ODF

  • LibreOffice 4.1.0.0 beta2 available for testing

    Steve WoodsOpen Source, Open Standards, Tech

    LibreOffice developer Fridrich Strba has announced that the second beta of the forthcoming LibreOffice 4.1.0, which is planned for release between 22 and 28 June, is ready for testing.

    One new feature now allows users to rotate images in Writer, several translations have been improved and a number of bugs have been fixed. The image rotation feature was implemented by Tomaz Vajngerl, who closed a feature request that had been open since early 2011.

    image of LibreOffice Mime type icons
    LibreOffice for all your office suite needs: word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, database, drawing and formulas

    LibreOffice 4.1.0 will include a number of new features, such as embedded fonts. This has been called the “most important feature” in the forthcoming release and allows users to include the fonts used in a document within the document, preventing text being displayed differently on systems where the original fonts are not available. This can happen when non-system or custom fonts are used and they have not been installed on the operating system of the reader.

    The change log contains a detailed list of all the bugs which have been fixed in LibreOffice 4.1.0 beta 2.

    This latest beta release can be downloaded from LibreOffice for testing on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux (deb and RPM packages) platforms.

  • LibreOffice 4.1.0 Beta 1 announced

    Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Open Standards, Tech

    the LibreOffice logoThorsten Behrens of The Document Foundation has announced the first beta release of LibreOffice 4.1.0.

    This will be the sixth major release of LibreOffice in two and a half years and comes with a set of attractive new features.

    However, Behrens points out that LibreOffice 4.1 Beta1 is not ready yet for production use and that LibreOffice 4.0.3 should continue to be used, if stability is preferred to testing bleeding edge versions.

    The release is available for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X from LibreOffice’s QA builds download page at http://www.libreoffice.org/download/pre-releases/.

    Any bugs should be reported to the FreeDesktop Bugzilla: https://bugs.freedesktop.org.

    A list of known issues and fixed bugs with 4.1.0 Beta1 is available on the LibreOffice wiki.

  • LibreOffice 4.0.3 RC3 released

    Steve WoodsOpen Source, Open Standards, Tech

    The third release candidate (RC) for LibreOffice 4.0.3 is now available for download for evaluation and testing, etc.

    As usual, the development team stress that using LibreOffice pre-release builds for “mission-critical” purposes is not recommended.

    image of LibreOffice Mime type icons
    LibreOffice for all your office suite needs: word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, database, drawing and formulas

    Potential users are also advised to consult the Releases Notes.

    When you visit the download page, it will try to detect the visitor’s system and offer the visitor the right download automatically, but may not succeed in all cases.

    People who are interested in even more bleeding-edge binaries of LibreOffice’s current development are advised to try the nightly builds. However, those are potentially even less suitable for productive work, provided by individual contributors and have not been approved in any way by a quality assurance process. Caveat emptor.

  • How many LibreOffice users are there?

    Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Open Standards

    the LibreOffice logoIt’s always difficult trying to work out how many users of particular software packages there are out there. Be that as it may, The Document Foundation, the body behind the open source LibreOffice suite, has made an attempt at estimating the suite’s users.

    According to a report today in Le Monde Informatique, estime that the suite has 20 to 30 million users on Linux (many Linux distributions, e.g. Ubuntu and Debian, include LibreOffice as the standard office suite in their disk images. Ed.) and another 30 to 40 million users on Windows. Up to last autumn, LibreOffice had been downloaded 20 million times.

  • LibreOffice 3.6.6 released today

    Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Open Standards, Tech

    The blog of The Document Foundation, the German foundation behind LibreOffice, announced the release of LibreOffice 3.6.6, the free and open source office suite for Windows, MacOS and Linux. It is described by the Foundation as a maintenance release for the 3.6 series

    image of LibreOffice Mime type icons
    LibreOffice for all your office suite needs: word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, database, drawing and formulas

    This release is aimed at businesses and individual end users who prefer stability to more advanced features (those who want more advanced features can sample LibreOffice 4. Ed.). This new release is suited to the increasing number of organisations migrating to LibreOffice, which is steadily growing worldwide.

    LibreOffice 3.6.6 is available for immediate download from http://www.libreoffice.org/download/. Extensions for LibreOffice are also available from the Extensions Centre.

  • 2nd release candidate for LibreOffice 4.0.2 available

    Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Open Standards

    the LibreOffice logoOn 28th March, just one day after Document Freedom Day (posts passim) the LibreOffice team made the 2nd and final release candidate for LibreOffice 4.0.2 available for evaluation, quality assurance testing, etc.

    As per usual, potential users are warned that this is a development version and it should not be installed on production machines: in other words, the developers recommend not using LibreOffice pre-release builds for “mission-critical” purposes. These are intended for testing purposes only.

    For further information, potential users should consult the release notes.

