[Infowarrior] - Libreoffice gets a facelift and performance boost in version 4.4

[Richard Forno]

(Only played w/it briefly but it is pretty slick -- might well become my Office replacement.  --rick)

Libreoffice gets a facelift and performance boost in version 4.4

Described as 'most beautiful ever'
By Chris Merriman
Fri Jan 30 2015, 15:26        

http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2392956/libreoffice-gets-a-facelift-and-performance-boost-in-version-44         

LIBREOFFICE HAS UNVEILED a fresh new look for the latest version of its open source productivity suite.

Libreoffice 4.4 has been given a serious facelift, as well as improvements to the coding to make it feel faster.

"LibreOffice 4.4 has got a lot of UX and design love, and in my opinion is the most beautiful ever," said Jan 'Kendy' Holesovsky, a member of the membership committee and leader of the design team.

"We also developed a new Color Selector, improved the Sidebar to integrate more smoothly with menus, and reworked many user interface details to follow today's UX trends."

Other additions include OpenGL transitions in Windows, digital signing of PDF files during export, two new fonts, Carlito and Caleadea, which fixes some bugs when using Microsoft fonts.

LibreOffice is an open source project, so there have been multiple contributions from the community including default templates.

Visual editing has been added to Impress master pages for presentations, with bullet toggling and layer hiding among the additions.

Track Changes has been improved with better auto correct features in the Writer word processor.

Import filters for Microsoft Visio, Publisher and AbiWord files, Works Spreadsheets, Adobe Pagemaker, MacDraw, MacDraw II and Ragtime have been added.

This is the first major release for LibreOffice since last summer which fixed a bug in the Open Office architecture which had plagued it for some time.

The suite is a fork of OpenOffice, but retains its independence from a major corporation. In version 4.2 the suite introduced deep integration with Windows. 

--
It's better to burn out than fade away.