About this page

This is an in-progress scratch-pad of notes to build release notes from as and when we release. Please do not list features that are to be shipped already in the 3.6 release! Please do not add wish-list features that you hope will be implemented, but only what actually is implemented already.

What does a good feature look like here:

It has a description, and a way for a busy reviewer, to find and play with the feature. Target someone who is extremely busy, and knows little-to-nothing about the product. So if a user interface element is key to the feature, be very explicit about where it is, e. g. Menu ▸ Format ▸ Character ▸ Position [tab] ▸ ‘90 degrees’ paths to the elements you changed. Of course, you know your feature is important, and that everyone should care about the Extensible AutoShapes Properties dialog – but often the guys taking the screenshots and writing the notes do not.

▸ ▸ ▸ ▸ paths to the elements you changed. Of course, know your feature is important, and that everyone should care about the – but often the guys taking the screenshots and writing the notes do not. It credits the main authors who did the work – just add them in brackets after the feature, where possible.

If the feature can be shown off with a sample / test file – particularly for new import-able features, it would be wonderful to have a link to/up-load of a test file that we can use to show that feature off to best effect. That really helps us to make good screenshots to show off the features, and allows reviewers to do their testing.

Thanks in advance for your help filling this out!





Writer

Enable attaching comments to document text ranges. tdf#38244 (Miklós Vajna)

Enable attaching comments to document text ranges

Allow extra word boundary characters. This feature overrides long dash (—) and short dash (–) to be word boundary characters for the purposes of counting words, and allows the user to specify additional word boundary characters (at Tools ▸ Options ▸ Writer ▸ General ▸ Word Count ). (Caolán McNamara)

Tools ▸ Options ▸ Writer ▸ General ▸ Word Count ) The new options for word counting (

Import ink annotations from DOCX and RTF documents (available when using Word on a Tablet PC). (Eilidh McAdam)

Drawn ink annotations

Import / export support for native RTF math expressions (Miklós Vajna)

Native RTF math in Writer.

First pages can now have a separate header/footer in Writer.

RTF filter now imports old Drawing Objects syntax (tdf#42407). See this blog entry for details and screenshots. (Miklós Vajna)

Various DOCX improvements: import of floating tables, OLE objects inside rectangles, margins of inline images using the WordProcessing markup. See this blog entry for details and screenshots. (Miklós Vajna)

Clicking fields selects them instead of placing the cursor before them. (Cédric Bosdonnat)

Logo toolbar and interpreter (László Németh, help in integration: András Tímár).

LibreLogo poster (original PDF and OpenDocument versions) View ▸ Toolbars ▸ Logo ): repeat 500 [ circle 10 + repcount/10 fd 5 + repcount/10 lt 10 ] Turtle vector graphics in LibreOffice Writer. Created by the following 1-liner (using the Logo command line on): Logo for DTP: drawing a chessboard with high print quality in Writer using chess notation or optional manual positioning (see the source document and its PDF export

The lightweight implementation (1400 lines in Python-PyUNO) uses the embedded Python to give a simplified programming interface to the excellent vector graphics of LibreOffice for graphic design and education (including teaching of word processing). Blog posts: 1. Logo, 2. Logo for desktop publishing, 3. Logo for template development. Examples: set the Logo toolbar (View ▸ Toolbars ▸ Logo) in Writer. Use the arrow icons of the toolbar to move and focus the turtle (graphical cursor of the Logo programming language). The localized commands depend on the language of the document, more information: press F1 in the Logo command line). Try the following commands in the command line of the Logo toolbar (for program execution in the command line, press ↵ Enter ):

circle 10cm fillcolor 'blue' pencolor 'red' pensize 2 circle 5cm forward 200 right 89 circle 5 repeat 88 [ forward 200 right 89 ] fill repeat 9 [ label 'Hello, World!' right 20 ] repeat 100 [ penup position any pendown pensize random 10 fillcolor any square 20 + random 100 ]

Logo examples on templates.libreoffice.org:

Calc

Improved performance of ODS document import. (Daniel Bankston)

When opening ODS and XLSX files, the values of formula can be shown as they were saved in the files (cached), without recalculating the formula directly when opening the file (Daniel Bankston) This makes opening of (larger) files faster; When the spreadsheet was last used by someone else, this will always show the values, as they were on that computer. (It is known that large, real complex spreadsheets on different computers, with different OS, processor or software, can have different results.) So that may be seen as an advantage when opening spreadsheets that have last been edited in Excel. The user gets a message on opening the file. That message can be turned on/off at Tools ▸ Options ▸ LibreOffice Calc ▸ Formula ▸ Recalculation on file load .



