LibreOffice 3.3.2

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the latest freest office productivity software in the world.

The Document Foundation maintains its release schedule thanks to a growing and vibrant community of developers

The Internet, March 22, 2011 – The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 3.3.2, the second micro release of the free office suite for personal productivity, which further improves the stability of the software and sets the platform for the next release 3.4, due in mid May. The community of developers has been able to maintain the tight schedule thanks to the increase in the number of contributors, and to the fact that those that have started with easy hacks in September 2010 are now working at substantial features. In addition, they have almost completed the code cleaning process, getting rid of German comments and obsolete functionalities.

“I have started hacking LibreOffice code on September 28, 2010, just a few hours after the announcement of the project, and I found a very welcoming community, where senior developers went out of their way to help newbies like me to become productive. After a few hours I submitted a small patch removing 5 or 6 lines of dead code… enough to get my feet wet and learn the workflow”, says Norbert, a French developer living in the United States. “In a short time, I ended up removing the VOS library – deprecated for a decade – from LibreOffice, and finding and fixing various threading issues in the process”.

LibreOffice 3.3.2 is being released just one day after the closing of the first funding round launched by The Document Foundation to collect donations towards the 50,000-euro capital needed to establish a Stiftung in Germany. In five weeks, the community has donated twice as much, i.e. around 100,000 euros. All additional funds will be used for operating expenses such as infrastructure costs and registration of domain names and trademarks, as well as for community development expenses such as travel funding for TDF representatives speaking at conferences, booth fees for trade shows, and initial financing of merchandising items, DVDs and printed material.

Italo Vignoli, a founder and a steering committee member of The Document Foundation, will be keynoting at Flourish 2011 in Chicago on Sunday, April 3, at 10:30AM, about getting independent from OpenOffice and Oracle, starting The Document Foundation, raising the capital and the first community budget, organizing developers and other work, and outlining a roadmap for future releases and features.

The Document Foundation is at http://documentfoundation.org, while LibreOffice is at http://www.libreoffice.org. LibreOffice 3.3.2 is immediately available from the download page.

*** About The Document Foundation

The Document Foundation has the mission of facilitating the evolution of the LibreOffice Community into a new, open, independent, and meritocratic organization within the next few months. An independent foundation is a better reflection of the values of our contributors, users and supporters, and will enable a more effective, efficient and transparent community. TDF will protect past investments by building on the achievements of the first decade, will encourage wide participation within the community, and will co-ordinate activity across the community.

*** Media contacts for TDF

Florian Effenberger (Germany)
Mobile: +49 151 14424108 – E-mail: floeff@documentfoundation.org
Olivier Hallot (Brazil)
Mobile: +55 21 88228812 – E-mail: olivier.hallot@documentfoundation.org
Charles H. Schulz (France)
Mobile: +33 6 98655424 – E-mail: charles.schulz@documentfoundation.org
Italo Vignoli (Italy)
Mobile: +39 348 5653829 – E-mail: italo.vignoli@documentfoundation.org


Italo Vignoli – The Document Foundation
email italo.vignoli@documentfoundation.org
phone +39.348.5653829 – VoIP +39.02.320621813
skype italovignoli – italo.vignoli@gmail.com

LibreOffice 3.3.2

Graph of internet users per 100 inhabitants be...
Image via Wikipedia

the latest freest office productivity software in the world.

The Document Foundation maintains its release schedule thanks to a growing and vibrant community of developers

The Internet, March 22, 2011 – The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 3.3.2, the second micro release of the free office suite for personal productivity, which further improves the stability of the software and sets the platform for the next release 3.4, due in mid May. The community of developers has been able to maintain the tight schedule thanks to the increase in the number of contributors, and to the fact that those that have started with easy hacks in September 2010 are now working at substantial features. In addition, they have almost completed the code cleaning process, getting rid of German comments and obsolete functionalities.

“I have started hacking LibreOffice code on September 28, 2010, just a few hours after the announcement of the project, and I found a very welcoming community, where senior developers went out of their way to help newbies like me to become productive. After a few hours I submitted a small patch removing 5 or 6 lines of dead code… enough to get my feet wet and learn the workflow”, says Norbert, a French developer living in the United States. “In a short time, I ended up removing the VOS library – deprecated for a decade – from LibreOffice, and finding and fixing various threading issues in the process”.

