LibreOffice 7.5 Arrives with Dark Theme Improvements, Compatibility Improvements, and More

The Document Foundation unveiled recently the launch of the new version of the office suite «LibreOffice 7.5″. In this new version 144 developers participated in preparation for the launch, of which 91 are volunteers.

63% of the changes were made by 47 employees from the three companies that oversee the project: Collabora, Red Hat and Allotropia, 12% by six employees of The Document Foundation, and 25% of the changes were added by independent enthusiasts.

LibreOffice 7.5 main new features

In this newly released version of LibreOffice 7.5, the GTK3 based builds now support smooth scrolling. For more precise scrolling, a long mouse click on the scroll bar or a mouse click while holding down the Shift key can be used.

Another change that stands out from LibreOffice 7.5 is the simproved support for dark system themes and high-contrast features provided on Windows, macOS, and Linux, along with more than 40 bugs that appeared when using dark themes have been fixed.

Besides it the version of the interface with a toolbar has been modernized (See ▸ User Interface… ▸ Single Toolbar), which offers the possibility to customize the content of the panel (Tools ▸ Customize… ▸ Toolbars or through the context menu).

Besides that heExport and import were improved for PDF documents, as well as adding support for embedding color (Emoji) and variable fonts in PDF.

On the part of the changes made in Writer, the following are mentioned:

• Sbuilt-in initial support for machine translation, implemented on the basis of the DeepL service.
• For improve portability with MS Word, added support for DOCX-compliant content controls used to fill out forms: plain text input area combo boxes, label and header input forms
• Added the ability to export content controls to PDF format.
• Implemented the ability to edit tab parameters (Format ▸ Paragraph… ▸ Tabs) for several selected paragraphs at once, for which different parameters are set.
• Implemented control of errors in the spelling of the words that make up the text of the hyperlinks.
• Improved removal of columns in tables that intersect with merged cells.
• Improved bookmark support.
• Significantly increased the visibility of markers (Tools ▸ Options ▸ LibreOffice Writer ▸ Formatting Aids ▸ Bookmarks).
• Bookmark editing is allowed in the Insert Bookmark dialog.

Regarding the changes in Calc:

• Implemented the ability to place a table with data displayed on the chart in the chart area.
• Conditional formatting operations begin with/end with/contains now handle masks case-insensitively.
• Tabs and new lines are preserved in cells.
• The settings for inserting special cells are saved between sessions.
• Changed behavior when entering non-string values ​​beginning with an apostrophe into cells (for example, when entering values ​​with numbers and dates beginning with an apostrophe, this character is now removed).
• The role wizard now has the ability to search by role description, not just by name.
• The Elements panel in Math has been moved from the left side of the window to the sidebar.

Y in Print:

• A selection of new table styles are included.
• Added the ability to change and create table styles. Modified styles can be saved to the document, exported, and used in templates.
• Added the ability to trim video added to the slide.
• The Presentation Console can now be launched in a normal window, and not just in full screen mode (for example, to show a presentation during a video conference with a monitor).
• The browser provides the ability to move and regroup objects using the drag and drop interface.

Finally if you are interested in knowing more about it About this new released version, you can check the details in the following link

How to install LibreOffice 7.5 on Ubuntu and derivatives?

For those who are interested in being able to obtain this new update now, we can do the following. First we must uninstall the previous version of LibreOffice (if we have it), This is in order to avoid later problems, for this we must open a terminal (you can do it with the key combination Ctrl + Alt + T) and execute the following:

sudo apt-get remove --purge libreoffice*
sudo apt-get clean
sudo apt-get autoremove

To download the new LibreOffice package, we are going to run the following command in a terminal:

wget http://download.documentfoundation.org/libreoffice/stable/7.5.0/deb/x86_64/LibreOffice_7.5.0_Linux_x86-64_deb.tar.gz

Done the download now we can extract the content of the downloaded file with:

tar xvfz LibreOffice_7.5.0_Linux_x86-64_deb.tar.gz

We enter the created directory:

cd LibreOffice_7.5.0_Linux_x86-64_deb/DEBS/

And finally we install the packages that are inside this directory with the following command:

sudo dpkg -i *.deb

Now We proceed to download the Spanish translation package with:

cd ..
cd ..
wget http://download.documentfoundation.org/libreoffice/stable/7.5.0/deb/x86_64/LibreOffice_7.5.0_Linux_x86-64_deb_langpack_es.tar.gz

And we proceed to unzip and install the resulting packages:

tar xvfz LibreOffice_7.5.0_Linux_x86-64_deb_langpack_es.tar.gz
cd LibreOffice_7.5.0_Linux_x86-64_deb_langpack_es/DEBS/
sudo dpkg -i *.deb

Finally, In case of having a problem with the dependencies, we can execute the following command:

sudo apt-get -f install

How to install LibreOffice using SNAP?

We also have the option to install from snapThe only drawback of installing by this method is that the current version has not been updated in Snap, so for those who prefer this installation method, they will have to wait a few days for the new version to be available.

The command to install is:

sudo snap install libreoffice --channel=stable