Automatically rotate chart axis labels if they are overlapping. This fix also improves detection of overlap while rotating labels. (Muthu Subramanian)

Chart Labels Auto Rotate Screenshot

Cached value import from ODS and XLSX (Daniel Bankston) Due to possible different implementations you get a warning when the cached values are used.



Save settings of Text Import Dialog for Text to Columns and Paste Unformatted Text from Clipboard (in addition to Text File Import). tdf#47674 (Laurent Balland-Poirier)

Export color scales and data bars to XLSX (also supports Excel 2010+ extensions for databars). (Markus Mohrhard)

Increased size limit on (uncompressed) ODF documents from 2Gb to 4Gb. (Michael Meeks)

Support "type-ahead" search in the autofilter popup. It is now possible to search for specific entry via key input. (Kohei Yoshida)

XML Source dialog to quickly import arbitrary XML content. Refer to this page for more information on this feature. (Kohei Yoshida)

XML Source dialog

Enhanced chart visualisation - better quality rendering / print and PDF export of charts (Armin Le-Grand - Apache)

New conditional formats: (Markus Mohrhard) Date formats Top/Bottom rules String rules



Improved conditional format dialogs (Markus Mohrhard)

Icon sets (Markus Mohrhard)

Overlapping conditional formats (Markus Mohrhard)

Initial work on a gnumeric import filter based on orcus (orcus by Kohei Yoshida, gnumeric parts by Markus Mohrhard) This is a technical demonstration of the orcus integration and hidden behind the experimental flag Only imports value, strings and formulas in 4.0 (more will follow in the future)



Exporting of a single chart as image (PNG, JPG) tdf#30944

Formula engine

New spreadsheet function XOR as defined in ODF OpenFormula. tdf#50882 (Winfried Donkers)

New configuration option to toggle handling of empty strings when used in arithmetic expression. tdf#44720 (Kohei Yoshida)

New configuration option for empty string.

New pricing Add-In containing spreadsheet functions for option pricing in particular barrier (OPT_BARRIER(...)) and touch (OPT_TOUCH(...)) options. Example :File:Calc-pricing-add-in.ods (Tino Kluge)

pricing add-in

Re-implemented RAND() function with better random number generation algorithm. tdf#33365 (Tino Kluge)

New spreadsheet functions AVERAGEIF, SUMIFS, AVERAGEIFS and COUNTIFS as defined in ODF OpenFormula. tdf#41214 (Marina Plakalovic, Daniel Rentz, Eike Rathke)

New spreadsheet functions IFERROR and IFNA as defined in ODF OpenFormula. tdf#56124 (Winfried Donkers, Eike Rathke)

Pivot table

Support multiple selections in page field of pivot table. (Kohei Yoshida)

New page field popup allows multiple selection

Impress

The state of the sidebar pane in Impress is now remembered. (Rob Snelders)

Initial work on hyperlinks/fields wrapping. (Muthu Subramanian)

Hyperlinks Wrapping support.

PPTX Impress now flips gradients as well, when it imports PPTX files (Muthu Subramanian) Lots of other PPTX/PPT import/export fixes (various developers) see Link

There's now an Impress remote control for Android phones: it works with Windows, Mac and Linux since LibreOffice 4.0.1 and higher. You can read more about getting this to work in this helpful howto - (Andrzej Hunt, Michael Meeks, Thorsten Behrens)

Impress Android Remote.

Much accelerated multimedia previews, and previews of embedded video on Linux. (Michael Meeks): Media thumbnails embedded in Impress

Presenter Console RTL support. tdf#42070 (Issa Alkurtass, Abdulmajeed Ahmed, Faisal Al-Otaibi - KACST): Presenter Console with RTL support.

