From The Document Foundation Wiki

LibreOffice 3.5 changes

About this page

This is an in-progress scratch-pad of notes to build release notes from as and when we release. Please do not list features that are to be shipped already in the 3.4 release! Please do not add wish-list features that you hope will be implemented, but only what actually is implemented already.

What does a good feature look like here:

• It has a description, and a way for a busy reviewer, to find and play with the feature. Target someone who is extremely busy, and knows little-to-nothing about the product. So if a user interface element is key to the feature, be very explicit about where it is e. g. Menu->Format->Character->Position[tab]->'90 degrees' paths to the elements you changed. Of course, you know your feature is important, and that everyone should care about the "Extensible AutoShapes Properties dialog" - but often the guys taking the screenshots and writing the notes do not.
• It credits the main authors who did the work - just add them in brackets after the feature, where possible.
• If the feature can be shown off with a sample / test file - particularly for new import-able features, it would be wonderful to have a link to / up-load of a test file that we can use to show that feature off to best effect. That really helps us to make good screenshots to show off the features, and allows reviewers to do their testing.

Thanks in advance for your help filling this out !

General

ODF 1.2 Conforming Documents

• LibreOffice 3.5 writes valid ODF 1.2
• Microsoft Office only officially supports ODF 1.1 and complains that ODF 1.2 and ODF 1.2 extended documents written by LibreOffice 3.5 are invalid.
• The warning from Microsoft Office can be safely ignored, and the "Repair" option will import the document.
• For users that find this annoying, a workaround is to open Tools->Options->Load/Save->General and set "ODF format version" to "1.0/1.1". However, please note that this will cause some information to be lost when storing documents.

Related issues: fdo#44498

Different Encryption Algorithm

In LibreOffice 3.5, a different and more secure encryption algorithm (AES-256) is used for password protected files in the ODF 1.2 and ODF 1.2 Extended file formats. The new cipher is activated by default. Blowfish encryption in ODF 1.2 files is considered deprecated

• LibreOffice versions up to 3.4.4 don't support the AES-256 cipher.
• LibreOffice 3.4.5 can read ODF files encrypted with the AES-256 cipher, but on writing a password protected file will fall-back to the Blowfish cipher.
• LibreOffice 3.5.0 can read and write ODF files encrypted with the AES-256 (and Blowfish) cipher. For files in the ODF 1.2 and ODF 1.2 Extended formats, AES-256 is the default cipher. New as well as existing password encrypted documents in these formats are always encrypted with the AES-256 cipher on writing them to disk. There's no UI to configure the cipher.
• Hint: LibreOffice versions up to 3.4.4 cannot open password protected files in the ODF 1.2 and ODF 1.2 Extended formats written by LibreOffice 3.5. All users of the LibreOffice 3.3 and 3.4 series are advised to update to LibreOffice 3.4.5 or later.

Related issues: fdo#43868 and fdo#40006.

Writer

• Display of non-printable characters on the end of line. Now modifying the spaces at end of line is very easy. (Bartosz Kosiorek)

• New numbering types: (Mohammad Elahi)

1. Persian words: ‫یک، دو، سه ...‬
2. Arabic abjad letter sequence: ‫ا، ب، ج ...‬

• Display bitmap image resolution in PPI (pixel/inch) in Format - Picture - Crop tab page. (László Németh)

• Better UI for Header and Footers handling (Cédric Bosdonnat)
  • Easily add header or footers
  • Quickly see what is edited with new changing text boundaries
  • Quickly edit or remove headers and footers without going through page styles formatting

