About this page

This is the page with our 4.3 release notes. It should be final now that the 4.3 version itself has been released. However, if you spot any missing or incorrect information, then please let us know. Thanks in advance for your help!





Writer

Raise limit of characters in paragraphs

Raise the 16bit (65,535) characters limitation of Writer paragraphs to 32bit (2,147,483,647). Especially useful in locales where there is a requirement to record minutes of meetings in a single paragraph. tdf#30668, i#17171 (Caolán McNamara)

A paragraph with more than 64k characters

Moved Navigation buttons

The Navigation buttons have been moved from below the scrollbar to the Find bar (Samuel Mehrbrodt, UX-Advise Team)

Before After

Increase/decrease font size buttons

Removed the 72 pt limitation of the Increase font button. tdf#73414 (Maxim Monastirsky, Caolán McNamara)

Also added Increase/decrease font functionality to drawing objects. commit (Maxim Monastirsky)

DrawingML import/export

Brand new drawingML-based DOCX import/export filter for shapes and TextFrames. For more details, see this blog entry. (Miklos Vajna)

Import and export of nested comments in the ODF, DOC, DOCX and RTF filters. i#123792 (Oliver-Rainer Wittmann - Apache: ODF filter and DOCX import part, Miklos Vajna: DOCX export and RTF/DOC filter parts)

Nested comments in a file imported from RTF.

Proportion image scaling

Images are now scaled proportionally by default, free resizing is available holding ⇧ Shift . tdf#71669 (Tomaž Vajngerl)

Solarized blue for Non-printing characters

Non-printing Characters are shown with "Solarized blue" color (currently not available on macOS). tdf#68071 (Tomaž Vajngerl)

Relative text frame anchoring improvements

Multiple relations are now supported for relative text frames. For more details, see this blog entry. (Miklos Vajna)

Relative textframes: relative from page or paragraph.

Vertical alignment for text frames

Vertical alignment of text (and other content) is now supported for text frames. This can be set under the "Options" tab. (Zolnai Tamás)

Vertical alignment for text frames

Comments can now be printed next to the text in the right margin as they appear on screen. Each page is scaled down in order to make space for the comments to fit on the underlying paper size. tdf#36815 (Caolán McNamara)

New 'Place in margins' option Sample output pdf with comments in margin

The character properties of all comments can be set at the same time now in order to reformat all comments in a document at the same time. (Caolán McNamara)

New 'Format all comments' option

Unicode-compliant soft hyphen handling

Soft hyphens can result non-standard hyphenation, according to the Unicode standard, and (soft hyphen based) hyphenation dialog window suggests these hyphenation points, too. tdf#44314 (László Németh)

Non-standard hyphenation support in user-defined dictionaries

In the user-defined dictionaries, now it is possible to use a [] block instead of the = sign to specify character changes before the hyphenation break. Possible character changes:

Extra characters, for example tug[g]gumi results the correct hyphenation “tugg- gummi” of the Swedish word “tuggummi”.

Character removing specified by a digit, for example paral·[1]lel results correct hyphenation “paral- lel” of the Catalan word “paral·lel”, removing one character before the break point.

Both removed and extra characters, for example cafee[2é]tje results correct hyphenation “café- tje” of the Dutch word “cafeetje”, removing two characters before the break point, and adding an extra one.

Note: also it is possible to complete the hyphenation of Dutch, Norwegian, Swedish, Catalan, Hungarian without the modification of the TeX-like hyphenation patterns, using a default shared user-defined dictionary file. (László Németh)

New non-standard hyphenation support in user-defined dictionaries

LibreLogo

Improvements of LibreLogo, the Logo-like programming environment of LibreOffice for graphic design and education:

Several user interface fixes

New PENTRANSPARENCY, FILLTRANSPARENCY commands to set transparency after PENCOLOR, FILLCOLOR usage

A transparent circle with 50% transparent outline (the orange part is the overlapping of the circle and its outline). Source code: PENSIZE 100 PENCOLOR “GOLD” PENTRANSPARENCY 50 FILLCOLOR “RED” FILLTRANSPARENCY 50 CIRCLE 450

Color and transparency gradients are now supported via FILLCOLOR and FILLTRANSPARENCY commands. (introduction)