  • UK Parliament: no open standards here

    Steve WoodsOpen Standards, Politics, Social Media, Tech

    Did you know House of Commons Select Committees only accept submissions in Microsoft’s proprietary formats?

    Today in my Twitter feed I read a tweet announcing the deadline for submissions to the Transport Select Committee for a new inquiry on local authority parking enforcement.

    Reading through the notes on the submission of written evidence, I was struck by the following:

    2. Evidence should be submitted by e-mail to transev@parliament.uk in Word or Rich Text format, with as little use of colour and images as possible. If you wish to submit written evidence to the Committee in another format you must contact a member of staff to discuss this.

    image of Parliament's crowned portcullis
    Parliament: we’re a Microsoft-only shop.
    Both Word and Rich Text format are Microsoft proprietary file formats. How long they remain readable is totally in the hands of a private American corporation whose first concern is making a return for its shareholders, not preserving the proceedings of Parliament and its committees for the benefit of future generations.

    For those future generations, I’d recommend that parliamentary select committees start accepting submissions in other, non-proprietary formats, such as plain text or open standards such as Open Document Format. The latter is an internationally accepted standard (ISO/IEC 26300:2006/Amd 1:2012) and is being widely adopted by other governments and official bodies (such as NATO, where ODF use is mandatory. Ed.) around the world for official document exchanges.

    Finally, the notes give no details any member of staff for the public to contact for submissions in other formats.

    Update: Since alerting the Transport Select Committee to this post via Twitter, I’ve received the following reply from them:

    Interesting post. We’re happy to accept other formats- and do – as long as we can process them using the software we have. We will certainly pass your points up the Committee Office chain to see if more can be done to accommodate this.

    Thanks, very much folks. I’ll await developments with interest.

  • LibreOffice 4.0.1 released

    Steve WoodsOpen Source, Tech

    Yesterday The Document Foundation blog announced the release of LibreOffice 4.0.1 for Linux, MacOS and Windows. This follows the release of LibreOffice 4.0 at the start of last month (posts passim).

    image of LibreOffice Mime type icons
    LibreOffice for all your office suite needs: word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, database, drawing and formulas

    The Document Foundation describes the new release is a step forward in the process of improving the overall quality and stability of LibreOffice 4.0. However, for business use The Document Foundation suggests the more solid and stable LibreOffice 3.6.5.

    Nearly 100 bugs have been fixed in the 4.0.1 release, according to the release notes.

    The Foundation’s Documentation team has also released a “Getting Started with LibreOffice 4.0” guide. This is available in PDF and ODF formats from the LibreOffice website and as a printed book from Lulu.

    LibreOffice 4.0.1 can be downloaded from the LibreOffice website, whilst extensions for LibreOffice are available from the extension repository.

    LibreOffice Impress Remote image
    Now available from Google Play
    In addition, the release has been announced of LibreOffice Impress Remote (posts passim), which will allow users to control Impress presentations from an Android smartphone. LibreOffice Impress remote is now available free of charge from Google Play for all platforms – Linux, MacOS and Windows, whilst instructions for its use can be found on the Document Foundation wiki.

  • LibreUmbria’s 5 good reasons to switch to LibreOffice

    Steve WoodsOpen Source, Open Standards, Tech

    The LibreUmbria blog features a new post today entitled (in English) 5+5 good reasons to adopt LibreOffice. The 10 reasons themselves are split between those for end users (PDF, Italian) and administrators and managers (PDF, Italian).

    image of LibreOffice Mime type icons
    LibreOffice for all your office suite needs: word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, database, drawing and formulas

    The post also features a fine graphic setting out 5 of the reasons. These are:

    • Quality. When using Office, you will happen to notice that the 2000 version is being officially dropped. This is because there is a new licence to acquire for each update for commercial software. LibreOffice is a product being continuously improved because it is the users who ask the developer community to fix bugs and add and simplify its features. LibreOffice is a product that shall never run out.
    • Freedom. LibreOffice is free software not linked to any company in particular. It can be freely used without limits and conditions imposed by user licences. You can install LibreOffice on your home computers, you can give to a friend and download it free of charge from the internet.
    • Training. Switching to LibreOffice means being able to take a training course which will teach you all the functions you need to know about.
    • Open format. With LibreOffice we use an open format (.odt) instead of .doc. You’ve surely never thought of it, but open formats ensure accessibility in the long term, but above all ensure transparency of the data exchanged; distributing content different from that which you seen on the screen will never happen with .odt.
    • Help. When you start working with LibreOffice you can always count on help from a colleague, as well as its large developer community, research centres and companies ready to fix any bugs in the working of the software.

    As previously reported, Italy’s Umbria region has a project to migrate 5,000 public sector workers from MS Office to LibreOffice (posts passim).

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