LibreOffice 5.0 will be announced next Wednesday – August 5, 2015 – at noon UTC. It is our tenth major release, and the first of the third stage of LibreOffice development. To show the impressive amount of new features added to LibreOffice since version 3.3, released in January 2011, we have compiled a summary of all previous announcements. LibreOffice 5.0 will add 64bit Windows builds to already available 32bit Windows, 64bit MacOS and 32/64bit Linux builds, and will be compatible with Windows 10. A pre-release of LibreOffice 5.0 is available on the download page at the following address: http://www.libreoffice.org/download/pre-releases/. LibreOffice 3.3, January 25, 2011 – LibreOffice 3.3 was the first stable release of the FOSS office suite developed by the community. In less than four months, the number of developers hacking LibreOffice has grown from less than twenty in late September 2010 to well over one hundred in January 2011. This has allowed to release LibreOffice 3.3 ahead of the aggressive schedule set by the project. LibreOffice 3.3 highlights: The developer community has been able to build their own and independent process, and get up and running in a very short time (with respect to the size of the code base and
Sophie Gautier has been a member of the OpenOffice.org project since its beginning, and then a founding member of The Document Foundation and LibreOffice. She is extremely active in the Francophone and international community, and is a staff member of The Document Foundation. She takes care of the French translation of LibreOffice (interface and help), is a member of LibreOffice certification committee and is a leading member of the quality assurance project. 2015 is more than ever a year packed with exciting projects and ideas around LibreOffice and The Document Foundation, so we want to continue our behind-the-scenes series, to share achievements with our community and our generous donours, to whom we’d like to express our sincerest gratitude and thanks for their incredible and wonderful support and their invaluable contributions! The localization team has been very busy translating for the 4.4.x version, a lot of dialogues have been modified, so thousands of strings were touched, moved and need to be translated and validated again. The L10N team had an important discussion on the workflow and the current workload due to changes on the sources, whether they are needed or purely cosmetic, which resulted in several decisions. The first is that the teams willing to
The user interface has been improved in a significant way Interoperability with OOXML file formats has been extended Improved source code quality based on Coverity Scan analysis Berlin, January 29, 2015 – The Document Foundation is pleased to announce LibreOffice 4.4, the ninth major release of the free office suite, with a significant number of design and user experience improvements. “LibreOffice 4.4 has got a lot of UX and design love, and in my opinion is the most beautiful ever,” says Jan “Kendy” Holesovsky, a member of the Membership Committee and the leader of the design team. “We have completed the dialog conversion, redesigned menu bars, context menus, toolbars, status bars and rulers to make them much more useful. The Sifr monochrome icon theme is extended and now the default on OS X. We also developed a new Color Selector, improved the Sidebar to integrate more smoothly with menus, and reworked many user interface details to follow today’s UX trends.” LibreOffice 4.4 offers several significant improvements in other areas, too: Support of OpenGL transitions in Windows, and improved implementation based on the new OpenGL framework; Digital signing of PDF files during the export process; Installation of free fonts Carlito and
With the beginning of 2015, a new year packed with exciting projects and ideas around LibreOffice and The Document Foundation, we today finish our behind-the-scenes series, to share achievements in 2014 with our community and our generous donours, to whom we’d like to express our sincerest gratitude and thanks for their incredible and wonderful support and their invaluable contributions! I’m Alexander Werner and I am responsible for the infrastructure of The Document Foundation on a contracted basis since March 2014. I have been with the project since its foundation in 2012, and been a longtime supporter of free and open source software. As a volunteer I helped setting up and maintaining our first server and optimizing it to handle the load of the first days. The infrastructure is one of the most important things The Document Foundation provides for the community. As long as every part is working as expected, it is basically invisible. It is my job to make sure that this is always the case, mostly by orchestrating the different services on our growing number of virtual machines. When the LibreOffice fork began, we started with only one server where all services were located – mailing lists, both
Better OOXML interoperability, and support of legacy Mac file formats Better comment management, and highly intuitive spreadsheet handling 3D models in Impress, and support for “monster” paragraphs Berlin, July 30, 2014 – The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 4.3, the 8th major release of the free office suite since the birth of the project in September 2010. The application includes the combined effort of thousands of volunteers and hundreds of developers, and has reached a point of maturity that makes it suitable for every kind of deployment, if backed by value added services by the growing LibreOffice ecosystem. LibreOffice 4.3 offers a large number of improvements and new features, including: Document interoperability: support of OOXML Strict, OOXML graphics improvements (DrawingML, theme fonts, preservation of drawing styles and attributes), embedding OOXML files inside another OOXML file, support of 30 new Excel formulas, support of MS Works spreadsheets and databases, and Mac legacy file formats such as ClarisWorks, ClarisResolve, MacWorks, SuperPaint, and more. Comment management: comments can now be printed in the document margin, formatted in a better way, and imported and exported – including nested comments – in ODF, DOC, OOXML and RTF documents, for improved productivity and better collaboration. Intuitive spreadsheet
UK citizens will be the first in Europe to be liberated from proprietary lock-ins Berlin, July 23, 2014 – The Document Foundation (TDF) congratulates the UK government for the selection of the Open Document Format (ODF), in addition to Portable Document Format (PDF), to meet user needs. LibreOffice, the free office suite developed by TDF, supports both ODF – the native document format – and PDF (including PDF/A). The original UK government press release is here: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/open-document-formats-selected-to-meet-user-needs. In addition, the UK government has published a policy paper with more details: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/open-standards-for-government/sharing-or-collaborating-with-government-documents. “TDF has always been a strong supporter of ODF, and a believer in open document standards”, says Thorsten Behrens, TDF Chairman. “July 22 will be a date to remember, as the culmination of a dream inaugurated when ODF become a ISO standard on November 30, 2006. By standardizing on ODF and PDF, the UK government is showing the world that it is entirely possible to find a way out of proprietary formats to enhance user freedom”. LibreOffice is a reference implementation of ODF, a document standard which is supported by a growing number of applications (including proprietary ones). ODF is independently managed by OASIS (https://www.oasis-open.org/), a non-profit consortium that