LibreOffice 3.3.2 is being released just one day after the closing of the first funding round launched by The Document Foundation to collect donations towards the 50,000-euro capital needed to establish a Stiftung in Germany. In five weeks, the community has donated twice as much, i.e. around 100,000 euros. All additional funds will be used for operating expenses such as infrastructure costs and registration of domain names and trademarks, as well as for community development expenses such as travel funding for TDF representatives speaking at conferences, booth fees for trade shows, and initial financing of merchandising items, DVDs and printed material.

Italo Vignoli, a founder and a steering committee member of The Document Foundation, will be keynoting at Flourish 2011 in Chicago on Sunday, April 3, at 10:30AM, about getting independent from OpenOffice and Oracle, starting The Document Foundation, raising the capital and the first community budget, organizing developers and other work, and outlining a roadmap for future releases and features.

The Document Foundation is at http://documentfoundation.org, while LibreOffice is at http://www.libreoffice.org. LibreOffice 3.3.2 is immediately available from the download page.

*** About The Document Foundation

The Document Foundation has the mission of facilitating the evolution of the LibreOffice Community into a new, open, independent, and meritocratic organization within the next few months. An independent foundation is a better reflection of the values of our contributors, users and supporters, and will enable a more effective, efficient and transparent community. TDF will protect past investments by building on the achievements of the first decade, will encourage wide participation within the community, and will co-ordinate activity across the community.

*** Media contacts for TDF

Florian Effenberger (Germany)
Mobile: +49 151 14424108 – E-mail: floeff@documentfoundation.org
Olivier Hallot (Brazil)
Mobile: +55 21 88228812 – E-mail: olivier.hallot@documentfoundation.org
Charles H. Schulz (France)
Mobile: +33 6 98655424 – E-mail: charles.schulz@documentfoundation.org
Italo Vignoli (Italy)
Mobile: +39 348 5653829 – E-mail: italo.vignoli@documentfoundation.org


Italo Vignoli – The Document Foundation
email italo.vignoli@documentfoundation.org
phone +39.348.5653829 – VoIP +39.02.320621813
skype italovignoli – italo.vignoli@gmail.com

Viva Libre Office

WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS.
Image via Wikipedia

The Document Foundation is happy to announce the release candidate of
LibreOffice 3.3.1. This release candidate is the first in a series of
frequent bugfix releases on top of our LibreOffice 3.3 product. Please
be aware that LibreOffice 3.3.1 RC1 is not yet ready for production
use, you should continue to use LibreOffice for that.

http://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/announce/msg00028.html

Following is the list of changes against LibreOffice 3.3:

Key changes at a glance:

* Numerous translation updates
* new mimetype icons for LibreOffice – explained here:
http://luxate.blogspot.com/2011/01/not-even-included-but-already-improved.html
* quite a few crasher fixes

Detailed change log:

