[tdf-announce] The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 4.0

The free office suite the community has been dreaming of for twelve years

Berlin, February 7, 2013 - The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice
4.0, the free office suite the community has been dreaming of since
2001. LibreOffice 4.0 is the first release that reflects the objectives
set by the community at the time of the announcement, in September 2010:
a cleaner and leaner code base, an improved set of features, better
interoperability, and a more diverse and inclusive ecosystem.

LibreOffice 4.0: a community on fire

In less than 30 months, LibreOffice has grown dramatically to become the
largest independent free software project focused on end user desktop
productivity. TDF inclusive governance and the copyleft license have
been instrumental in attracting more than 500 developers - three
quarters of them being independent volunteers - capable of contributing
over 50,000 commits.

The resulting code base is rather different from the original one, as
several million lines of code have been added and removed, by adding new
features, solving bugs and regressions, adopting state of the art C++
constructs, replacing tools, getting rid of deprecated methods and
obsoleted libraries, and translating twenty five thousand lines of
comments from German to English. All of this makes the code easier to
understand and more rewarding to be involved with for the stream of new
members of our community.

"LibreOffice 4.0 is a milestone in interoperability and an excellent
foundation for our continued work to improve the User Interface,"
explains Florian Effenberger, Chairman of the Board of Directors. "Our
project is not only capable of attracting new developers on a regular
basis, but it also creates a transparent platform for cooperation based
on a strong Free Software ethos, where corporate sponsored and volunteer
developers work to attain the same objective."

LibreOffice 4.0: the new features

LibreOffice 4.0 offers a large number of new characteristics, which are
listed on this page:
https://www.libreoffice.org/download/4-0-new-features-and-fixes.

- Integration with several content and document management systems -
including Alfresco, IBM FileNet P8, Microsoft Sharepoint 2010, Nuxeo,
OpenText, SAP NetWeaver Cloud Service and others - through the CMIS
standard.
- Better interoperability with DOCX and RTF documents, thanks to several
new features and improvements like the possibility of importing ink
annotations and attaching comments to text ranges.
- Possibility to import Microsoft Publisher documents, and further
improvement of Visio import filters with the addition of 2013 version
(just announced).
- Additional UI incremental improvements, including Unity integration
and support of Firefox Themes (Personas) to give LibreOffice a
personalized look.
- Introduction of the widget layout technique for dialog windows, which
makes it easier to translate, resize and hide UI elements, reduces code
complexity, and lays a foundation for a much improved user interface.
- Different header and footer on the first page of a Writer document,
without the need of a separate page style.
- Several performance improvements to Calc, plus new features such as
export of charts as images (JPG and PNG) and new spreadsheet functions
as defined in ODF OpenFormula.
- First release of Impress Remote Control App for Android, supported
only on some Linux distributions. (The second release, coming soon, will
be supported on all platforms: Windows, MacOS X and all Linux distros
and binaries.)
- Significant performance improvements when loading and saving many
types of documents, with particular improvements for large ODS and XLSX
spreadsheets and RTF files.
- Improved code contribution thanks to Gerrit: a web based code review
system, facilitating the task for projects using Git version control
system (although this is not specific of LibreOffice 4.0, it has entered
the production stage just before the 4.0 branch).

LibreOffice 4.0: under the hood

There are a number of fixes and improvements primarily of interest to
developers:
https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleaseNotes/4.0#API_Changes.

Overall excellent backwards compatibility is retained for legacy
extensions, but moving forward TDF is committed to a more pro-active
approach to evolving the UNO APIs, with more functionality to be
deprecated, and eventually dropped, in due time - according to the six
month release cycle - throughout the LibreOffice 4.x release series.

During the last seven months, since the branch of LibreOffice 3.6 and
during the entire development cycle of LibreOffice 4.0, developers have
made over 10,000 commits. On average, one commit every 30 minutes,
including weekends and the holiday season: a further testimonial of the
incredible vitality of the project.

How to get LibreOffice 4.0

LibreOffice 4.0 is immediately available for download from the following
link: http://www.libreoffice.org/download/. Extensions for LibreOffice
are available from the following link:
http://extensions.libreoffice.org/extension-center.

Changelogs are available at
https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/4.0.0/RC1 (solved in
4.0.0.1), https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/4.0.0/RC2 (solved
in 4.0.0.2) and https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/4.0.0/RC3
(solved in 4.0.0.3).

Support The Document Foundation

LibreOffice users, free software advocates and community members can
support The Document Foundation with a donation at
http://donate.libreoffice.org. Money collected will be used to grow the
infrastructure, and support marketing activities to increase the
awareness of the project, both at global and local level.

Short link to The Document Foundation blog: http://wp.me/p1byPE-mG.

-- 
Italo Vignoli - Director
phone +39.348.5653829 - skype italovignoli
email italo.vignoli@documentfoundation.org
The Document Foundation
Zimmerstraße 69, 10117 Berlin, Germany
Rechtsfähige Stiftung des bürgerlichen Rechts
Legal Details: www.documentfoundation.org/imprint

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