Example for LibreLogo color gradient support. Code: PENUP REPEAT 100 [ FILLCOLOR [ANY, ANY] CIRCLE 20 + RANDOM 130 POSITION ANY ]

For additional information, see the new portal for LibreLogo news and examples: LibreLogo.org

Calc

Smarter highlighting of cell in a formula

Border highlight on multiple instances of the same cell, when selecting a formula, now get same color. After calculating a long formula, the cells can be easily referenced with the formula, as they get the same color i.e., the highlight of the cell and the name of the cell in the formula. tdf#52461 (Rachit Gupta)

Before After

Number selected rows and columns in status bar

When selecting cells, the number of selected rows and columns is shown in the status bar. tdf#64290 (Manmeet Singh)

See the number of selected rows and columns in the status bar.

Sheet tab area: when expanding the space available for sheet tabs make better use of that. (Michael Meeks)

Start cell edit with content of cell above

Allow starting of cell edit with the content of the cell above it as its initial content. It is bound to the Ctrl + ' (single quote) key by default. (Note: On some locales this keyboard shortcut may conflict with the system default shortcuts. If the default shortcut does not work due to conflict, bind it to a different shortcut). (Kohei Yoshida)

Starting cell edit with the formula from the above cell.

User selectable text conversion models

Under Tools ▸ Options ▸ LibreOffice Calc ▸ Formula in Detailed calculation settings ▸ Custom ▸ Details the user can select how textual cell content shall be treated in arithmetic operations. See also this blog entry for some details. tdf#37132 and tdf#75834 related (Eike Rathke)

Pivot Table layout improvement

"Data" field is now on columns by default, and can be moved to rows if needed. This makes it much faster to generate useful pivot tables from large data sources. tdf#77927 (Tomaž Vajngerl)

Before version 4.3, it was only possible to generate pivot table with data field on rows.

Start from LO 4.3, it's also possible to generate pivot table with data field on columns.

Formula engine

Added GAMMA.DIST, GAMMA.INV and GAMMALN.PRECISE spreadsheet functions for Excel interoperability. tdf#71936 (Winfried Donkers)

Added LOGNORM.DIST, LOGNORM.INV, NORM.DIST, NORM.INV, NORM.S.DIST and NORM.S.INV spreadsheet functions for Excel interoperability. tdf#72158 (Winfried Donkers)

Added T.DIST, T.DIST.2T, T.DIST.RT, T.INV, T.INV.2T and T.TEST spreadsheet functions for Excel interoperability. tdf#72793 (Winfried Donkers)

Added PERCENTILE.EXC, PERCENTILE.INC, PERCENTRANK.EXC, PERCENTRANK.INC, QUARTILE.EXC, QUARTILE.INC, RANK.EQ and RANK.AVG spreadsheet functions for Excel interoperability. tdf#73146 (Winfried Donkers)

Added MODE.SNGL, MODE.MULT, NEGBINOM.DIST and Z.TEST spreadsheet functions for Excel interoperability. tdf#72197 (Winfried Donkers)

Added FLOOR.PRECISE, CEILING.PRECISE and ISO.CEILING spreadsheet functions for Excel interoperability. tdf#71720 (Winfried Donkers, Eike Rathke)

Added NETWORKDAYS.INTL and WORKDAY.INTL spreadsheet functions for Excel interoperability. tdf#73147 (Winfried Donkers)

Added ERF.PRECISE and ERFC.PRECISE spreadsheet functions for Excel interoperability. tdf#73149 (Winfried Donkers)

Enable CoinMP solver

Previously LibreOffice shipped the lpsolve solver, now we can build both the lpsolve and coin-mp solvers. (Matúš Kukan)

Statistics Wizard (alternative to Excel's Add-in "Analysis ToolPak")

In Statistics Wizard Data ▸ Statistics

added Two factor Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) (Tomaž Vajngerl)

added F-test. tdf#74663 (Tomaž Vajngerl)

added t-test. tdf#74668 (Tomaž Vajngerl)

Random number generation

In random number generation dialog box Edit ▸ Fill ▸ Random Number, now user can optionally limit the number of decimal places in the generated random number. tdf#76718 (Tomaž Vajngerl)

