[tdf-announce] The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 3.4.0

The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 3.4.0

The new release offers several new features but is focused on contributors

The Internet, June 3rd, 2011 - The Document Foundation announces 
LibreOffice 3.4.0, a major release of the free office suite for personal 
productivity developed by a community of sponsored and volunteer 
developers, and supported worldwide by local communities of volunteers. 
LibreOffice 3.4.0 is the second major release of the suite since the 
announcement of The Document Foundation in September 2010 and 
incorporates the contributions of over 120 developers (six times as many 
as the first beta released on the launch date).

The majority of these contributors have started to hack LibreOffice code 
less than eight months ago, and this is an incredible achievement if one 
recalls that the OOo project has attracted a lower number of 
contributors in ten years. "We care for our developers, and it shows", 
comments Italo Vignoli, a Steering Committee member and a spokesperson 
for TDF. "Our core developers have invented the mechanism of the easy 
hacks, which makes it simple and enjoyable for volunteer contributors to 
get to know LibreOffice code challenging their development skills with 
basic or elementary tasks".

"Once they have completed the first easy hacks, contributors are ready 
to scale to more difficult tasks", says Michael Meeks, a senior 
developer working for SUSE. "We spend quite a lot of time mentoring new 
contributors, in order to increase the number of people working on bug 
fixing, patches and features. This is soon going to be reflected in the 
quality of the software and the number of new features of future releases".

LibreOffice 3.4.0 offers several new features for Calc, with faster 
performances and an improved compatibility with Excel spreadsheets, and 
Pivot Table - the new name of DataPilot - with support for unlimited 
numbers of fields and named range as data source. The user interface of 
Writer, Impress and Draw has been improved with many new features, and 
several cosmetic changes have been applied to the Linux version, with a 
better text rendering engine and an improved GTK+ theme integration. 
Code wise, several thousand lines of German comments have been 
translated into English, and over 5.000 lines of dead code have been 
removed from Writer, Calc and Impress.

The first release of the 3.4 series, LibreOffice 3.4.0, is targeted to 
community members and power users, and should not be implemented in a 
corporate environment. The Document Foundation has explained that 
following its time based release schedule - the best strategy for a 
distributed and cooperative development environment - the best releases 
for such deployments start from x.x.1. Because of this, LibreOffice 
3.3.x is going to be maintained for several months to come, until the 
end of calendar year 2011, for the most conservative users.

LibreOffice 3.4 can be downloaded from 
http://www.libreoffice.org/download. A complete list of new features and 
fixes is available online at the following address: 
https://www.libreoffice.org/download/3-4-new-features-and-fixes/. 
Screenshots of the new features can be downloaded from this page.


Media Contacts

Florian Effenberger (Germany)
Phone: +49 8341 99660880
Mobile: +49 151 14424108
Skype: floeff
E-mail: floeff@documentfoundation.org

Olivier Hallot (Brazil)
Mobile: +55 21 88228812
E-mail: olivier.hallot@documentfoundation.org

Charles H. Schulz (France)
Mobile: +33 6 98655424
E-mail: charles.schulz@documentfoundation.org

Italo Vignoli (Italy)
Mobile: +39 348 5653829
E-mail: italo.vignoli@documentfoundation.org

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