Enable attaching comments to document text ranges.tdf#38244 (Miklós Vajna)
Enable attaching comments to document text ranges
Allow extra word boundary characters. This feature overrides long dash (—) and short dash (–) to be word boundary characters for the purposes of counting words, and allows the user to specify additional word boundary characters (atTools ▸Options ▸Writer ▸General ▸Word Count). (Caolán McNamara)
The new options for word counting (Tools ▸Options ▸Writer ▸General ▸Word Count)
Import ink annotations from DOCX and RTF documents (available when using Word on a Tablet PC). (Eilidh McAdam)
First pages can now have a separate header/footer in Writer.
RTF filter now imports old Drawing Objects syntax (tdf#42407). Seethis blog entry for details and screenshots. (Miklós Vajna)
Various DOCX improvements: import of floating tables, OLE objects inside rectangles, margins of inline images using the WordProcessing markup. Seethis blog entry for details and screenshots. (Miklós Vajna)
Clicking fields selects them instead of placing the cursor before them. (Cédric Bosdonnat)
Logo toolbar and interpreter (László Németh, help in integration: András Tímár).
Turtle vector graphics in LibreOffice Writer. Created by the following 1-liner (using the Logo command line onView ▸Toolbars ▸Logo):repeat 500 [ circle 10 + repcount/10 fd 5 + repcount/10 lt 10 ]
Logo for DTP: drawing a chessboard with high print quality in Writer using chess notation or optional manual positioning (see thesource document and itsPDF export
The lightweight implementation (1400 lines in Python-PyUNO) uses the embedded Python to give a simplified programming interface to the excellent vector graphics of LibreOffice for graphic design and education (including teaching of word processing). Blog posts: 1.Logo, 2.Logo for desktop publishing, 3.Logo for template development.Examples: set the Logo toolbar (View ▸Toolbars ▸Logo) in Writer. Use the arrow icons of the toolbar to move and focus the turtle (graphical cursor of the Logo programming language). The localized commands depend on the language of the document, more information: pressF1 in the Logo command line). Try the following commands in the command line of the Logo toolbar (for program execution in the command line, press↵ Enter):
circle 10cmfillcolor 'blue' pencolor 'red' pensize 2 circle 5cmforward 200 right 89 circle 5repeat 88 [ forward 200 right 89 ] fill repeat 9 [ label 'Hello, World!' right 20 ]repeat 100 [ penup position any pendown pensize random 10 fillcolor any square 20 + random 100 ]
Improved performance of ODS document import. (Daniel Bankston)
When opening ODS and XLSX files, the values of formula can be shown as they were saved in the files (cached), without recalculating the formula directly when opening the file (Daniel Bankston)
This makes opening of (larger) files faster;
When the spreadsheet was last used by someone else, this will always show the values, as they were on that computer. (It is known that large, real complex spreadsheets on different computers, with different OS, processor or software, can have different results.) So that may be seen as an advantage when opening spreadsheets that have last been edited in Excel.
The user gets a message on opening the file. That message can be turned on/off atTools ▸Options ▸LibreOffice Calc ▸Formula ▸Recalculation on file load.
Automatically rotate chart axis labels if they are overlapping. This fix also improves detection of overlap while rotating labels. (Muthu Subramanian)
Chart Labels Auto Rotate Screenshot
Cached value import from ODS and XLSX (Daniel Bankston)
Due to possible different implementations you get a warning when the cached values are used.
Save settings of Text Import Dialog for Text to Columns and Paste Unformatted Text from Clipboard (in addition to Text File Import).tdf#47674 (Laurent Balland-Poirier)
Export color scales and data bars to XLSX (also supports Excel 2010+ extensions for databars). (Markus Mohrhard)
Increased size limit on (uncompressed) ODF documents from 2Gb to 4Gb. (Michael Meeks)
Support "type-ahead" search in the autofilter popup. It is now possible to search for specific entry via key input. (Kohei Yoshida)
XML Source dialog to quickly import arbitrary XML content. Refer tothis page for more information on this feature. (Kohei Yoshida)
XML Source dialog
Enhanced chart visualisation - better quality rendering / print and PDF export of charts (Armin Le-Grand - Apache)
New conditional formats: (Markus Mohrhard)
Date formats
Top/Bottom rules
String rules
Improved conditional format dialogs (Markus Mohrhard)
Icon sets (Markus Mohrhard)
Overlapping conditional formats (Markus Mohrhard)
Initial work on a gnumeric import filter based onorcus (orcus by Kohei Yoshida, gnumeric parts by Markus Mohrhard)
This is a technical demonstration of the orcus integration and hidden behind the experimental flag
Only imports value, strings and formulas in 4.0 (more will follow in the future)
Exporting of a single chart as image (PNG, JPG)tdf#30944
Formula engine
New spreadsheet function XOR as defined in ODF OpenFormula.tdf#50882 (Winfried Donkers)
New configuration option to toggle handling of empty strings when used in arithmetic expression.tdf#44720 (Kohei Yoshida)
New configuration option for empty string.
New pricing Add-In containing spreadsheet functions for option pricing in particular barrier (OPT_BARRIER(...)) and touch (OPT_TOUCH(...)) options. Example :File:Calc-pricing-add-in.ods (Tino Kluge)
pricing add-in
Re-implemented RAND() function with better random number generation algorithm.tdf#33365 (Tino Kluge)
New spreadsheet functions AVERAGEIF, SUMIFS, AVERAGEIFS and COUNTIFS as defined in ODF OpenFormula.tdf#41214 (Marina Plakalovic, Daniel Rentz, Eike Rathke)
New spreadsheet functions IFERROR and IFNA as defined in ODF OpenFormula.tdf#56124 (Winfried Donkers, Eike Rathke)
Pivot table
Support multiple selections in page field of pivot table. (Kohei Yoshida)
New page field popup allows multiple selection
Impress
The state of the sidebar pane in Impress is now remembered. (Rob Snelders)
Initial work on hyperlinks/fields wrapping. (Muthu Subramanian)
Hyperlinks Wrapping support.
PPTX
Impress now flips gradients as well, when it imports PPTX files (Muthu Subramanian)
Lots of other PPTX/PPT import/export fixes (various developers) seeLink
There's now anImpress remote control for Android phones: it works with Windows, Mac and Linux since LibreOffice 4.0.1 and higher. You can read more about getting this to workin this helpful howto - (Andrzej Hunt, Michael Meeks, Thorsten Behrens)
Impress Android Remote.
Much accelerated multimedia previews, and previews of embedded video on Linux. (Michael Meeks):Media thumbnails embedded in Impress
Improve quality of page previews in Draw/Impress with supersampling. (Tomaž Vajngerl)
Linecap improvements - adding rounded caps (ends) to lines, see right-clickLine ▸Corner and cap styles (Regina Henschel, Armin Le-Grand - Apache)
Rounded line caps
Shear transforms for GraphicObjects, and shear + properties for OLE Objects (Armin Le-Grand - Apache)
Multi-image support in ODF allowing a bitmap + SVG representation eg. (Armin Le-Grand - Apache)
Circles and Ovals toolbar from Impress now also available in Draw (Rob Snelders)
Base
On all non-Windows platforms a new mork driver implementation is used to access Thunderbird address book. This means that Debian/Ubuntu users can finally integrate LO with their Thunderbird address book. (Debian/Ubuntu distros are not shipping a Mozilla-based mork driver, therefore their native Base package can not access the address book.) This also fixes some really old bugs for different distros. (David Ostrovsky)
In Forms, AutoFilter does not anymore treat values as patterns. As a consequence, an AutoFilter on "A*" will not anymore match any value starting with an A, but only the exact value "A*".tdf#48807 (Lionel Elie Mamane)
Core
CMIS protocol support for easy access to document stored on Document Management Systems like Alfresco, Nuxeo, SharePoint... (Cédric Bosdonnat). Cedric gave a speech on this atFOSDEM 2013 which sums up: "LibreOffice easily connects to Enterprise Content Management servers through CMIS protocol using the libcmis library."
Integration of session-installer to add missing parts of LibreOffice on the fly (Björn Michaelsen)
Core: session installer
Reduce Java code: Port Fax and Letter Wizard to Python (Xisco Faulí)
LibreOffice 4.0 ships four new open-source font families:Open Sans (Ascender),PT Serif (ParaType),Source Code Pro andSource Sans Pro (Adobe).
Preview of new bundled fonts
Options / General
Java and advanced options now combined inTools ▸Options ▸LibreOffice ▸Advanced. For choosing experimental features and enabling macro-recording. (Joel Madero)
Options: Advanced options for Java, Macro recording and Experimental
Send via Bluetooth (experimental) feature. Uses BlueZ to send documents via Bluetooth, just like Send via Email.
Send via Bluetooth
New Regular Expression Engine (Herbert Duerr - Apache)
We now use the ICU regular expression engine instead of a custom version. This solves several "find and replace" bugs, and is faster and smaller. We have compatibility code to map old-style word boundary syntax \> and \< to \b while upgrading. Read more about theICU regexp engine. Japanese users should be aware that some more advanced transliterations may behave differently.
Filters
Import filter for Microsoft Publisher publications. More details in thisblog and in Fridrich Strba's speech atFOSDEM 2013.
A document in MS Publisher 2003
The same document in LibreOffice Draw
Extended coverage of Visio file-format. LibreOffice 4.0.0 supportsall existing Visio file formats from Visio 1.0 released in 1992 to Microsoft Visio 2013 released in 2012. More details in thisblog and in Fridrich Strba's speech atFOSDEM 2013.
A old Visio document in Visio 1.0
The same document in LibreOffice Draw
A VSDX document in MS Visio 2013
The same document in LibreOffice Draw
Improved ODF compatibility in various points. (Michael Stahl)
GUI
NewWidget layout technique for dialog windows introduced, and converted various dialogs; seeWidgetLayout. (Caolán McNamara, see his speech atFOSDEM 2013; Jack Leigh; Gokul)
UI mockups can be created with Glade UI designer then hooked up to code.
Converted widgets can be edited without recompiling Libreoffice. More easy to iterate for good UI design.
Support for easily resizing and hiding elements. Reduces code complexity.
Intent to follow best-practice guidelines for spacing and indentation yielding nicely spaced, clearer dialogs.
Added dialog forSmooth image filter, where it is possible to select the radius (strength) of smoothing/blurring. (Tomaž Vajngerl)
Graphics can be resized and recompressed with the newCompress Graphics popup menu function. (Tomaž Vajngerl)
Menu function is available in Draw, Impress and Calc but not (yet) Writer.
Supports displaying of current graphics information: original dimensions, dimensions inside of document.
Ability to reduce image resolution with setting a new dimension (width/height in pixels and DPI).
Lossless (PNG) or lossy (JPEG) compression with ability to set the quality and compression strength.
Possibility to select the interpolation (resampling) algorithm.
The new Compress Graphics Dialog available in Draw, Impress and Calc
AddedEdit with External Tool to Calc, Impress and Draw. (Tomaž Vajngerl)
Unify Popup menu optionSave Graphic… from Writer andSave as Picture… from Draw and Impress toSave Graphic…. (Tomaž Vajngerl)
Improve quality of displaying images in documents. (Tomaž Vajngerl)
Quality comparison of displayed images
It is possible now to select and copy text from message boxes.tdf#46193 (Tamas Zolnai)
The "Apply Style" combo box in the toolbar now features previews of the styles to choose. (Jan Holesovsky)
Unity integration (Antonio Fernandez, Björn Michaelsen, Alberto Ruiz, Ryan Lortie, Ted Gould)
tdf#61461 Unity integration is available via the official Ubuntu repositories. Only the following Ubuntu/LibreOffice combinations are currently supported:
Ubuntu 12.10 + LO 3.6
Ubuntu 13.04 + LO 4.0
unity menu integration
Hide / Show styles in theStyles & Formatting dialog (Cédric Bosdonnat)
Core: Hidden styles
The templates management interfaces now allows to have non-native template files: templates from other office suites are now handled like the ODF ones. (Cédric Bosdonnat)
SupportFirefox Personas in LibreOffice. With LibreOffice 4.0, you can chooseTools ▸Options… ▸Personalization ▸Select Persona, choose a persona you like in your browser, paste its address to the dialog, confirm, and LibreOffice will use that. (Jan Holesovsky)
New templates manager to bring the templates to the user (Rafael Dominguez and Cédric Bosdonnat)
Localization
idxexample.odt localizable via PO files (Insert ▸Indexes and Tables ▸Indexes and Tables…). (Istvan Turi)
agenda/fax/letter/report templates localizable via PO files (File ▸Wizards). (Istvan Turi)
Autocorrection improvements for pt-BR. (Raimundo Moura, Olivier Hallot)
The LightProof grammar checker for Brazilian Portuguese is now available. Improvements in pt-BR spell checking (Raimundo Moura, João Mac-Cormick, Olivier Hallot, László Németh).
Translated key names on Windows for Asturian (Xuacu Saturio), Catalan (Jesús Corrius), Estonian (Mihkel Tõnnov), Slovenian (Martin Srebotnjak) and Spanish (Adolfo Jayme Barrientos). Translated key names on Linux for Slovenian (Martin Srebotnjak).
Updated Slovenian thesaurus (Martin Srebotnjak/tezaver.si)
For more information, see speech about localization toolchain atFOSDEM 2013.
Performance
Improved ODS load times (seethis blog entry for details). (Daniel Bankston)
Improved XLSX load time (seethis blog entry for details). (Daniel Bankston)
Significantly improved the performance of saving a new entry to a large autocorrect replacement table (tdf#49350). (Tomaž Vajngerl)
Significant load and save time improvements for slides / drawings with large numbers of shapes (Michael Meeks)
Significantly improved RTF file load times (tdf#44736). (Miklós Vajna, Michael Meeks)
Infrastructure
Many modules ported to gbuild. (Peter Foley, Matúš Kukan, Caolán McNamara, David Ostrovsky, David Tardon, Norbert Thiebaud and others)
all legacy container classes (Sv*Array*, Table, Container, List etc.) replaced with STL containers (Noel Grandin, Michael Stahl, etc.)
https://gerrit.libreoffice.org/ used for code review and easy patch submission -- more than 1500 patches reviewed and merged with it already (David Ostrovsky, Norbert Thiebaud, Robert Einsle, Björn Michaelsen and many more)
gerrit
translations module became a source-only module, l10n tools read translations directly from .po files. (Tamas Zolnai)
Add GStreamer 1.0 support, and refactor existing gstreamer code. (Tim-Philipp Müller, Michael Meeks)
Extensions
PDF Import, the Presenter Console, and the Python Scripting Provider are no longer bundled extensions but core features. (Stephan Bergmann)
Feature removal / deprecation
Dropped support forlegacy binary StarOffice (version 1.x → 5.x) files.
Note: the old OpenOffice.org XML file format (.sxw, .sxi etc.) which was used as the default format by StarOffice versions 6 and 7is still supported.
Dropped support for export tolegacy Word and Excel (version 6.0/95) files. These files can still be opened, but they will save in your default format (usually .odt/.ods).We continue to export to the Office 97 and later binary file formats of course.
This avoids user confusion, and accidentally selecting very old formats that will lose document data.
Dropped support for ODMA document management integration, this windows-specific integration point is deep legacy, and yields some horrible user interactions.
Droppedlegacy STLport library for compatibility with old extensions that linked against it (was only included for 32-bit Linux and Windows).
Deprecated Mac / PPC as a platform, raising our base-line to 10.6.
Dropped support of Windows 2000.
Dropped Mozilla based LDAP backend for address book on all non windows platforms.
Horizontal Rule... item removed from Writer'sInsert menu, as well as respective.uno:InsertGraphicRuler command3be15a05 (Cédric Bosdonnat)
API Changes
C++ UNO language binding and URE libraries
Base-line Windows / C++ compiler upgraded to Visual Studio 2010 (Fridrich Strba, Tor Lillqvist)
runtime libraries for Visual Studio 2008 (msvcr90.dll) are no longer bundled
All exising API methods that used to be defined asoneway are now plain methods.
New style services
A large number of existing UNO services were converted to new-style services, which allow for more convenient and more type safe construction;this has no impact on compatibility of existing client code. (Noel Grandin)
The UNO exception com.sun.star.lang.IllegalArgumentException now derives from com.sun.star.uno.RuntimeException instead of com.sun.star.uno.Exception31170413ae3786bf44564e813d7291354e939a77.
Unpublishing UNO APIs
Deprecation and un-publishing of internal accessibility API
This API was primarily used internally for our bridge implementations to native accessibility technology APIs, and will need adapting in future.
The following UNO services and interfaces are no longer published:
The following annoying bugs were not fixedin time and will be addressed in the regularbug fix releases:
Broken access to Samba share (tdf#64311); fixed in 4.0.4;
CAIRO not linking against internal libpng, results in "no suitable windowing system found, exiting." error on some Linux systems. Workaround with a libpng12 package install (tdf#61571) fixed in 4.0.2
Password-protected documents saved unencrypted for auto-recovery (tdf#51819) fixed in 4.1.6, 4.2.3 and 4.2.4
Duden Rechtschreibprüfung / Duden Korrektor
All versions ofDuden Rechtschreibprüfung up to version 9.0 cannot be installed with LibreOffice 4.0 on Windows and Linux x86. Users should contact the extension provider and ask for a fixed build. A workaround is to install STLPort library before the extension. Seetdf#59107 and theGerman release notes for more details.Duden Rechtschreibprüfung is a commercial extension providing various writing aids for the German language.