The new release offers several new features, but it focuses on contributors.
The Internet, June 3, 2011. Documentary Foundation
(The Document Foundation) announces the release of
LibreOffice 3.4.0 - a significant new version of a free suite of applications for office workers, developed by a community of voluntary and paid developers and supported worldwide by local volunteer communities.
LibreOffice 3.4.0 is the second significant version of this set since the creation of the Documentary Fund was announced in September 2010, and it contains more than 120 developers (six times more than the first
beta version released on the launch day of the project) .
Most of the source code donators started to hack LibreOffice less than eight months ago - this is an incredible achievement, if we recall that the OOo project in 10 years attracted fewer co-workers. “We take care of our developers, and it worked,” commented Italo Vignoli
, the Jury of the Steering Committee, on behalf of the DF. “Our main developers invented the lightweight hack mechanism, which pleases volunteers with a simplified opportunity to familiarize themselves with the LibreOffice code in practice, perfecting the development skills on basic, on elementary tasks.”
“And having made the first simple hacks, the authors of the code are able to grow to more complex tasks,” says Michael Meek, who works at SUSE as a senior developer. “We spent quite a lot of time learning new code authors to increase the number of people working on fixing bugs, creating patches, and creating features. Soon this will affect the quality of the software product, the number of new features in future releases of the program. ”
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Several new features
in LibreOffice 3.4.0 are implemented in Calc: increased speed, improved compatibility with Excel spreadsheets, and the Pivot Table (now called DataPilot) supports an infinite number of fields and a named interval
(named range) as a data source. The user interface of the Writer, Impress and Draw programs has been improved with a number of new features, and the Linux version has several cosmetic changes (in particular, the best text rendering engine has been applied
and the GTK + theme has been enhanced to match the theme
). As for the code, several thousand lines with comments in German were translated into English, and more than five thousand lines of dead code were removed from Writer, Calc and Impress.
Being the first release
in the 3.4 series, LibreOffice 3.4.0 is intended for community members and for confident users, and should not be implemented in a corporate environment. According to the explanations of the Documentary Fund and according to its program release schedule (time bound is the best strategy for a distributed, team development environment), the best releases for such an implementation will start
from the number xx1. Based on these considerations,
LibreOffice 3.3.x will also be supported over the next few months, up to the end of calendar 2011, for the most conservative users.
Download LibreOffice 3.4 at
http://www.libreoffice.org/download . A complete list of new features and bug fixes is available on the Web at
https://www.libreoffice.org/download/3-4-new-features-and-fixes/ . You can also download screenshots illustrating the new features of LibreOffice.