The new rounding option for random number generation

Impress and Draw

Number of Pages

Hidden slides are no longer included in the “Number of pages” counting field, to avoid confusion. tdf#74383 (J. Fernando Lagrange)

Fit slide to window

Add an icon to the statusbar to allow fitting the current slide to window with a single click. (Caolán McNamara)

Fit slide to current window

Slide Pane selected/unselected slides with mouse over

It is now possible to distinguish between selected and unselected slides when the mouse over highlight activates. rhbz#1096295 (Caolán McNamara)

Before, Selected or Unselected After, Unselected After, Selected

3D models

LibreOffice now supports inserting 3D models in the glTF format into presentations (using libgltf). To use this feature, go to Insert ▸ Object ▸ 3D Model. Currently this option is available for Windows and Linux. (Zolnai Tamás, Jan Holesovsky, Markus Mohrhard).

Static model: Duck

Animated model: Monster

Monster 3D model

Limited support for 3D models in *.dae and *.kmz formats (using collada2gltf). (Zolnai Tamás, Matúš Kukan).

For more information about 3D model support see this blog post.

Base

LibreOffice bundles a new version of Access2Base, see Scripting / Base for details.

Chart

Property Mapping

Added property mapping functionality for charts, allowing to change data series properties based on spreadsheet values. For more details see this blog entry (Markus Mohrhard)

The new Property mapping dialog

Core

Accessibility

On Windows, IAccessible2 is now the only assistive technology support option. Support for the Java Accessibility Bridge has been removed, and turning on experimental features is no longer necessary in the Advanced options to enable assistive technology support.

Added new, specialized roles for specific text, spreadsheet and presentation documents. tdf#39944 (blog post) (Jacobo Aragunde)

Improve mapping of ATK and LibreOffice roles, matching new(ish) ATK roles with existing UNO ones. tdf#39944 (blog post) (Jacobo Aragunde)

Expose the role change between a heading and a paragraph through a new UNO accessibility event. tdf#35105 (blog post) (Jacobo Aragunde)

Remove unnecessary text-attributes-changed events when typing. tdf#71556 (Jacobo Aragunde)

Notify misspelled words to accessibility. tdf#71558 (Jacobo Aragunde)

Use quick help text as the accessible name for toolbar buttons if not explicitly set. tdf#74681 (Jacobo Aragunde)

VCL (GUI Toolkit)

Major refactoring and cleanup of the VCL code (Chris Sherlock)

Options / General

CUPS, fax machines and spadmin

LibreOffice will now autodetect that fax4CUPS printers are fax machines and prompt for the fax number to use when you print to them. Multiple numbers, separated by commas, can be entered.

Other printer drivers that contain custom options which can take arbitrary text or numbers are now supported. So to set the phone number for printer drivers for fax machines that utilize a custom option for that purpose the number can be entered in the device tab of the printer properties.

The graphical utility spadmin is now removed in favor of these new features and the operating system's standard printer administration tools. (Caolán McNamara)

Filters

Improved PDF import

Improved OOXML support

Initial import support for OOXML Strict in the DOCX, XLSX and PPTX formats. For more details, see this blog entry. (Markus Mohrhard, Miklos Vajna)

Theme fonts support: detect and render the proper fonts and preserve font theme attributes. Details in this blog entry. (Jacobo Aragunde)

Preserve theme colors on fonts, paragraphs and table cells. (Jacobo Aragunde, blog entry)

Preserve style attribute on shapes and tables. (Jacobo Aragunde)

Preserve line and fill theme colors on shapes, including color transformations. (Jacobo Aragunde, blog entry)

Preserve gradient shape fill, although the render is not accurate the gradient information is completely preserved on export. (Jacobo Aragunde, blog entry)

Save embedded spreadsheets, presentations, etc. in docx documents. (Jacobo Aragunde)

Improved Standard Document Tags support: fix export of date and checkbox controls, fix import of combobox controls reusing dropdown control and preserve the other kinds of tags. (Jacobo Aragunde)

Preserve effects on shapes and pictures, including 3D effects and artistic effects. (Jacobo Aragunde, blog entry)

Artistic effects in Writer

Improved handling of Writer track changes in groupshape text. (Miklos Vajna, blog entry)

Group shape with change tracking text in Writer

Shape adjustment names are now exported according to the specification. tdf#73215 (Miklos Vajna)

