The community behind the LibreOffice project has released version 3.5 of the increasingly popular open source office suite. The update introduces new features and improvements that were developed by the project's growing body of contributors.

The LibreOffice project, which was founded in 2010, is a community-driven fork of OpenOffice.org (OOo). LibreOffice benefits from a more open governance model and a more inclusive community than OOo, characteristics that have attracted a significant number of new contributors to the project and have led to increased developer engagement. The rapid growth of the developer community and the lower barrier to participation have allowed LibreOffice to advance at a fast pace.

One of the major new features introduced in LibreOffice 3.5 is a new grammar checking tool. The feature is built with Lightproof, a language-neutral grammatical analysis tool that is implemented in Python and has a sophisticated regex-based rule system. LibreOffice Writer also got a typographical boost in 3.5 from improvements to the Linux Libertine font, which now supports additional features like true small caps.

LibreOffice Calc, the suite's spreadsheet application, can now support up to 10,000 sheets and offers better performance when adding many sheets at once. Line smoothing in charts has also been improved and now conforms with version 1.2 of the ODF standard. Calc has gained improved support for conditional formatting, the functionality that allows cell formatting to be tied to formula results and other conditions. Impress, the presentation application, also gained a number of new features, including better handling of smart art from PowerPoint documents.

In addition to feature improvements and bugfixes, LibreOffice 3.5 is also svelter. The developers conducted a major code cleanup that helped to purge a significant amount of dead or superfluous code. The cleanup is part of a broader effort to address legacy cruft. The LibreOffice team is also making progress in the effort to translate old comments in the source code from German into English. The German comments are left over from the original StarOffice code base, which dates back to the late 90s.

Prominent LibreOffice developer Michael Meeks discussed the ongoing overhaul in a statement about the 3.5 release.

"In addition to the visible features, [LibreOffice contributors have] translated tens of thousands of German comments, removed thousands of unused or obsolete methods—sometimes whole libraries—and grown a suite of automated tests," he said. "Although we still have a long way to go, users—who have sometimes complained for the stability of the software, as they were not aware of the technical debt we were fighting with—can now benefit from a substantially cleaner, leaner and more feature rich LibreOffice 3.5."

Indeed, OOo has not historically been regarded as particularly robust or efficient. The more agile LibreOffice project is finally remedying the longstanding deficiencies of the office suite and making it more competitive compared to proprietary alternatives. The LibreOffice developers are also taking the project into new territory with innovative mobile and cloud ports that are currently under active development.

For more details about LibreOffice 3.5, you can refer to the official release announcement. The new version is available for download from the LibreOffice website.