LibreOffice 3.3 final released

The Document Foundation has announced the release of the final version of LibreOffice 3.3, after four months of development, a development team that has expanded to over one hundred people and four release candidates. LibreOffice was created last September after frustration with Oracle's OpenOffice plans and development. Since breaking away from Oracle, the increased number of developers and a more open source friendly development model has allowed the Foundation to release ahead of its "aggressive schedule", and to offer a number of new and original features which distinguish it from Oracle's OpenOffice 3.3.

RedHat's Caolan McNamara, one of the development community leaders, said that the developers were excited as this was the first stable release and they were eager to get user feedback. McNamara noted that from March, the development would move to more of a "real time-based, predictable, transparent and public release schedule". Details of this on the project's Wiki include plans for 3.3.1 and 3.3.2 releases in February and March, and foresee a 3.4.0 release in May.

Some of the features in version 3.3 address needs of the developers, such as a new Windows installer; this integrates all language versions into one build of LibreOffice, reducing its footprint on servers from 75 to 11 GB. The developers are also progressing a rapid clean up of the code to help prepare for future versions.

The Foundation highlights a number of features unique to LibreOffice, such as the ability to import SVG files, easy to use title page formatting in Writer, improvements to Writer's navigation tools, better sheet and cell management in Calc and import support for Microsoft Works and Lotus Word Pro documents. LibreOffice also bundles extensions for PDF import, a slideshow presenter console and an improved report builder.

LibreOffice 3.3 also includes all the enhancements of OpenOffice 3.3: custom properties handling, embeddable standard PDF fonts in PDF documents, a new Liberation Narrow font, better document protection in Calc and Writer, support of a million rows in calc, and more. The Document Foundation notes that several of these features were actually contributed by LibreOffice team members before the creation of the Document Foundation. All the new LibreOffice features are detailed on a "New Features" page and LibreOffice can be downloaded from the LibreOffice website. LibreOffice 3.3 is licensed under the GNU LGPL version 3 and is available for Windows, Mac OS X (Intel and PPC), and Linux (32-bit and 64-bit in rpm and deb packages).

See also:

• The Document Foundation blog announcement of LibreOffice 3.3

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