The other open-source productivity suite gets a version bump
The latest point-release of Onlyoffice, a free Microsoft Office-compatible suite, is here with multiple small improvements and better support for Asian and African writing systems.
Despite Microsoft’s seemingly unassailable hegemony, Office does still have rivals other than Google Docs. There’s more than one free-and-open-source productivity suite out there. Onlyoffice has a few points in its favor, and the new version 7.2 increases its appeal.
Onlyoffice 7 came out at the start of the year and this is the second point-release. This version has improved font support, notably for handling ligatures – the combined characters created by joining two (or more) letters together. This isn’t a big deal in English; it’s useful for some words of Latin origin, such as anæsthetic. However, for some alphabets, where most or all letters join together, it’s critical, so this means Onlyoffice 7.2 now has much better support for Bengali (বাংলা বর্ণমালা) and N’Ko (ߒߞߏ), among others.
There’s improved specification of data-entry fields in forms. Spreadsheets can be inserted into other documents as OLE objects, meaning that they remain live and can be edited and updated.