VML import now handles optional command parameters. commit (Miklos Vajna)

Improved drawingML export of pattern fill for shapes. commit (Miklos Vajna)

DOCX import now handles explicit horizontal merges of table cells. tdf#65090 (Miklos Vajna)

DOCX import now handles floating tables anchored inside tables. tdf#74357 (Miklos Vajna)

New import filters

Microsoft Works spreadsheets and databases (Laurent Alonso)

A host of legacy Mac formats (Laurent Alonso) spreadsheets: BeagleWorks, ClarisWorks, Claris Resolve, GreatWorks, MacWorks, Wingz vector and bitmap images: BeagleWorks, ClarisWorks, GreatWorks, MacPaint, MacWorks, SuperPaint



GUI

Available since 4.3.1 There was a leftover 1 px border around the Start Center, which is now removed. core commit 2b2d1bbaf9af0ec177e27fd930cd63c6bfdc2ab9 (Adolfo Jayme Barrientos)

There was a leftover 1 px border around the Start Center, which is now removed. core commit 2b2d1bbaf9af0ec177e27fd930cd63c6bfdc2ab9 (Adolfo Jayme Barrientos) Available since 4.3.1 The background color was tweaked and unified with that of the rulers, streamlining and improving the default look. tdf#51534, tdf#79278 (Michael Meeks, Adolfo Jayme Barrientos)

The rulers harmonize with the background again; the darker color helps to focus on the document and reduces eye strain.

Refreshed Tango icons

The default Tango icon set has received a general update, including the addition of new icons for the Sidebar. (Alexander Wilms, Miroslav Mazel)

Native background rendering on macOS

Native rendering of toolbars background on macOS. tdf#69358 (Joren De Cuyper, Jan Holesovsky, Tor Lillqvist)

Native toolbar background

Color pickers improvements

Line color picker now uses a color palette instead of a list. tdf#46839 (Maxim Monastirsky)

Before After

Several color pickers were converted to split buttons, making it possible to apply the last used color with one mouse click. This includes: Font color (Impress, Draw), Font color of drawing objects (Writer, Calc), Line color, 3D Extrusion color. commit (Maxim Monastirsky)

Start Center improvements

Preview of all file types in start center, not only ODF. tdf#72469 (Jan Holesovsky)

Selectively delete Recent Documents (Jan Holesovsky)

Selectively delete Recent Documents

Initial HiDPI support

Some HiDPI support for Linux and Windows, most of the patches have been backported to 4.2.3 (Keith Curtis, Jan Holesovsky, Caolán McNamara, Andrzej Hunt)

Progressbar for DOCX documents

DOCX import now has a progressbar. tdf#58044 (Miklos Vajna)

Progressbar while opening a DOCX file.

Localization

Font support

Available since 4.3.1 We now ship Adobe’s Source Sans Pro 2.0, which includes a greatly expanded range of characters. It now supports the Cyrillic, Greek and IPA writing systems, tweaks several diacritic marks and adds the new Russian Rupee sign ( ₽ , U+20BD , included since Unicode 7.0). tdf#81095 (András Tímar)

New languages/locales in language list

Available for character attribution and spell-checking.

Added Maninkakan, Eastern, Latin [emk-Latn-GN]. tdf#74672 (Eike Rathke)

Added Avar [av-RU]. tdf#75161 (Eike Rathke)

Added Cree, Plains, Latin [crk-Latn-CN] and Syllabics [crk-Cans-CN]. tdf#73973 (Eike Rathke)

New languages/locales with locale data

Available as default document language and for locale specific formatting.

