[tdf-announce] The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 3.4.0

Florian Effenberger <floeff -AT- documentfoundation.org>

Fri, 03 Jun 2011 12:35:02 +0200

The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 3.4.0 The new release offers several new features but is focused on contributors

The Internet, June 3rd, 2011 - The Document Foundation announces

LibreOffice 3.4.0, a major release of the free office suite for personal

productivity developed by a community of sponsored and volunteer

developers, and supported worldwide by local communities of volunteers.

LibreOffice 3.4.0 is the second major release of the suite since the

announcement of The Document Foundation in September 2010 and

incorporates the contributions of over 120 developers (six times as many

as the first beta released on the launch date).

The majority of these contributors have started to hack LibreOffice code

less than eight months ago, and this is an incredible achievement if one

recalls that the OOo project has attracted a lower number of

contributors in ten years. "We care for our developers, and it shows",

comments Italo Vignoli, a Steering Committee member and a spokesperson

for TDF. "Our core developers have invented the mechanism of the easy

hacks, which makes it simple and enjoyable for volunteer contributors to

get to know LibreOffice code challenging their development skills with

basic or elementary tasks".

"Once they have completed the first easy hacks, contributors are ready

to scale to more difficult tasks", says Michael Meeks, a senior

developer working for SUSE. "We spend quite a lot of time mentoring new

contributors, in order to increase the number of people working on bug

fixing, patches and features. This is soon going to be reflected in the

quality of the software and the number of new features of future releases".

LibreOffice 3.4.0 offers several new features for Calc, with faster

performances and an improved compatibility with Excel spreadsheets, and

Pivot Table - the new name of DataPilot - with support for unlimited

numbers of fields and named range as data source. The user interface of

Writer, Impress and Draw has been improved with many new features, and

several cosmetic changes have been applied to the Linux version, with a

better text rendering engine and an improved GTK+ theme integration.

Code wise, several thousand lines of German comments have been

translated into English, and over 5.000 lines of dead code have been

removed from Writer, Calc and Impress.

The first release of the 3.4 series, LibreOffice 3.4.0, is targeted to

community members and power users, and should not be implemented in a

corporate environment. The Document Foundation has explained that

following its time based release schedule - the best strategy for a

distributed and cooperative development environment - the best releases

for such deployments start from x.x.1. Because of this, LibreOffice

3.3.x is going to be maintained for several months to come, until the

end of calendar year 2011, for the most conservative users.

LibreOffice 3.4 can be downloaded from

http://www.libreoffice.org/download. A complete list of new features and

fixes is available online at the following address:

Screenshots of the new features can be downloaded from this page.

Media Contacts Florian Effenberger (Germany) Phone: +49 8341 99660880 Mobile: +49 151 14424108 Skype: floeff 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 -- Unsubscribe instructions: E-mail to announce+help@documentfoundation.org List archive: http://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/announce/

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