, actually). To insert cells
I'd type "ALT-E-I". To delete cells "ALT-E-D". Aside from cut/copy/paste and
simple text formatting (bold, underline, italic) I've never used the CTRL-x
shortcuts. I've always just operated the pull-down menus with their
accelerator keys very quickly.

Edit: Ahh-- I re-read your comment. I'm not using the ribbon ALT-x shortcuts.
I'm using the accelerator keys from the old pull-down menus. No-- those ribbon
"shortcuts" are frustrating to me.

------
cwyers
> Inspired by Leonardo da Vinci’s “simplicity is the ultimate sophistication”,
> LibreOffce developers have focused on fle simplicity as the ultimate
> document interoperability sophistication. This makes ODF and OOXML fles
> written by the free offce suite more robust and easier to exchange with
> other users than the same documents generated by other offce suites.

So, two notes here:

1) Microsoft Office and Google Docs at least have figured out how to make
their web versions so that when I copy-and-paste from them, any i following an
f doesn't disappear because of whatever they're doing to kern letters.

2) "Shorter XML output" is about 978th on the list of things that LibreOffice
needs to do to improve interoperability, and the fact that it's a focus is
deeply weird.

~~~
italovignoli
You are probably not aware of the issues related to Microsoft Office files,
which are intentionally bloated with useless XML contents to make
interoperability almost impossible. A cleaner XML improves interoperability,
even if you do not think it helps. The reality is that until people will
consider Microsoft Office files as a reference, anything else will fail WRT
interoperability because those files are developed to kill interoperability.

~~~
cwyers
> which are intentionally bloated with useless XML contents to make
> interoperability almost impossible.

That's just a conspiracy theory. The reason they're "bloated" is because
Microsoft Office is optimizing for interoperability with its largest
competitor: older versions of Microsoft Office.

Maybe Microsoft Office having "cleaner" XML would improve interoperability.
But as long as Office is the standard, the ability to consume messy XML is
worth more than the ability to emit clean XML.

~~~
davidgerard
> That's just a conspiracy theory.

The "conspiracy" is exceedingly well documented, as others have already noted.

The motherlode is these pages of contemporary documents at Groklaw:

[http://www.groklaw.net/staticpages/index.php?page=2005121615...](http://www.groklaw.net/staticpages/index.php?page=20051216153153504)

[http://www.groklaw.net/staticpages/index.php?page=2008071923...](http://www.groklaw.net/staticpages/index.php?page=20080719233709726)

A good starting document is "Can Other Vendors Implement Microsoft's Office
Open XML?"
[http://web.archive.org/web/20070912014933/http://www.hollowa...](http://web.archive.org/web/20070912014933/http://www.holloway.co.nz/can-
other-vendors-implement-ooxml.html)

~~~
cwyers
> A good starting document is "Can Other Vendors Implement Microsoft's Office
> Open XML?"
> [http://web.archive.org/web/20070912014933/http://www.hollowa...](http://web.archive.org/web/20070912014933/http://www.hollowa..).

Then let's start there! Let's start with the first section about Word
Processing, in fact:

``` 1.1. Historical Compatibility

OOXML contains compatibility markers to describe older legacy documents, their
quirks and processing models. These compatibility features mark behaviours
that software must implement to correctly display and process the majority of
documents in existence.

The "Compability Settings" WordProcessingML4 section within OOXML does not
provide for repeatable practices. While it provides Microsoft the ability to
store information related to various behaviors in their legacy file formats,
the specification merely lists the names of these settings without proper
definitions. An OOXML-consuming application, presented with a document using
these attributes, will be unable to interpret them properly and render the
page in a high-fidelity manner. Further, since these attributes are merely
listed but not defined, the ability to practice the benefit of being “fully
compatible with the large existing investments in Microsoft Office documents”
(the goal of OOXML according to its authors) is consequently reserved for
Microsoft alone.

These behaviours such as “autoSpaceLikeWord95” , “useWord97LineBreakRules” and
“useWord2002TableStyleRules” are not defined. As OOXML repeatedly states, [t]o
faithfully replicate this behavior, applications must imitate the behavior of
that application, which involves many possible behaviors and cannot be
faithfully placed into narrative for this Office Open XML Standard.

These processing hints in the proposed standard depend on undisclosed
information, and therefore other vendors cannot correctly process historical
documents using OOXML. This lack of specification has significant implications
for the New Zealand public sector organisations operating under the Public
Records Act who are seeking to preserve documents of their records in a
readable electronic form. ```

I think that rather supports the claim that backwards compatibility is a
problem for OOXML. I see no claim in there about any deliberate obfuscation.

------
0x0
I'm getting the macOS gatekeeper alert about "unidentified developer".
Obviously this can be bypassed by right-clicking and choosing open, but don't
the libreoffice developers code-sign LibreOffice.app (anymore) ?