Added Lengo [lgr-SB] locale data. tdf#72512 (pcunger, Eike Rathke)

Added Moore [mos-BF] locale data. tdf#78647 (David Delma, Eike Rathke)

Added French (Côte d'Ivoire) [fr-CI] locale data. tdf#79348 (David Delma, Eike Rathke)

Added French (Mali) [fr-ML] locale data. tdf#79349 (David Delma, Eike Rathke)

Added French (Senegal) [fr-SN] locale data. tdf#79350 (David Delma, Eike Rathke)

Added French (Benin) [fr-BJ] locale data. tdf#79351 (David Delma, Eike Rathke)

Added French (Niger) [fr-NE] locale data. tdf#79352 (David Delma, Eike Rathke)

Added French (Togo) [fr-TG] locale data. tdf#79353 (David Delma, Eike Rathke)

Adding a new language tag

In character attribution dialogues the language list box (of the Western text font if CJK or CTL are enabled) is now a combo box with an edit field where the user can specify a valid BCP 47 language tag to define a text language attribute if the language they wants to assign is not available from the selectable list. (Eike Rathke)

Performance

Algorithm of reordering sorted data has been overhauled. Sorting of large data set is now substantially faster. (Kohei Yoshida, Michael Meeks)

Importing OOXML documents with lots of relations is much faster. (Michael Meeks)

Much accelerated DOCX hyperlink import. tdf#76563 (Miklos Vajna)

Scripting / Base

Access2Base new version

LibreOffice bundles Access2Base V1.1.0, a simplified API for scripting of Base (and database forms stored in Writer, Calc, ... documents) in the Basic programming language. It is more concise and easier to learn than the cross-language standard UNO API. The current version allows dynamic data access from any Basic macro, including, just as an example, from a user-defined function invoked in a Calc cell formula. (Jean-Pierre Ledure)

Feature removal / deprecation

Exporting to the OpenOffice.org 1.0 XML file format was removed; users are recommended to save in ODF, which is a perfect substitute that is better in all respects. Import of old files is still possible. (Bryan Quigley)

The Sidebar in Draw doesn't have an "Insert Shapes" panel anymore. tdf#73070 (Rob Snelders)

API changes

Removed configuration options

C++ UNO language binding and URE libraries

All inline C++ functions that took a sal_Bool parameter by value or returned sal_Bool have been changed to use bool instead. This should effectively be transparent to client code, and potentially helps static analyzers produce better diagnostics.

parameter by value or returned have been changed to use instead. This should effectively be transparent to client code, and potentially helps static analyzers produce better diagnostics. cppu::Enterable::v_isValid returns bool instead of int core commit 81cb6a7fbc315d3287e7a485b73a1b66dd4478ef

instead of core commit 81cb6a7fbc315d3287e7a485b73a1b66dd4478ef Removed the cppu::loadSharedLibComponentFactory override with rPrefix parameter, intended only for internal use anyway. core commit 2f7b329297c65d75f428d389a53b5822e38b0ec5

override with parameter, intended only for internal use anyway. core commit 2f7b329297c65d75f428d389a53b5822e38b0ec5 Removed rtl/allocator.hxx , intended only for internal use anyway. core commit a908e4eb41b83d051232f9e551e779e77c9a9c4f

, intended only for internal use anyway. core commit a908e4eb41b83d051232f9e551e779e77c9a9c4f Removed the obsolete functions originally underlying osl/diagnose.h before that got rebased onto sal/log.hxx core commit 97354578d7195bce927f0c00c4e2ae9cd7344776

OSL macro clean up

Remove dead support for nonexisting UNO “array” and “union” concepts

Removed functionality of

typelib_static_array_type_init function

function typelib_typedescription_newArray function

function typelib_typedescription_newUnion function

function typelib_ArrayTypeDescription struct

struct typelib_UnionTypeDescription struct

struct getCppuArrayType * inline functions

core commit a2c464868aca4bb38aa8afff635da56942b597ac

UNO API changes

Removing XInitialization from a service implementations

Deprecating com.sun.star.lang.XTypeProvider.getImplementationId

Implementations should just always return an empty sequence, and clients should be prepared to routinely obtain empty sequences (which already could have happened in the past) or (better) not call this method at all. core commit dd1050b182260a26a1d0ba6d0ef3a6fecc3f4e07

Other

Platform Compatibility

Windows

Updated build environment on Windows (Windows Server 2012R2 with Visual Studio 2012).

Known Issue: there are problems with running the Windows release on older CPUs that lack support for SSE2 instructions, see tdf#82430.

Affected CPUs include Intel Pentium III and older, and all AMD 32-bit CPUs (Athlon XP and older).

Mac

macOS 32 bits build and version 10.6 and 10.7 are deprecated.

Most Annoying Bugs

The following annoying bugs were not fixed in time and will be addressed in the regular bug fix releases: