LibreOffice 4.1.0 approaches with beta 2

LibreOffice developer Fridrich Strba has announced that the second beta of the upcoming LibreOffice 4.1.0, which is planned for release between 22 and 28 June, is ready for testing. Compared to the first beta from the end of May, this development release includes relatively few changes. A 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 the beginning of 2011. The commit removes a shortcoming that many users had found annoying about Writer, as image rotation was already implemented in other parts of the office suite. The bug remained one of the top issues to be fixed on LibreOffice's Vote for Enhancement page before being eventually closed for this release.

LibreOffice 4.1.0 will include a number of new features such as embedded fonts, which has been called the "most important feature" in the upcoming release. This feature allows users to include the fonts used in a document within the document, preventing text being displayed differently on systems where the 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. Font embedding in LibreOffice 4.1.0 uses the SVG font-face-uri element specified in the ODF 1.2 standard and, according to some preliminary tests run by the developers, works when round-tripping the document between LibreOffice and Microsoft Office on Windows.

A detailed list with all bugs fixed in LibreOffice 4.1.0 beta 2 is available in the change log. The release can be downloaded for testing on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux (deb and RPM packages) from the LibreOffice servers.

(fab)