~~~
amake
I was confused by this, too. I could have sworn they were signing previous
releases, but I'm not sure.

I did check the SHA-1 of my download, and it was correct.

~~~
cowsandmilk
previous one was definitely code signed. I installed the previous one
yesterday and it was signed. So, surprised when today's wasn't.

------
vedranm
>Thanks to the efforts of developers, the XML description of a new document
written by LibreOffice is 50% smaller in the case of ODF (ODT), and around 90%
smaller in the case of OOXML (DOCX), in comparison with the same document
generated by the leading proprietary office suite.

Given Microsoft's record in implemeting OpenDocument, this shouldn't be too
hard to do.

~~~
phonon
I think they're saying they do .docx better (or at least smaller) than MS Word
does .docx

~~~
italovignoli
DOCX files created by LibreOffice are not only smaller but simpler in term of
XML structure, and easier to interoperate. A two-page file created from
scratch is 1100 XML lines if written by LibreOffice and 11500 XML lines if
written by Microsoft Office. The 10400 redundant XML lines are there to make
it difficult to properly read the file. Also, they may contain non-standard
elements which have been deprecated before the approval of the standard itself
but are still there after 12 years.

~~~
tialaramex
I'm not sure that "to make it difficult" is true.

MS Office is very old, from their point of view compatibility will always have
to mean it works as much as possible like the previous version.

So suppose you have a three-way condition clause in some code, each paragraph
has either "Straight", "Fast" or "Thom Hopkins" formatting. Hmm. During XML
standard writing you ask engineers to explain these options so you can write
them up for the standard.

"Straight" and "Fast" turn out to each have six paragraph definitions. Great!
Write those in the XML standard. The guy you asked to work out "Thom Hopkins"
has gone on sick leave due to a mental breakdown, he has left a forty page
document, which includes excerpts from several multi-page C++ classes, one of
which seems to be a partial implementation of a bin packing solver and another
involves regular expressions.

You find the supervisor of the guy who last worked on the original "Thom
Hopkins" code. He explains it was developed over 15 years by a large team and
was originally a core part of the document engine before the invention of the
faster "Straight" paragraph mode sidelined it.

Now, you _could_ add all this crap to an appendix of the proposed XML document
standard, and watch a committee vomit when they try to read it OR you could
say "Thom Hopkins" is a special mode and shouldn't be used in standards
compliant documents, even though it's actually used in millions of templates
for your own popular office suite. And then people will say you did it just to
spite them...

~~~
chuckdries
I mostly agree with you, I subscribe to "don't attribute malice where you
could attribute incompetence or unforseen factors" but I keep wondering in the
back of my head why they would keep all this cruft in the docx format. They
hard forked their document format in 2007 and caused a LOT of headache back
then, why not take the opportunity to streamline all this stuff, you know? Why
not remove "Thom Hopkins" in the case of your story?

------
Freak_NL
I'm looking forward to giving LibreOffice Online a test drive. Perhaps it can
replace Google Docs for us with a nice self-hosted solution.

Are there any public demo instances available?

~~~
phonon
[https://demo.nextcloud.com/#short-term](https://demo.nextcloud.com/#short-
term)

~~~
frik
Great. It works fine even on a tablet with touch. Sure, GoogleDocs is still
better, but the power of the underlying LibreOffice will a lot more, and it's
on-pare with iCloud and better than MS Word WebApp

------
blablabla123
I like LibreOffice as well. I find the whole suite useful: Writer, Calc,
Impress and Draw. No heavy office person but I I use Calc several times a
week.

It's funny that after so many years the tools still struggles getting traction
even among Linux users. The built-in PDF was there years before MS Office
which is why I wrote all my Resumes in the past with LibreOffice/OpenOffice.
Google Docs might be more intuitive but it has less features than MS Works and
I have little control over my privacy.

------
heypete
As much as I love LibreOffice -- and I prefer to use it whenever I can for
several reasons -- the UI is just painfully awful.

My university and one of the journals I publish in require Word (docx) files
for papers and other documents, so I'm required to use Office. No alternatives
are allowed, not even LaTeX or sending in PDFs: their whole internal editing
and typesetting system is based around Word. Still, while I disliked the
ribbon in 2007, I've found the Word UI to have improved significantly over the
years, with 2016 being remarkably decent and producing quite presentable
documents. I would not object to there being a similar UI them in Writer.

I wanted to use Writer for several papers and my PhD thesis, but it has some
difficulty importing my otherwise-not-very-complex Word 2016 files. While the
text is imported more or less correctly, table widths and alignments get all
screwy (which is a big deal), Word's internal cross-references (e.g. "See
Figure X", where X is a number representing a specific figure and if that
figure is re-ordered in the document, the number changes) get horribly broken,
among other issues. Having Word export as ODT and opening that in Writer fixes
some issues but creates more issues to the point where there's no real
alternative for me than Word, at least for papers and other academic
documents.

It really bugs me, and I blame Word for the interoperability issues. Even so,
I have no alternatives due to the requirements of the journal. Bah.

------
xixor2
I try to get into LibreOffice, but I just can't: on windows the ui is quite
laggy, and the fonts just look... strange. It's like both the kerning and AA
are off.

------
izzard
Warning to Windows users. I've just performed a clean install of the latest
version, and I'm experiencing this problem:

[https://ask.libreoffice.org/en/question/113122/menu-bar-
vani...](https://ask.libreoffice.org/en/question/113122/menu-bar-vanished-
cursor-registration-wrong/)

Looks like others are having this problem, too.