Draw

Improve quality of page previews in Draw/Impress with supersampling. (Tomaž Vajngerl)

Linecap improvements - adding rounded caps (ends) to lines, see right-click Line ▸ Corner and cap styles (Regina Henschel, Armin Le-Grand - Apache)

Rounded line caps

Shear transforms for GraphicObjects, and shear + properties for OLE Objects (Armin Le-Grand - Apache)

Multi-image support in ODF allowing a bitmap + SVG representation eg. (Armin Le-Grand - Apache)

Circles and Ovals toolbar from Impress now also available in Draw (Rob Snelders)

Base

On all non-Windows platforms a new mork driver implementation is used to access Thunderbird address book. This means that Debian/Ubuntu users can finally integrate LO with their Thunderbird address book. (Debian/Ubuntu distros are not shipping a Mozilla-based mork driver, therefore their native Base package can not access the address book.) This also fixes some really old bugs for different distros. (David Ostrovsky) For more information please see: tdf#51004 lp#93546

In Forms, AutoFilter does not anymore treat values as patterns. As a consequence, an AutoFilter on "A*" will not anymore match any value starting with an A, but only the exact value "A*". tdf#48807 (Lionel Elie Mamane)

Core

protocol support for easy access to document stored on Document Management Systems like Alfresco, Nuxeo, SharePoint... (Cédric Bosdonnat). Cedric gave a speech on this at FOSDEM 2013 which sums up: "LibreOffice easily connects to Enterprise Content Management servers through CMIS protocol using the libcmis library."

Integration of session-installer to add missing parts of LibreOffice on the fly (Björn Michaelsen)

Core: session installer

Reduce Java code: Port Fax and Letter Wizard to Python (Xisco Faulí)

LibreOffice 4.0 ships four new open-source font families: Open Sans (Ascender), PT Serif (ParaType), Source Code Pro and Source Sans Pro (Adobe).

Preview of new bundled fonts

Options / General

Java and advanced options now combined in Tools ▸ Options ▸ LibreOffice ▸ Advanced . For choosing experimental features and enabling macro-recording. (Joel Madero)

Options: Advanced options for Java, Macro recording and Experimental

Send via Bluetooth (experimental) feature. Uses BlueZ to send documents via Bluetooth, just like Send via Email.

Send via Bluetooth

New Regular Expression Engine (Herbert Duerr - Apache) We now use the ICU regular expression engine instead of a custom version. This solves several "find and replace" bugs, and is faster and smaller. We have compatibility code to map old-style word boundary syntax \> and \< to \b while upgrading. Read more about the ICU regexp engine. Japanese users should be aware that some more advanced transliterations may behave differently.



Filters

Import filter for Microsoft Publisher publications. More details in this blog and in Fridrich Strba's speech at FOSDEM 2013.

A document in MS Publisher 2003 The same document in LibreOffice Draw

Extended coverage of Visio file-format. LibreOffice 4.0.0 supports all existing Visio file formats from Visio 1.0 released in 1992 to Microsoft Visio 2013 released in 2012. More details in this blog and in Fridrich Strba's speech at FOSDEM 2013.

A old Visio document in Visio 1.0 The same document in LibreOffice Draw A VSDX document in MS Visio 2013 The same document in LibreOffice Draw

Improved ODF compatibility in various points. (Michael Stahl)

GUI

New Widget layout technique for dialog windows introduced, and converted various dialogs; see WidgetLayout. (Caolán McNamara, see his speech at FOSDEM 2013; Jack Leigh; Gokul) UI mockups can be created with Glade UI designer then hooked up to code. Converted widgets can be edited without recompiling Libreoffice. More easy to iterate for good UI design. Support for easily resizing and hiding elements. Reduces code complexity. Intent to follow best-practice guidelines for spacing and indentation yielding nicely spaced, clearer dialogs.

technique for dialog windows introduced, and converted various dialogs; see WidgetLayout. (Caolán McNamara, see his speech at FOSDEM 2013; Jack Leigh; Gokul) Added dialog for Smooth image filter, where it is possible to select the radius (strength) of smoothing/blurring. (Tomaž Vajngerl)

image filter, where it is possible to select the radius (strength) of smoothing/blurring. (Tomaž Vajngerl) Graphics can be resized and recompressed with the new Compress Graphics popup menu function. (Tomaž Vajngerl) Menu function is available in Draw, Impress and Calc but not (yet) Writer. Supports displaying of current graphics information: original dimensions, dimensions inside of document. Ability to reduce image resolution with setting a new dimension (width/height in pixels and DPI). Lossless (PNG) or lossy (JPEG) compression with ability to set the quality and compression strength. Possibility to select the interpolation (resampling) algorithm.

popup menu function. (Tomaž Vajngerl)

