Download LibreOffice 3.4.0 Beta 4

The Document Foundation has released the fourth beta release of version 3.4.0 of LibreOffice. Like The Document Foundation itself, this open source office suite was created after a large number of developers left Oracle out of dissatisfaction with how Oracle managed OpenOffice.org. LibreOffice comes with a word processor (Writer), a spreadsheet program (Calc), a presentation program (Impress), a drawing program (Draw), a database program (Base), and a scientific notation program (Formula). In beta 4 are still 36 problems fixed, so the final probably won’t be long in coming. Below is an overview of the main improvements made in version 3.4.0.

writer

• New gradient / drop-shadow to highlight writer pages, with configurable colors in the options. To see simply start writer, and admire the prettier page / drop shadow
• Support Color and line styles for the columns and footnote separator lines. This is improving the compatibility of LibreOffice with ODF
• Add Greek Characters mode for bullets and numbering
• The graphite smart font rendering support, has been completely rewritten to use a new faster graphite engine and is now more stable and at least 10 times faster. No changes are needed to existing fonts or documents.

calc

• Redesigned Move/Copy Sheet dialog (Edit->Sheet->Move/Copy) to improve its ergonomics. (Joost Eekhoorn, Christoph Noack)
• Support for autofilter per sheet: It is now possible to set autofilter per sheet without manually creating named database ranges prior to setting autofilter. Previously Calc only supported one autofilter per document, which caused the previous autofilter to disappear when setting another one even on a different sheet unless a named database range was created beforehand. (Mark Mohrhard)
• Re-work of the drawing layer, to improve precision on re-positioning and re-sizing of drawing objects. (Caolan McNamara, Red Hat, Inc.)
• Massive re-work of external reference handling: External reference handling code has been significantly re-worked in order to fix a large number of defects in formula calculations involving external references, and to boost data caching performance especially when referencing large data ranges. (Kohei Yoshida)
• Named ranges in sheet-local scope: Previously, Calc only supported named ranges in global scope, that is, all named ranges were made available for the entire document regardless of the current sheet. In 3.4 Calc now supports named ranges that are local to a sheet. The named range dialog (Insert->Names->Define) has been modified to reflect this change. (Kohei Yoshida)
• Multiple subtotals on a single sheet: It is now possible to define more than one subtotal range in a single sheet via Data->Subtotals. Previously, setting a second subtotal range removed the first one if they were on the same sheet. (Kohei Yoshida)
• Preserve OLE links to other Excel documents when importing an Excel document. OLE links get converted to external references upon import. Previously, Calc ignored OLE links and cells containing OLE links resulted in error upon import. (Kohei Yoshida)

DataPilot

• Support for unlimited number of fields: Previously DataPilot only supported up to 8 column/row/data fields and up to 10 page fields. 3.4 has lifted this restriction to allow unlimited number of fields in each field type.
• Named range as data source: With 3.4 it is now possible to use a named range as the data source for DataPilot. This allows, for example, addition of new rows to the data source and update of the DataPilot table to reflect the new data, without manually changing the data source range in the DataPilot dialog.
• Re-work of the internals: The internal implementation of DataPilot has been significantly re-worked in order to fix several regressions especially with regard to refreshing of DataPilot tables.

Impress / Draw

• Improve HTML export with an image thumbnail gallery of the slides on the contents page (Julien Nabet, Michael Meeks)

Filters

• Re-write flat ODF import and export file filters from Java to C++ giving a huge speed increase. Try saving your writer document as a “.fodt” file
• Substantially re-work legacy StarOffice (pre 2000) binary file format filters, removing all export code: the filters are now smaller and read-only, this also removes clutter from the ‘Save As’ dialog

GUI

• Initial support for Unity and global menu support
• Internationalized font previews: In the drop-down font selector, fonts which are tuned for use with a specific script, eg Arabic, Hebrew, Malayalam, etc. now show an additional preview of some sample text in the target script. see before and after screenshots.
• Natural Sorting: Menus list their entries in a natural sort order. eg “Heading 10” now appears directly after “Heading 9” in the list instead of directly after “Heading 1”. see before and after screenshots.
• Autocorrect: Typing “http:” at the start of a sentence no longer auto-capitalizes. Such URLs are now excluded from being auto-capitalized.
• Text Rendering: Linux text rendering improvements. Text is now drawn via Cairo with the same subpixeling options as other Cairo-using apps. The outcome is that text in LibreOffice is rendered the same as the rest of your desktop. see sample screenshot when desktop-wide subpixeling is enabled.
• Adapt to Linux mouse pointer themes more pleasantly
• Improve gtk+ theme integration, making LibreOffice look more native. Fix menu separators, Alt key issues, Toggle buttons, and many widget rendering details
• Find toolbar now behaves much more like in applications like Firefox, or Evolution – is hidden by default, shows when the user presses Ctrl+f at the bottom of the document, and is wider, so more text fits there, see the detailed description and a screenshot. For the Search and Replace dialog, Ctrl+Alt+f is used.
• Separate borders width and style for Writer, Calc and Impress
• Added new 3D border types to increase compatibility with loads of file formats, including ODF.
• Color Charts: Adding and Removing color charts is now possible
• Rotate through case changes: fix for bug 32559

Performance

• Smoother startup on Linux: we now show our splash screen before starting to read all the application’s data, giving a faster time to splash and cleaner code
• Remove inefficient, and un-necessary ‘BmpColorMode’ approach to accessibility theming. Reduce theme sizes and duplication by isolating high contrast icons in their own theme
• Remove 150 duplicated redundant ‘missing icon’ icons to reduce bloat
• Move seldom used text encoding conversions into a separate library, saving 1Mb or so of RAM
• Linux fontconfig leak: Fixed a font-related leak, saving up to 800k or so of RAM, depending on the amount of fonts installed
• Shrink Windows installer download by more than 30Mb using better compression schemes
• Remove 624 localized palette files and have them localized run-time
• Remove compatibility support layer for old Windows 9x non-unicode Win32 APIs

Other

• When the document is encrypted with a password, you can now change the password while the document is open, from File->Properties->General->Change Password. The button is enabled only when the document is encrypted with a password.

Code cleanups

• Removal of numerous DECLARE_LIST in favor of STL and boost ptr_container. (Joseph Powers, Rafael Dominguez)
• Many thousands of lines of German comments, translated to English (…)
• Thousand of incorrectly ‘executable’ files fixed (Francisco Saito)
• More than 5,000 lines of dead code removed [Writer/Calc/Impress]
• Use of SAL_N_ELEMENTS [Writer/Calc/Impress/Base]
• Cppcheck warnings fixes

Localization

• Data Pilot is now named Pivot Table.
• Add Beembe (bek), Bekwel(bkw), Kituba (mkw), Lari (ldi), Mbochi (mdw), Teke-Ibali (tek), Teke-Tyee (tyx), and Vili (vif) languages ​​(Republic of Congo ). Hunspell spell checker dictionaries in these languages ​​are now useable in LibreOffice. (Andras Timar)
• Add Portuguese (Angola) local data (pt_AO). (Andras Timar)