~~~
izzard
Just found a solution, disabling OpenGL rendering. Not sure why this works,
but it does:

[https://ask.libreoffice.org/en/question/112724/all-the-
words...](https://ask.libreoffice.org/en/question/112724/all-the-words-in-
menu-bar-and-drop-down-lists-are-replaced-with-dots/)

------
themodelplumber
I love seeing plain-text-related features appear every once in a while. Stuff
like this[0] makes it much easier to use LO with my home-grown notetaking
system which is kept in plain text.

[0]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBNWOWJul4w&t=1m9s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBNWOWJul4w&t=1m9s)

------
ComputerGuru
I remember using OpenOffice torrents back in 2004 as the equivalent of
`:CheckHealth` to see if users had problems with their network configuration,
throttling, connection speed, etc because of how perpetually well-seeded they
were.

I tried the torrent download just for kicks, and I was pleasantly surprised
that was still the case: it downloaded at over 40MiB/s. (yes, MiB/s, not
mbps).

Here's a magnet link if anyone wants:

magnet:?xt=urn:btih:40836b52d32f79dbb90f2453ab3ee6e6da825880&dn=LibreOffice_5.4.0_Win_x64.msi

------
phkahler
How is the native Wayland support these days?

~~~
jhasse
5.3 already runs perfectly for me on Wayland (native, not through Xwayland).
So I guess 5.4 will be the same :)

~~~
phkahler
That pleases me. Now if Firefox could catch up....

------
cutler
Forget features. Just make LO usable again. I had to revert to OpenOffice
recently in the middle of pitching a client for a desktop db conversion from
MS Access. On OS X Sierra LO has regressed.

------
SubiculumCode
I use calc all the time, and it does just fine, but one thing I'd like to know
how to fix is the poor performance when having a filter applied on a long
column...it crawls...

~~~
chtfn
Have you submitted a bug report or looked for an existing one?
[https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=Li...](https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=LibreOffice;bug_status=UNCONFIRMED;version=)?

------
FatAmericanDev
Libreoffice is too slow with large documents.

~~~
vram22
At what size (in MB) of document have you noticed that it gets too slow?
asking because I am planning to use it for a writing project.

~~~
keithpeter
I do course guides and question sets to support teaching in LibreOffice Writer
(at home) and OpenOffice (at work). In the 60 page range, with lots of
formulas, diagrams (drawn with drawing tools) and some bitmap images (scans of
hand drawn graphs). I also copy in charts and graphs and more complex drawings
from Calc/Impress as needed. No complex 'section' schemes or restyling though
just writing straight through.

The size in Mb varies according to the number of scans - the drawings and
diagrams themselves take little file space. A 100 page course guide comes in
around 2Mb as an .odt with half a dozen scanned plots.

Seems sprightly enough on a core-duo laptop with 2Gb ram and KDE at home and
the usual 'office PC' at work.

~~~
vram22
Interesting. Thanks for the info. Don't know a lot about the sizes of word
processing docs, but slightly surprised that a 100 page doc would come in at
as little as 2 MB. I would have thought it should be more. Maybe it is due to
ODT format being compressed text/XML, which I think I read somewhere - need to
look up the format spec.

------
ta33444
I havent checked in a while, but have they given up on the pathetic attempt at
an Access clone? It looked like someones weekend project accidentally got
turned into a product.

