Apache OpenOffice 3.4, the first (stable) release of the free software office suite since its development was handed over to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF), has been released. The announcement was made earlier today.
Before coming under the administration of the ASF, OpenOffice.org, as it was known then, was the most popular office suite in the free software community, and it was also installed by default on virtually all Linux desktop distributions.
While some will likely insist that it is still popular, its position on free software operating systems has been taken by LibreOffice, a fork of the original OpenOffice.org code. How will this first release be received by the community? That is a good question that I do not have an answer for.
But here are some information about this release:
- Downloads binaries are available for Linux (32- and 64-bit), Mac OS X and Windows
- Support for encrypting documents using SHA1 digests, Blowfish and AES256 encryption
- Now with support for SeaMonkey address books instead of Mozilla Address Book
- With Gstreamer installed, it is now possible to play multimedia (audio and video) content in Apache OpenOffice Impress
- Line Cap Property support, which means you can now get lines like this:
And this:
- Support for shear transformations for GraphicObjects and attributes and transformations for OLEObjects
- Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) support
- Improved chart visualization and improved crop support for GraphicalObjects
- New regexp engine
You may read the full list of updated and new features here. And you may download binaries for your platform and language here. Note that at the time this article was published, none of the distributions have this release in their repository, but that should change in the coming days and weeks.
Last time I installed this program, it did not have an English version – only and American version, which while it does have a slight similarity with English English, is not sufficiently similar to use. Nie to hear that the other languages are now incorporated, but when will we get an English English version.