* translation updates
* Removed old/unmaintained icon themes
* Fix for https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=664516: Don’t
use a reference or the default formula string will be changed
* Install bash completion for oo* wrappers when enabled
(https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=665402)
* Build fix: get the stlport compat workaround working for gcc 4.6.0
* Build fix: no ddraw.h or ddraw.lib in the June 2010 DirectX SDK,
removed usage
* Windows installer: padded nologobanner.bmp, new size is 102×58
* removed gd – Gaelic, ky – Kirghiz, pap – Papiamento, ti – Tigrinya,
ms – Malay, ps – Pashto, ur – Urdu. UI localization does not exist
in these languages. So it makes no sense to ship packages.
* Build fix: pass thru PYTHON, found by configure. Will be used by
filter/source/config/fragments/makefile.mk.
* Upgraded libwpd (WordPerfect filter) to 0.9.1
* Fixed BrOffice Windows start menu branding
* Removed language code ‘kid’. kid is not Koshin, but key id pseudo
language which is good for debugging UI but should no be included
in the product
* Added ca_XV and ast language/local name and description
* Fixed incorrect page number in page preview mode
(https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=33155). When the
window is large enough to show several ‘Page X’ strings,
the page number was not properly incremented.
* Fixed incorrect import of cell attributes from Excel
documents. When a cell with non-default formatting attribute starts
with non-first row in a column, the filter would incorrectly apply
the same format to all the cells above it if they didn’t have any
formats.
* Ubuntu: fix for lp#696527 – enable human icon theme in LibreOffice
* Fix for https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=673819 crash on
changing position of drawing object in header.
* Changed OpenOffice.org to LibreOffice in nsplugin
* Added Occitan dictionary
* Added Ukrainian dictionaries
* Fix window focus for langpack installation on Mac –
https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=33056
* Added/modified NLPsolver translations from Pootle
* Fix for https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=655763
* Fix for RTF export crasher
(https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=656503)
* Use LibreOffice as product name for EPS Creator header
* Parse svg ‘color’ property (fixes
https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=33551)
* Use double instead of float in writerfilter import
* Build fix: use PYTHON as passed through by set_soenv.in.
* Fix for https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=33237 remove
debug line
* Fix for https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=33237 – fixes
ole object import for writer (docx)
* Fix for https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=33249
rename OOo -> LibO on Getting Support Page
* Fix ooxml import: handle css::table::BorderLine in addition to
css::table::BorderLine2 That means that table cell properties are
correctly set on import again.
* Fix for https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=33258
wikihelp: Improve the check for existence of the localized help.
* Fix for https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=33994 – fixes
several crashes around config UNO API
* Fix for https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=30879
* Fix for https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=32872
Implementation names weren’t matching with xcu.
* Fix: don’t pushback and process a corrupt extension
* Fix: wikihelp – do not check for existence of the localized
help. In case we do not have the help installed, it is up to the
online service to decide the fallback in case a language version is
not available.
* Fix README: change su urpmi to sudo urpmi for Mandriva section
* Fix README formatting –
https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=32741 – using CRLF
instead of LF on WIN platform
* Fix README: word wrap at column 75 for better readability
* Build fix: KDE3 library search order
(https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=32797). Use LINKFLAGS
instead of STDLIBS.
* Start using technical.dic instead of oracle.dic
(https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=31798)
* Build fix: add explicit QRegion* for clipRegion to fix compile of
kde backend
* Cleanup: removed obsolete m_bSingleAltPress
* Remove the menu when Left Alt Key was pressed for GTK
* Fix for https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=33459: use
year of era in long format for zh_TW by default
* Fix wrong collation for Catalan language
* Fix for https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=31271 wrong
line break with “(”
* Fix for https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=32561 – crash
when iterating over the database types.
* Default currency for Estonia should be Euro – fixes
https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=33160
* Avoid a pointless GetHelpText() call in the toolbox. Fixes
https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=33315. GetHelpText()
can be quite heavy, see
https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=33088.
* Paint toolbar handle positioned properly
(https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=32558)
* Build fix: move cxxabi.h after stl headers to workaround gcc 4.6.0
and stlport
* Fix for https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=33355
manipulate also the C runtime’s environment
* Fix for CTL/Other Default Font #i25247#, #i25561#, #i48064#,
#i92341#
* RTF export crasher
(https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=656503)
* Fixed an infinite loop in RTF exporter
* UI: translations need more space on word count dialog, made space
for it.
* Fix for https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=660816 improve
formfield checkbox binary export (and import)

Again a BIG Thank You!

Again whats Libre Office

What does LibreOffice give you?

Writer is the word processor inside LibreOffice. Use it for everything, from dashing off a quick letter to producing an entire book with tables of contents, embedded illustrations, bibliographies and diagrams. The while-you-type auto-completion, auto-formatting and automatic spelling checking make difficult tasks easy (but are easy to disable if you prefer). Writer is powerful enough to tackle desktop publishing tasks such as creating multi-column newsletters and brochures. The only limit is your imagination.

Calc tames your numbers and helps with difficult decisions when you’re weighing the alternatives. Analyze your data with Calc and then use it to present your final output. Charts and analysis tools help bring transparency to your conclusions. A fully-integrated help system makes easier work of entering complex formulas. Add data from external databases such as SQL or Oracle, then sort and filter them to produce statistical analyses. Use the graphing functions to display large number of 2D and 3D graphics from 13 categories, including line, area, bar, pie, X-Y, and net – with the dozens of variations available, you’re sure to find one that suits your project.

Impress is the fastest and easiest way to create effective multimedia presentations. Stunning animation and sensational special effects help you convince your audience. Create presentations that look even more professional than the standard presentations you commonly see at work. Get your collegues’ and bosses’ attention by creating something a little bit different.

Draw lets you build diagrams and sketches from scratch. A picture is worth a thousand words, so why not try something simple with box and line diagrams? Or else go further and easily build dynamic 3D illustrations and special effects. It’s as simple or as powerful as you want it to be.

