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The Document Foundation has finished selecting the projects for its LibreOffice open-source office suite in Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2023, promising new features and improvements that have been requested by users for a long time now.
Future LibreOffice releases will let you import and export APNG (Animated PNG) images, an animated format that’s backwards compatible with the PNG image format and support more colors than GIF images and partial transparency. Also, APNG is already supported by all major web browsers.
Another new feature that has been requested by users for some time now is the implementation of a search field in the Options panel to let you more easily find various settings to configure LibreOffice to your needs. The search field will be implemented in the Options dialog under Tools.
Future LibreOffice releases will also get improved PGP/GPG encryption support. At the moment, this feature is in an experimental state in LibreOffice, but it will be improved to make it easier to find the right keys for encrypting documents, add asynchronous querying for a performance boost, and implement smart searching, traversing, and filtering capabilities for large keyrings.
On top of that, future LibreOffice releases will come with a machine learning-based test selection method that’s capable of selecting tests to run in the continuous integration chain to reduce the testing load, as well as C++-written unit tests for Writer’s UNO API, which were forked from OpenOffice.org are written in Java.
These features will be implemented by various students during Google Summer of Code 2023 and are scheduled to land in future LibreOffice releases. Unfortunately, they won’t make it in time for the upcoming LibreOffice 7.6 release, due out in mid-August 2023, so we will probably enjoy them in 2024.
Meanwhile, check out all the details on the LibreOffice GSoC 2023 program page.
Image credits: The Document Foundation
Last updated 11 months ago
