The transition of LibreOffice to ODF 1.3 is finished

Earlier this year, allotropia software GmbH was awarded the Tender to finish transition of LibreOffice to ODF 1.3 (ODF 1.3 delta) (#202010-01) by The Document Foundation (TDF).

The implementation is now finished, has received quite a bit of polishing and testing, and is available for production use in the LibreOffice 7.2 release.

While ODF 1.3 support is widely available across the LibreOffice ecosystem since the beginning of this year, there was a number of improvements now possible, after the ODF TC cleaned up and improved the standard.

We have implemented the following features:

• Writer: alphabetical indexes, tables of contents and user-defined indexes will now generate clickable hyperlinks to document index entry marks (https://git.libreoffice.org/core/commit/7685c0746cf0db6f51c6a7a488f4a960f8eab3c9). We also fixed the long standing problem of missing URI-encoding of internal link targets (https://git.libreoffice.org/core/commit/7f14ea4431cb4182bccbd9998a60db2f9d9ae07a).

• Writer: All background fills can now be set to either cover the page inside the margins or the entire page (https://git.libreoffice.org/core/commit/56d8007a197b095b09423c691a51515567648e80).

Previously, the situation in Writer was that some types of background were always covering the entire page, others only within the margins, which required some work on the ODF import for compatibility with existing files (https://git.libreoffice.org/core/commit/e9c6fd6b4d09ee59b6a86942cbf001f2ba9782e6).

• Impress: All background fills can now be set to either cover the page inside the margins or the entire page (https://git.libreoffice.org/core/commit/dda83832529fd8c7d02bdf14890faf84a3512112).

Since this feature adds a new checkbox on a dialog, we also added some UITests (https://git.libreoffice.org/core/commit/8a859cdecdd49e186b95a051ee31756770d50e9c).

• Chart: Adding series name to data series label is now possible.

With this feature, you can now show the data series name in the chart on each data label, which makes reading a chart easier and also improves interoperability with Microsoft Excel (https://git.libreoffice.org/core/commit/b99f310d3b24dc45e3d84751e810c0bbff1d991b).

• Chart: For “Moving average” trend line, the type can now be selected
  • Prior (default)
  • Central
  • Averaged Abscissa

This allows to calculate the trend line with different algorithms, and gives more flexibility to the chart creator (https://git.libreoffice.org/core/commit/4141533a3fb984fbaefe87b15fceeda7f2082061) (https://git.libreoffice.org/core/commit/a9b71098845edcb4f6b4629795168d174f28ef70).

• Additionally, we re-implemented z-order export in Writer and Calc to take into account layers, which is an improvement that is not typically visible to LibreOffice users (https://git.libreoffice.org/core/commit/9bc6160e0acbc78be998129ea55ed7e4529959fa) (https://git.libreoffice.org/core/commit/b4f38c6b8bbc6ea6a5d9354bfd24e411fc5a51fc).

As a bonus, this enabled us to fix a very long-standing bug of the text frame/shape duality in Writer not maintaining its invariants (https://git.libreoffice.org/core/commit/3bc8f90e9693f710f12632f69b9348c1c833c906) (https://git.libreoffice.org/core/commit/c2eae4998b3ae79210ef0b5c064e9833218c22de). The benefits here is improved stability for a number of important corner-cases.

We would like to thank The Document Foundation, and their countless donors, for funding these improvements to LibreOffice!