• Better page breaks indicators (Cédric Bosdonnat)
• The word count dialog is modeless and updates as you type (Matt Pratt)
• Autotext "Formula numbering" (fn+F3) has been corrected for most locales: no extra space after inserted formula, fonts of inserted formula follow default font (fdo#40499, i#75665). Type fn+F3 or nf+F3 according to your locale. (Laurent BP, Caolán McNamara)
• Print dialog: page input field now shows current page by default. fdo#34697 (Ta Duc Tung)
• Layout fixes (Cédric Bosdonnat)
  • When a tab stop is set behind the end margin, the tab uses this value and doesn't go to a new line. A compatibility option has been added, thus only new documents will behave this way.
  • When importing doc, docx and RTF files, the numberings aren't split on new lines if they don't fit. This is only happening for layout compatibility with Word.
• Grammar checking improvements (Cédric Bosdonnat)
  • Reworked the grammar checking dialog to better show the error help.
  • Grammar checkers can now add an optional URL to more details about the error in SingleProofreadingError::aProperties. The property needs to be named FullCommentURL. This link appears in the details area of the Grammar checking dialog and in the popup menu as an "Explanations..." item.
    
• Bundled LightProof grammar checkers for English, Hungarian, and Russian. For details see this blog post (László Németh)
  • Default checks: punctuation, a/an article, word spacing, paragraph capitalization, simple word duplication…
  • Longer explanations, using relevant Wikipedia articles (and new FullCommentURL feature), see above.
  • Optional features: more grammar checks, measurement conversion, thousand separation, sentence capitalization; n-dash/m-dash, quotation mark and parenthesis checks…
    
  • Settings of English grammar checker: in Tools » Extension manager click on English dictionaries extension, and its Options button
    
  • Lightproof rule editor extension:
    • Writer extension with a special grammar checking component + Lightproof editor toolbar
    • Run-time compilation and update of its grammar checking component
    • Debugging of user code (rule conditions and Python user functions)
      
• Auto-generated tables of contents now contain hyperlinks to the relevant pages by default. (Cédric Bosdonnat)
• Support for comments export/import in Office Open XML (docx) documents (Luboš Luňák)
• Label printing positioning fixed (Winfried Donkers) fdo#36874

• Basic Fonts (Western) option page removed. This option page does exactly the same than changing the values in the style directly (Cédric Bosdonat)
• New typographic features by improved Graphite port of the last release of Libertine Open Fonts, examples: NEWS.pdf and NEWS.odt, documentation: fontfeatures.pdf and fontfeatures.odt (László Németh, improvements of Libertine Open Fonts: Philipp Poll et al.)
  • Proper hinting for digital publishing by new ttfautohint tool of FreeType project (Full picture: media:Hintingdemo.png, PDF source: media:Hintingdemo.pdf):
  • Linux Libertine typeface: new size variant Display Regular, updated fonts Bold and Semibold (also Bold and Semibold Italic), several other fixes and improvements (Philipp Poll et al., see ChangeLog and LinuxLibertine.org. Usage: choose "Linux Libertine Display G" in the font selector instead of "Linux Libertine G" for texts with 16 pt or more (Note: currently, there is only a Regular variant of Linux Libertine Display). In character formatting: select Linux Libertine G Bold for titles, and Semibold for highlighting inside paragraphs.
  • New gy, gj, gf, etc. Italic ligatures for Hungarian and several new font features for ligature handling (ligc, lith, litt).
  • Extended superiors (punctuation, upcase and latin-1/latin-2 letters, proportional numbers) and small caps. Usage: set "Linux Libertine G:sups=1&pnum=1" for superiors with proportional numbers, and "Linux Libertine G:smcp=1" for for true small caps.
  • Combining diacritics (extended Graphite port of the original OpenType features) for scientific typesetting and localization (eg. for IPA and African, Eskimo–Inuit etc. languages)
  • Better typography of Catalan "l·l".
  • Optional regular parenthesis in Italic text (usage: "Linux Libertine G:para=1").
  • Double stroke capital letters (usage: "Linux Libertine G:dbls=1").

Calc

• Supports 10000 sheets and has improved performance for a lot of sheet operations (insertion of several sheets should be much faster now). (Markus Mohrhard)
• Handles DDE and external links failures more gracefully. Instead of turning formulas with failed link updates into errors, it keeps the previous values and launches an error message notifying the user of the link update failure. (Kohei Yoshida)
• Line chart's smoothing has been upgraded to the ODF 1.2 standard. (Regina Henschel)

Closed lines which are smoothed using a “Cubic Spline” are now completely rounded.