Base is the database front-end of the LibreOffice suite. With Base, you can seamlessly integrate your existing database structures into the other components of LibreOffice, or create an interface to use and administer your data as a stand-alone application. You can use imported and linked tables and queries from MySQL, PostgreSQL or Microsoft Access and many other data sources, or design your own with Base, to build powerful front-ends with sophisticated forms, reports and views. Support is built-in or easily addable for a very wide range of database products, notably the standardly-provided HSQL, MySQL, Adabas D, Microsoft Access and PostgreSQL.

Math is a simple equation editor that lets you lay-out and display your mathematical, chemical, electrical or scientific equations quickly in standard written notation. Even the most-complex calculations can be understandable when displayed correctly. E=mc2.

LibreOffice also comes configured with a PDF file creator, meaning you can distribute documents that you’re sure can be opened and read by users of almost any computing device or operating system.

Download LibreOffice now and try it out today.

http://www.libreoffice.org/features/

 

LibreOffice Stable Release launched

Non Oracle Open Office completes important milestone- from the press release

The Document Foundation launches LibreOffice 3.3

The first stable release of the free office suite is available for download

The Internet, January 25, 2011 – The Document Foundation launches LibreOffice 3.3, the first stable release of the free 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 today. This has allowed us to release ahead of the aggressive schedule set by the project.

Not only does it ship a number of new and original features, LibreOffice 3.3 is also a significant achievement for a number of reasons:

– 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 the project’s strong ambitions);

– thanks to the high number of new contributors having been attracted into the project, the source code is quickly undergoing a major clean-up to provide a better foundation for future development of LibreOffice;

– the Windows installer, which is going to impact the largest and most diverse user base, has been integrated into a single build containing all language versions, thus reducing the size for download sites from 75 to 11GB, making it easier for us to deploy new versions more rapidly and lowering the carbon footprint of the entire infrastructure.

Caolán McNamara from RedHat, one of the developer community leaders, comments, “We are excited: this is our very first stable release, and therefore we are eager to get user feedback, which will be integrated as soon as possible into the code, with the first enhancements being released in February. Starting from March, we will be moving to a real time-based, predictable, transparent and public release schedule, in accordance with Engineering Steering Committee’s goals and users’ requests”. The LibreOffice development roadmap is available at http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleasePlan

LibreOffice 3.3 brings several unique new features. The 10 most-popular among community members are, in no particular order:

  1. the ability to import and work with SVG files;
  2. an easy way to format title pages and their numbering in Writer;
  3. a more-helpful Navigator Tool for Writer;
  4. improved ergonomics in Calc for sheet and cell management;
  5. and Microsoft Works and Lotus Word Pro document import filters.

In addition, many great extensions are now bundled, providing

PDF import,

a slide-show presenter console,

a much improved report builder, and more besides.

A more-complete and detailed list of all the new features offered by LibreOffice 3.3 is viewable on the following web page: http://www.libreoffice.org/download/new-features-and-fixes/

LibreOffice 3.3 also provides all the new features of OpenOffice.org 3.3, such as new custom properties handling; embedding of standard PDF fonts in PDF documents; new Liberation Narrow font; increased document protection in Writer and Calc; auto decimal digits for “General” format in Calc; 1 million rows in a spreadsheet; new options for CSV import in Calc; insert drawing objects in Charts; hierarchical axis labels for Charts; improved slide layout handling in Impress; a new easier-to-use print interface; more options for changing case; and colored sheet tabs in Calc. Several of these new features were contributed by members of the LibreOffice team prior to the formation of The Document Foundation.

LibreOffice hackers will be meeting at FOSDEM in Brussels on February 5 and 6, and will be presenting their work during a one-day workshop on February 6, with speeches and hacking sessions coordinated by several members of the project.

The home of The Document Foundation is at http://www.documentfoundation.org

The home of LibreOffice is at http://www.libreoffice.org where the download page has been redesigned by the community to be more user-friendly.

*** About The Document Foundation

The Document Foundation has the mission of facilitating the evolution of the OOo Community into a new, open, independent, and meritocratic organization within the next few months. An independent Foundation is a better reflection of the values of our contributors, users and supporters, and will enable a more effective, efficient and transparent community. TDF will protect past investments by building on the achievements of the first decade, will encourage wide participation within the community, and will co-ordinate activity across the community.

