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. 🙂

It’s been announced that the City of Munich has joined the Advisory Board of The Document Foundation (TDF) the non-profit foundation steering the development of LibreOffice, the leading free and open source office productivity suite.

On the TDF’s Advisory Board, Munich’s city council will be represented by Florian Haftmann. Back in 2003, the city of Munich – the capital of Bavaria and Germany’s third largest city – launched the LiMux Project to migrate their software systems from closed-source, proprietary products to free and open-source software. The project was successfully completed in late 2013. The City of Munich has hosted a LibreOffice HackFest since 2011 to improve LibreOffice’s features aimed at enterprise environments.

“The city of Munich is a healthy reference for every migration to free software and as such will add a significant value to our Advisory Board, where it will seat side by side with MIMO, representing the migration to LibreOffice of French Ministries, and with other companies providing value added services on top of LibreOffice,” says Thorsten Behrens, Chairman of The Document Foundation. “Doctor Florian Haftmann will be introduced to other members of TDF Advisory Board during next planned meeting, on January 15, 2015.”

With Munich’s addition, the TDF Advisory Board now has 17 members: AMD, CIB Software, City of Munich, CloudOn, Collabora, FrODeV (Freies Office Deutschland), FSF (Free Software Foundation), Google, Intel, ITOMIG, KACST (King Abdulaziz City of Science and Technology, Saudi Arabia), Lanedo, MIMO (Consortium of French Ministries), RedHat, SPI (Software in the Public Interest), Studio Storti and SUSE.

Reposted from Bristol Wireless.

The Document Foundation blog has announced the release of LibreOffice 4.3.4. This is the fourth minor release of LibreOffice 4.3 “Fresh” family, which is a stable release of the more advanced version of the software, and is targeted to users focusing on features. The new release contains over 60 bug fixes.

For technical details of LibreOffice 4.3.4, consult the change log.

LibreOffice 4.3.4 “Fresh” can be downloaded for free from http://www.libreoffice.org/download/, although The Document Foundation would welcome donations to support its work from LibreOffice users, free software advocates and community members.

EU open source news site Joinup reports that the crowdfunding appeal launched by Wilhelm Tux for the incorporation of signed PDF functionality in LibreOffice (posts passim) has reached its target of CHF8,000 (about €10,000) in just three days.

To date 90 organisations, companies and individuals have contributed to the Wilhelm Tux crowdfunding campaign, including Swiss Post Solutions, a division of the Swiss Post Office (isn’t it great to see the public sector supporting free and open source? Ed.).

Once implemented, LibreOffice will be able to:

• Create PDF documents with legally accepted digital signatures accompanied by a timestamp;
• Conform to PDF/A signature standards;
• Use either Mozilla Firefox or Thunderbird to manage certificates using a simple interface.

Implementation of the project has been awarded to Collabora, an open source IT service provider, and the work is expected to be completed by April 2015.

Collabora, which is based in Cambridge, has issued a statement in connection with the Wilhelm Tux crowdfunding campaign, which declares:

The success of their campaign shows that Swiss businesses want LibreOffice, want digital signing, and, given the opportunity, are happy to pay for it. It also demonstrates the freedom that the LibreOffice ecosystem provides to businesses. Independently of The Document Foundation who steward and steer LibreOffice development, and independently of the many businesses who have stakes in the future of the application, organisations of any size can organise the addition of new features. When their needs are shared, they need not even bear the exclusive burden of cost.

Work on adding digital signature functionality to this popular free and open source office suite was initially started in 2012, but then stagnated.