• 

  Closed curve in LO 3.4, notice the corner in point A

• 

  Closed curve in LO 3.5, all rounded

Open and closed lines which are smoothed using a “B-Spline” now go through the given points, interpolating between them.

• 

  Curve misses the points in LO 3.4

• 

  Curve interpolates the points in LO 3.5

• New option to specify the initial number of sheets in new documents. (Albert Thuswaldner)

• New multiline inputbar. (Anurag Jain, Noel Power)

• Allow pasting a single cell range to multiple destination ranges. Some restrictions do apply, however. (Kohei Yoshida)
• New Calc Functions BITAND, BITOR, BITXOR BITRSHIFT and BITLSHIFT, as declared in the ODF 1.2 specification. (Wolfgang Pechlaner)
• Additional data point markers are defined, suitable for the 'standard markers' in the ODF 1.2 specification. The mapping to markers for charts in XLS files has been changed in cases where a better mapping is possible now. (Regina Henschel)

• The standard palette has got some new line ends, mostly unfilled ones. Some of them are useful for UML diagrams. The new symbols are designed to fit best to a line width of 0.02 cm and a marker width of 0.3 cm. Only the marker "Half circle unfilled" is designed for a marker width of 0.45 cm, so that it can encircle a filled circle as it is needed for the symbol 'interface'. The line width inside the marker scales together with the marker width. (Regina Henschel)

• the command "Protect Sheet" is now also accessible from the context menu of the sheet tab (Olivier Hallot)

• Autofilter popup window has been re-designed for better visual appearance and the ability to allow multiple selections. Refer to this blog post for more info. (Kohei Yoshida)

• New Calc Functions SEC, CSC, SECH and CSCH, as declared in the ODF 1.2 specification. (Regina Henschel)
• Redesigned all range name dialogs to work much better with local range names and make it easier to use the dialogs (Christoph Noack, Astron, Markus Mohrhard)

• Unlimited number of rules for conditional formatting. See Format > Conditional Formatting. (Robert Dargaud)

• DBF Import/Export dialog preferences are now saved. (Muthu Subramanian)

Performance

• Performance improvement on the import of Excel documents containing a large number of form controls. (Kohei Yoshida)
• Performance improvement on the import of cell formats from Excel documents. (Kohei Yoshida)
• Improved performance on ODS import, especially with documents with large number of named ranges. (Laurent Godard, Markus Mohrhard, Kohei Yoshida)

Impress / Draw

• Elliptical arcs in path:

Until now, the elliptical arcs in paths were ignored by LibreOffice and OpenOffice.org. With 3.5, elliptical arcs will be properly imported and rendered.

• Better handling of custom animation list

Previously, the list of custom animations was tedious to work with because any changes resulted in it refreshing to the top of the list. With 3.5, we now scroll to newly added animations, stay with items when they are moved up or down in the list, and keep animations in view when changing their properties. (Luke Symes)

• Support embedding Pallettes and other property list types

Previously, we would store a local file-system link to one of our property lists (eg. color palettes) in the file - which would be reflected in the choice of colors, gradients, bitmap fills, hatching etc. available to the user. We added the ability to (selectively) embed these inside the ODF container (Michael Meeks)

• Start Impress without the wizard by default.

The wizard can still be run manually from "File -> Wizards -> Presentation," alternatively, the autostart can be activated again under "Tools -> Options -> Impress -> General -> Start with wizard". (Tim Hardeck)

• Better Custom Shapes and their Presets PPTX import

Custom Shapes import was greatly enhanced, many bugs were fixed and new presets implementation added. The following image shows all the preset shapes as they were in the previous version (3.4) before the feature was improved:

And this is how they now look in 3.5:

Try this example PPTX presentation with slide containing custom shapes identical to presets. In 3.5, it should look like the screenshot above, in older versions it shows a lot of problems (Radek Doulik)

Media:Cshape-all.pptx

• Better support for importing Smart Art.

