LibreOffice 7.2 Beta Arrives With Initial Command Pop-Up HUD, Better Performance

Following last month's LibreOffice 7.2 Alpha, the first beta for this open-source office suite update is now available for testing.

LibreOffice 7.2 has been working on introducing a command pop-up / heads-up display, initial GTK4 toolkit support, the ability to compile to WebAssembly, font caching for faster rendering, Calc spreadsheet performance improvements, the usual assortment of import/filter export work, and dropping its OpenGL-based drawing code in favor of routing all the code through Skia.

Another performance improvement with LibreOffice 7.2 is that Microsoft DOCX files should open faster. Meanwhile large images will also now be loaded on-demand and for faster slide rendering there is pre-fetching of large images.

The default templates for LibreOffice have also been refreshed with a better appearance.

Downloads for today's LibreOffice 7.2 Beta 1 release are available via The Document Foundation. More details on all of the changes coming for LibreOffice 7.2 via the tentative release notes.

LibreOffice 7.2.0 is aiming for release around mid-August.