*** Media Contacts for TDF

Florian Effenberger (Germany)

Mobile: +49 151 14424108 – E-mail: floeff@documentfoundation.org

Olivier Hallot (Brazil)

Mobile: +55 21 88228812 – E-mail: olivier.hallot@documentfoundation.org

Charles H. Schulz (France)

Mobile: +33 6 98655424 – E-mail: charles.schulz@documentfoundation.org

Italo Vignoli (Italy)

Mobile: +39 348 5653829 – E-mail: italo.vignoli@documentfoundation.org

LibreOffice News and Google Musings

Tux, the Linux penguin
Image via Wikipedia

Official Bloggers on LibreOffice- http://planet.documentfoundation.org/

Note- for some strange reason I continue to be on top ranked LibreOffice blogs- maybe because I write more on the software itself than on Oracle politics or coffee spillovers.

LibreOffice Beta 2  is ready and I just installed it on Windows 7 – works nice- and I somehow think open Office and Google needs an  example to stop being so scary on cautioning—— hey,hey it’s a  beta – (do you see Oracle saying this release is a beta or Windows saying hey this Windows Vista is a beta for Windows 7- No right?)-

see screenshot of solver in  LibreOffice spreadsheet -works just fine.

We cant wait for Chromium OS and LibreOffice integration (or Google Docs-LibreOffice integration)  so Google starts thinking on those lines (of course

Google also needs to ramp up Google Storage and Google Predict API– but dude are you sure you wanna take on Amazon, Oracle and MS and Yahoo and Apple at the same time. Dear Herr Schmidt- Last German Guy who did that ,  ended up in a bunker in Berlin. (Ever since I had to pay 50 euros as Airline Transit fee -yes Indian passport holders have to do that in Germany- I am kind of non objective on that issue)

Google Management is busy nowadays thinking of trying to beat Facebook -hint -hint-

-buy out the biggest app makers of Facebook apps and create an api for Facebook info download and upload into Orkut –maybe invest like an angel in that startup called Diaspora http://www.joindiaspora.com/) see-

Back to the topic (and there are enough people blogging on Google should or shouldnt do)

-LibreOffice aesthetically rocks! It has a cool feel.

More news- The Wiki is up and awaits you at http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Documentation

And there is a general pow-wow scheduled at http://www.oookwv.de/ for the Open Office Congress (Kongress)

As you can see I used the Chrome Extension for Google Translate for an instant translation from German into English (though it still needs some work,  Herr Translator)

Back to actually working on LibreOffice- if Word and Powerpoint is all you do- save some money for Christmas and download it today from

LibreOffice Beta 2 (Office Fork off Oracle) launches!

 

Windows 7, the latest client version in the Mi...
Image via Wikipedia

 

Announcement from Code Ninjas at Document Foundation

10 years after the StarOffice code has been opened as OpenOffice.org, The Document Foundation is proud to announce the availability of LibreOffice Beta 2 for public testing. Please, download the suitable package(s) from

http://www.documentfoundation.org/download/

 

Ajay- Note that first beta was downloaded almost 100,000 times

install them, and start testing! Should you find bugs, please report them to the FreeDesktop Bugzilla:

https://bugs.freedesktop.org

If you want to get involved in this exciting project, you can contribute code:

http://www.documentfoundation.org/develop/

translate LibreOffice to your language:

http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/LibreOffice/i18n/translating_3.3

or just donate:

http://www.documentfoundation.org/contribution/
A list of known issues with Beta 2 is available in our wiki:

http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Beta2

Beta Release Notes

This beta release is not intended for production use!

There are a number of known issues being worked on:

  • The Windows build is an International build – you can choose the user interface language that is suitable for you, but the help is always English. We are currently working on improving the delivery mechanism to be able to provide you with the localized help. We are also working on smaller problems like wrong description of several languages.
  • The Linux and MacOSX builds are English builds with the possibility to install language packs. Please browse the archives to get the langugage pack you need for your platform.
  • The LibreOffice branding and renaming is new and work in progress. You may still see old graphics, icons or websites. So please bear with us. This also applies to the BrOffice.org branding – applicable in Brazil.
  • Filters for the legacy StarOffice binary formats are missing.

I tested it- it seems okay enough. Once again Open Source tends to underplay expectations (when was the last time you saw that in enterprise software?)