

LibreOffice 4.0 now supports customisation with Firefox themes The Document Foundation has announced the first of three planned release candidates for version 4.0 of LibreOffice, its open source office suite. RC1 includes 70 bug fixes since the release of LibreOffice 4.0.0 Beta2 from the end of December. The code base has been in feature freeze since 3 December and the hard code freeze will occur in the week beginning 21 January, with the final release expected in the week beginning 4 February.

LibreOffice 4.0 features a number of enhancements over the 3.x series of the office suite. All parts of the suite now support the CMIS open standard, which enables the application to access content management systems such as Alfresco, Sharepoint and Nuxeo. CMIS also adds a new way to store and share documents created in LibreOffice within existing CMS systems and it could be used to provide the office suite with managed storage. LibreOffice also gained support for lightweight Firefox themes (formerly called Personas), which enables users to skin the toolbar in the application with themes available from Mozilla.

Writer has gained support for ink annotations in DOCX files and can now import and export native RDF maths expressions. Users can now also include different headers and footers on the first page of a document without creating a page style for it. Calc can import documents faster and has added an XOR function. The presentation application Impress now remembers the state of its sidebar, and page previewing in Draw has also been improved.

An overview of all changes in LibreOffice 4.0 is available in the release notes. Changes in LibreOffice 4.0.0 RC1 since the last beta are listed separately. LibreOffice 4.0 RC1 is available to download under the LGPLv3 licence. The release candidate is not recommended for production use. The current stable version of the office suite is LibreOffice 3.6.4 from December 2012.

(fab)