The Document Foundation today announced the official launch and immediate availability of LibreOffice 6.1 suite, the second major update in the LibreOffice 6 series that was released earlier this year.
LibreOffice 6.1 has been in development for the last few months and after the last bug search, is now ready for the general public with improved performance and many new features such as a Redesigned image handling and better compatibility with documents created in Microsoft Office.
LibreOffice 6.1 adds a Page menu and reorganizes the Draw component menus for better consistency between the different modules, the filter to export EPUB is improved with additional options such as metadata customization and better support for links, images, tables, notes and embedded sources .
The Base component also received a major upgrade, the Firebird database engine is already enabled by default, replacing the old HSQLDB engine. It is recommended that users migrate their files from HSQLDB to Firebird using the migration wizard.
For Linux users, LibreOffice 6.1 brings better integration with the KDE Plasma graphical environment, enables Elementary icons by default in GNOME, and uses native GTK + 3 interfaces in pop-up windows. The Microsoft Excel 2003 XML file import filter has also been improved in this new update.
Colibre, a new icon theme for Windows users
With the arrival of LibreOffice 6.1, The Document Foundation presents Colibre, a new icon theme for Windows users which follows the Microsoft operating system default icon theme guidelines. With this, TDF hopes that Windows users will feel at home when migrating to another system.
LibreOffice Online, the server service for deploying LibreOffice on public and private servers, also received significant enhancements in LibreOffice 6.1, including a rEditing of the user interface to make it more like the desktop version.
The Document Foundation considers LibreOffice 6.1 to be a release that should be used by power users and enthusiasts. For office and new users, TDF recommends LibreOffice 6.0 which will be supported until November 26, 2018. LibreOffice 6.1 will stop receiving security and maintenance updates until May 29, 2019.