The new Compress Graphics Dialog available in Draw, Impress and Calc

Added Edit with External Tool to Calc, Impress and Draw. (Tomaž Vajngerl)

to Calc, Impress and Draw. (Tomaž Vajngerl) Unify Popup menu option Save Graphic… from Writer and Save as Picture… from Draw and Impress to Save Graphic… . (Tomaž Vajngerl)

from Writer and from Draw and Impress to . (Tomaž Vajngerl) Improve quality of displaying images in documents. (Tomaž Vajngerl)

Quality comparison of displayed images

It is possible now to select and copy text from message boxes. tdf#46193 (Tamas Zolnai)

The "Apply Style" combo box in the toolbar now features previews of the styles to choose. (Jan Holesovsky)

Unity integration (Antonio Fernandez, Björn Michaelsen, Alberto Ruiz, Ryan Lortie, Ted Gould) tdf#61461 Unity integration is available via the official Ubuntu repositories. Only the following Ubuntu/LibreOffice combinations are currently supported: Ubuntu 12.10 + LO 3.6 Ubuntu 13.04 + LO 4.0



unity menu integration

Hide / Show styles in the Styles & Formatting dialog (Cédric Bosdonnat)

Core: Hidden styles

The templates management interfaces now allows to have non-native template files: templates from other office suites are now handled like the ODF ones. (Cédric Bosdonnat)

Support Firefox Personas in LibreOffice. With LibreOffice 4.0, you can choose Tools ▸ Options… ▸ Personalization ▸ Select Persona , choose a persona you like in your browser, paste its address to the dialog, confirm, and LibreOffice will use that. (Jan Holesovsky)

New templates manager to bring the templates to the user (Rafael Dominguez and Cédric Bosdonnat)

Localization

idxexample.odt localizable via PO files ( Insert ▸ Indexes and Tables ▸ Indexes and Tables… ). (Istvan Turi)

localizable via PO files ( ▸ ▸ ). (Istvan Turi) agenda/fax/letter/report templates localizable via PO files ( File ▸ Wizards ). (Istvan Turi)

▸ ). (Istvan Turi) Added locale data files for axk_CG beq_CG bkw_CG bvx_CG dde_CG ebo_CG iyx_CG kkw_CG kng_CG ldi_CG mdw_CG mkw_CG ngz_CG njx_CG njy_CG puu_CG sdj_CG tek_CG tsa_CG tyx_CG vif_CG xku_CG yom_CG. (Jeremy Brown)

Autocorrection improvements for pt-BR. (Raimundo Moura, Olivier Hallot)

The LightProof grammar checker for Brazilian Portuguese is now available. Improvements in pt-BR spell checking (Raimundo Moura, João Mac-Cormick, Olivier Hallot, László Németh).

Translated key names on Windows for Asturian (Xuacu Saturio), Catalan (Jesús Corrius), Estonian (Mihkel Tõnnov), Slovenian (Martin Srebotnjak) and Spanish (Adolfo Jayme Barrientos). Translated key names on Linux for Slovenian (Martin Srebotnjak).

Updated Slovenian thesaurus (Martin Srebotnjak/tezaver.si)

For more information, see speech about localization toolchain at FOSDEM 2013.

Performance

Improved ODS load times (see this blog entry for details). (Daniel Bankston)

Improved XLSX load time (see this blog entry for details). (Daniel Bankston)

Significantly improved the performance of saving a new entry to a large autocorrect replacement table (tdf#49350). (Tomaž Vajngerl)

Significant load and save time improvements for slides / drawings with large numbers of shapes (Michael Meeks)

Significantly improved RTF file load times (tdf#44736). (Miklós Vajna, Michael Meeks)

Infrastructure

Many modules ported to gbuild. (Peter Foley, Matúš Kukan, Caolán McNamara, David Ostrovsky, David Tardon, Norbert Thiebaud and others)

all legacy container classes (Sv*Array*, Table, Container, List etc.) replaced with STL containers (Noel Grandin, Michael Stahl, etc.)

https://gerrit.libreoffice.org/ used for code review and easy patch submission -- more than 1500 patches reviewed and merged with it already (David Ostrovsky, Norbert Thiebaud, Robert Einsle, Björn Michaelsen and many more)

gerrit

translations module became a source-only module, l10n tools read translations directly from .po files. (Tamas Zolnai)

tinderbox building bibisect repo Tinderbox integration (Norbert Thiebaud) initial bibisect proof-of-concept (Björn Michaelsen)



