LibreOffice is diving into desktop publishing
Last week at LibreOffice Conference in Paris, there was quite an interesting presentation of a project that has the potential of dramatically changing the somewhat unevenly developing landscape of free desktop publishing applications.
László Németh of FSF.hu Foundation spoke about plans and ongoing work to make LibreOffice more suitable for complex desktop publishing tasks and typesetting. If you ever used the typography toolbar extension in OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice, then you probably don’t need him introduced. For the rest of you László is likely to become a new superhero in heavy disguise.
Things that are being worked on or currently in plans: better support for complex scripts, GUI for advanced text and paragraph setting, a microtypography slider, lots of improvements to PDF exporting such as creating proper CMYK PDFs and setting cropbox. This won’t make LibreOffice Writer directly compete against InDesign or QuarkXPress, but it’s a great help in producing documents that look really well.
László has just published slides from his talk which you can download here.
For LibreOffice 3.4 the plan is to integrate Graphite 2 — a new version of the Graphite font engine that deals with complex and minor scripts (previous version of Graphite has been supported since OpenOffice.org v3.2). Some of the features require standardization work, e.g. there is a proposal for adding font feature support to the Open Document Format (see here). László is also working on Graphite versions of Linux Libertine and Linux Biolinum fonts. You can find additional information at his website.
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