Another major piece of engineering that I have covered that we did for Fedora Workstation 23 is the GTK3 port of LibreOffice. Those of you who follow Caolán McNamaras blog are probably aware of the details. The motivation for the port wasn’t improved look and feel integration, there was easier ways to achieve that, but to help us have LibreOffice deal well with a range of new technologies we are supporting in Fedora Workstation namely: Touch support, Wayland support and HiDPI.

That ongoing work is now available in Fedora Workstation 23 if you install the ‘libreoffice-gtk3’ package. You have to install this using a terminal and dnf as this is a early adopter technology, but we would love as many as possible for you to try and report any issues you have either to the upstream LibreOffice bugzilla or the Fedora bugzilla against the LibreOffice component. Testing of how it works under X and how it works under Wayland are both more than welcome. Be aware that it is ‘tech preview’ technology so you might want to remove the libreoffice-gtk3 package again if you find that it hinders your effective use of LibreOffice. For instance there is a quite bad titlebar bug you would exprience under Wayland that we hope to fix with an update.

If you specifically want to test out the touch support there are two features implemented so far, both in Impress. One is to allow you to switch slides in Impress by a swiping gesture and the second is long press, you can bring up the impress slide context menu with it and switch to e.g. drawing mode. We would love feedback on what gestures you would like to see supported in various LibreOffice applications, so don’t be shy about filing enhancement bug reports with your suggestions.

HiDPI it wasn’t a primary focus of the porting effort it has to be said, but we do expect that it should also make improving the HiDPI support in LibreOffice further easier. Another nice little bonus of the port is that the GTK Inspector can now be used with LibreOffice.

A big thanks to Caolán for this work.