LibreOffice 4.4 To Have A New OpenGL Back-End

Michael Meeks has shared that LibreOffice 4.4 will feature some dramatic OpenGL improvements.

LibreOffice 4.4 will feature new OpenGL rendering code that provides a VCL (Visual Class Libraries) back-end implementation to render all of the windows contents via shared code on all platforms. All LibreOffice rendering will be able to happen within the same OpenGL context to yield seamless 3D integration and better performance. This OpenGL rendering support for LibreOffice is also an important step towards support for Wayland by this open-source office suite.

Within the latest Git code, LibreOffice isn't yet rendering perfectly, but the developers are continuing to work on it in the lead-up to LibreOffice 4.4. This work has been done by developers from Collabora, SUSE, and many others.

Find out about the LibreOffice OpenGL 4.4 work via Meeks' blog post.

The current plan for LibreOffice 4.4 is to go into beta later this month, release candidates to begin around mid-December, and for the official LibreOffice 4.4.0 release to happen in either late January or early February.