22 February 2013
RIYADH -- The Germany-based Document Foundation, manager of the LibreOffice project, announced the release of LibreOffice 4.0, the latest version of the free power-packed open source personal productivity suite for Windows, Macintosh and Linux.
LibreOffice 4.0 is a free software and a competitor to the proprietary Office suites that provides functionality needed by Office suite users. The company said that the new release was developed with technical contribution from the Motah Program at King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology in Riyadh (KACST).
The foundation mentioned that LibreOffice 4.0 is the first release that reflects the objectives set by the community. It also stated that it is a cleaner and leaner code base, has an improved set of features, better interoperability, and a more diverse and inclusive ecosystem.
Some of the new improvements in the 4.0 version are the inclusion of more enhancement to RTL languages, and support to languages as Arabic, Hebrew, and Indic has been significantly improved. Michael Meeks, who works on LibreOffice at SUSE, said that a team working at KACST in Saudi Arabia has done a large part of the RTL support, and it provided solutions to eliminate bugs.
He mentioned that other improvements in LibreOffice 4.0 is that it is more compatible with Microsoft's Rich Text Format (RTF) and DOCX file formats. LibreOffice 4.0 now supports importing Microsoft Publisher documents and reading all Visio file formats.
He said a new feature in LibreOffice Impress has also been introduced through the new Impress Remote Control Application, which allows a speaker to control an Impress slide deck using an Android smart-phone. This feature is currently available in some Linux distributions. Work is in progress to provide this application for Windows, OS X, and all other Linux versions.
The Document Foundation has attracted many new developers mostly independent volunteers -- capable of contributing over 50,000 commits. As of November 30, 2012, the Foundation has over 150 members and over 2,000 volunteers and contributors worldwide.
RIYADH -- The Germany-based Document Foundation, manager of the LibreOffice project, announced the release of LibreOffice 4.0, the latest version of the free power-packed open source personal productivity suite for Windows, Macintosh and Linux.
LibreOffice 4.0 is a free software and a competitor to the proprietary Office suites that provides functionality needed by Office suite users. The company said that the new release was developed with technical contribution from the Motah Program at King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology in Riyadh (KACST).
The foundation mentioned that LibreOffice 4.0 is the first release that reflects the objectives set by the community. It also stated that it is a cleaner and leaner code base, has an improved set of features, better interoperability, and a more diverse and inclusive ecosystem.
Some of the new improvements in the 4.0 version are the inclusion of more enhancement to RTL languages, and support to languages as Arabic, Hebrew, and Indic has been significantly improved. Michael Meeks, who works on LibreOffice at SUSE, said that a team working at KACST in Saudi Arabia has done a large part of the RTL support, and it provided solutions to eliminate bugs.
He mentioned that other improvements in LibreOffice 4.0 is that it is more compatible with Microsoft's Rich Text Format (RTF) and DOCX file formats. LibreOffice 4.0 now supports importing Microsoft Publisher documents and reading all Visio file formats.
He said a new feature in LibreOffice Impress has also been introduced through the new Impress Remote Control Application, which allows a speaker to control an Impress slide deck using an Android smart-phone. This feature is currently available in some Linux distributions. Work is in progress to provide this application for Windows, OS X, and all other Linux versions.
The Document Foundation has attracted many new developers mostly independent volunteers -- capable of contributing over 50,000 commits. As of November 30, 2012, the Foundation has over 150 members and over 2,000 volunteers and contributors worldwide.
© The Saudi Gazette 2013
