The Document Foundation has announced the release of LibreOffice 4.4, billed as “the most beautiful LibreOffice ever“.
This is the ninth major release of this leading free and open source office suite, with a significant number of design and user experience improvements.
“LibreOffice 4.4 has got a lot of UX and design love, and in my opinion is the most beautiful ever,” says design team leader Jan “Kendy” Holesovsky. “We have completed the dialog conversion, redesigned menu bars, context menus, toolbars, status bars and rulers to make them much more useful. The Sifr monochrome icon theme is extended and now the default on OS X. We also developed a new Color Selector, improved the Sidebar to integrate more smoothly with menus, and reworked many user interface details to follow today’s UX trends.”
LibreOffice 4.4 likewise offers several significant improvements in other areas, such as:
- Support of OpenGL transitions in Windows and improved implementation based on the new OpenGL framework;
- Digital signing of PDF files during the export process;
- Installation of free fonts Carlito and Caladea to replace the proprietary Microsoft C-Fonts Calibri and Cambria, to get rid of font related problems while opening Microsoft’s proprietary format OOXML files;
- The addition of several new default templates designed by volunteers;
- Visual editing of Impress master pages, to remove unwanted elements, adding or hiding a level to the outline numbering and toggling bullet points on or off;
- Better Track Changes – with new buttons in the Track Changes toolbar – and AutoCorrect features in Writer;
- Improved import filters for Microsoft Visio, Microsoft Publisher and AbiWord files, as well as Microsoft Works spreadsheets;
- New import filters for Adobe Pagemaker, MacDraw, MacDraw II and RagTime for Mac;
- Greatly expanded support for media capabilities on each platform.
A complete list of new and improved features is available in the release notes.
LibreOffice 4.4 is available immediately for download from http://www.libreoffice.org/download/.
I’m looking forward to the new release being available in the Debian Jessie software repositories in the next few days. 🙂