14 DAY TRIAL // The Document Foundation announced that the first Release Candidate for the LibreOffice 5.0.4 branch is now out and ready for testing.
The devs from The Document Foundation continue to provide support for the 5.x branch of LibreOffice. This is a very new release, and it's going to be around for a long time. In fact, a couple more releases are planned after the launch of 5.0.4. The launch of the next major version, 5.1.0, should happen on February 1, at the earliest.
One of the greatest attributes of LibreOffice, besides the fact that it's open source, is its predictability. Developers announce the schedule for new releases long before they start to work on it, and it's easy to prepare. This is especially helpful for organizations or any kind of enterprise deployments.
It has also been revealed that there are now more than 100 million active users, and that only means that the makers of this office suite have a much bigger responsibility than we can imagine.
LibreOffice 5.0.4 RC1 is ready for testing
Like all first Release Candidates for LibreOffice, the changelog is extensive, and there are a lot of fixes. It's important to mention that it's a maintenance release and that only fixes are pushed through the door.
According to the changelog, the proper header/footer paragraph properties are now applied to the body paragraph during DOCX import, the ability to set highlight color for text in drawing objects has been added, the DOCX page Orientation is now preserved when mixed orientation is present, and an image anchored as 'As Character' is no longer positioned on the wrong page for DOCX documents.
Also, the Line Style drop down is no longer missing a background color, a disparity between inserting shapes from menu and toolbar has been corrected, zip archives can now be exported, and numerous other small fixes have been added.
You can download LibreOffice 5.0.4 RC1 right now. Please keep in mind that it's a development version, and it's not meant for production machines. Also, you shouldn't install and run this version alongside the stable one.