GNU/Linux

Add GStreamer 1.0 support, and refactor existing gstreamer code. (Tim-Philipp Müller, Michael Meeks)

Extensions

PDF Import, the Presenter Console, and the Python Scripting Provider are no longer bundled extensions but core features. (Stephan Bergmann)

Feature removal / deprecation

Dropped support for legacy binary StarOffice (version 1.x → 5.x) files . Note: the old OpenOffice.org XML file format (.sxw, .sxi etc.) which was used as the default format by StarOffice versions 6 and 7 is still supported .

. Dropped support for export to legacy Word and Excel (version 6.0/95) files. These files can still be opened, but they will save in your default format (usually .odt/.ods). We continue to export to the Office 97 and later binary file formats of course. This avoids user confusion, and accidentally selecting very old formats that will lose document data.

(version 6.0/95) files. These files can still be opened, but they will save in your default format (usually .odt/.ods). Dropped support for ODMA document management integration, this windows-specific integration point is deep legacy, and yields some horrible user interactions.

Dropped legacy STLport library for compatibility with old extensions that linked against it (was only included for 32-bit Linux and Windows).

for compatibility with old extensions that linked against it (was only included for 32-bit Linux and Windows). Deprecated Mac / PPC as a platform, raising our base-line to 10.6.

Dropped support of Windows 2000.

Dropped Mozilla based LDAP backend for address book on all non windows platforms.

API Changes

C++ UNO language binding and URE libraries

Python

The bundled Python was upgraded from Python 2.6 to Python 3.3 (Michael Stahl)

Python extensions and macros may require some degree of re-work to work on the latest Python; see for example Porting to Python 3.

UNO IDL

Support for defining oneway methods and the [oneway] syntax was removed from the UNO IDL compiler core commit 90eac3e69749a9227c4b6902b1f3cef1e338c6d1

All exising API methods that used to be defined as oneway are now plain methods.

New style services

A large number of existing UNO services were converted to new-style services, which allow for more convenient and more type safe construction; this has no impact on compatibility of existing client code. (Noel Grandin)

XDocumentInfo removed

The deprecated XDocumentInfo and related UNO interfaces were removed (core commit e6f81b1898a59280f41177206b777a7a0d32f3fc). The replacement XDocumentProperties is available since OpenOffice.org 3.0 (interface announcement).

com.sun.star.document.DocumentInfo

com.sun.star.document.StandaloneDocumentInfo

com.sun.star.document.XDocumentInfo

com.sun.star.document.XDocumentInfoSupplier

com.sun.star.document.XStandaloneDocumentInfo

IllegalArgumentException

The UNO exception com.sun.star.lang.IllegalArgumentException now derives from com.sun.star.uno.RuntimeException instead of com.sun.star.uno.Exception core commit 31170413ae3786bf44564e813d7291354e939a77.

Unpublishing UNO APIs

Deprecation and un-publishing of internal accessibility API This API was primarily used internally for our bridge implementations to native accessibility technology APIs, and will need adapting in future.



The following UNO services and interfaces are no longer published:

changes to unpublished UNO APIs

The following unpublished UNO interfaces were changed:

UNO API removals

The following UNO modules were removed entirely from the API:

The following UNO interfaces and services were removed from the API:

Most Annoying Bugs

The following annoying bugs were not fixed in time and will be addressed in the regular bug fix releases:

Broken access to Samba share (tdf#64311) ; fixed in 4.0.4;

; fixed in 4.0.4; CAIRO not linking against internal libpng, results in "no suitable windowing system found, exiting." error on some Linux systems. Workaround with a libpng12 package install (tdf#61571) fixed in 4.0.2

fixed in 4.0.2 Password-protected documents saved unencrypted for auto-recovery (tdf#51819) fixed in 4.1.6, 4.2.3 and 4.2.4

Duden Rechtschreibprüfung / Duden Korrektor

All versions of Duden Rechtschreibprüfung up to version 9.0 cannot be installed with LibreOffice 4.0 on Windows and Linux x86. Users should contact the extension provider and ask for a fixed build. A workaround is to install STLPort library before the extension. See tdf#59107 and the German release notes for more details. Duden Rechtschreibprüfung is a commercial extension providing various writing aids for the German language.