Reduced broken imports from pptx with smart arts. (muthusuba)

Try this example PPTX presentaion.

Media:extlst-test.pptx

• Better handling of export to PDF for hidden slides

Previously, all presentation slides used to exported to PDF. With 3.5, per default, hidden slides are excluded, but they can be included per check-box. (Pierre-André Jacquod)

Math

• New "does not exist" symbol (Julien Nabet)
• New symbols for Games theory (Olivier Hallot)

• Support for export and import of Math formulas in Office Open XML (docx) documents (Luboš Luňák)

Base

• Lots of bug fixes
• Integrated PostgreSQL native driver. Will be shipped out of the box with LibreOffice 3.5. The driver is still beta-quality, but works well (and much faster than alternatives such as JDBC or ODBC) for basic features. We will continue to improve the driver in the 3.6 release cycle. (Lionel Elie Mamane)

Filters

• Import filter for MS Visio documents

DNetwork.vsd in Visio	DNetwork.vsd in LibreOffice Draw
OrgChart.vsd in Visio	OrgChart.vsd in LibreOffice Draw
Calendar.vsd in Visio	Calendar.vsd in LibreOffice Draw

• Writer RTF import rewrite, see here for details (Miklos Vajna)

draw.rtf in LibreOffice 3.4	draw.rtf in LibreOffice 3.5	draw.rtf in Word 2007
forms.rtf in LibreOffice 3.4	forms.rtf in LibreOffice 3.5	forms.rtf in Word 2007
table.rtf in LibreOffice 3.4	table.rtf in LibreOffice 3.5	table.rtf in Word 2007

• Various DOCX import improvements, see here for details (Miklos Vajna)

Basic IDE

• There is a new menu item View->Line Numbers that toggles line numbers in the editor window. (August Sodora)
• There is a new menu item View->Goto Line to complement the above. (Noel Power)
• Dialog controls now have a spinbutton. (Noel Power)

Bundled Extensions

Presenter Console

• Presenter Console now features a "Exchange Screen Images" button to work around the bug that in some cases the projector/presentation screen was picked for the Presenter Console instead of the speaker's laptop screen (Michael Meeks, Astron).

Core changes

GUI

• The color picker (available e.g. in Tools -> Options -> Colors, press “Edit”) has been rewritten to be more modern and usable. See this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rPu6EmIxkIM&hd=1 (Christian Lippka)
• The unused toolbar menus were removed from the toolbars, and the indication that there are some hidden items was updated to look nicer; see the longer description (Jan Holesovsky)

• The application color settings (Tools -> Options -> Appearance) now have correct color previews for ‘Automatic’ colors in the combo drop-downs.
• Natural Sorting: Menus list their entries in a natural sort order; e.g., “Heading 10” now appears directly after “Heading 9” in the list instead of directly after “Heading 1”. See before and after screenshots. Example is in Writer > Format > Styles and Formatting. (Sébastien Le Ray)
• Added a Scan button to the scan dialog for unix (screenshot). (Rob Snelders)
• Substantial cleanup and re-factoring of vcl’s unix backends: adding initial port to gtk3, and hence via Broadway a web office prototype (Michael Meeks, Lucas Baudin, Caolan McNamara, Cosimo Cecchi)
• New object handles that use alpha transparency to improve usability. The legacy options of “Modern” vs. “Simple” and "Small" vs. "Large" handles were removed at the same time, to reduce toolbar clutter and user confusion (Tim Hardeck, Michael Meeks, Astron).

• Moved context-sensitive toolbars to the bottom to prevent them from overlaying important parts of the document. (Tim Hardeck)
• The Extension Manager dialog now has 3 checkboxes to allow the selection of the type of extension to display: Bundled (Installation), Shared and User, or a combination of the three (Olivier Hallot).

• The "Insert Movie and Sound" dialog now has a "Link" checkbox, enabling the embedding of media files into ODF package based documents. (Michael Stahl)
• Several GTK+ right-to-left interface glitches have been fixed making LibreOffice more RTL-aware and consistent with native GTK+ applications. (Khaled Hosny)

• Dialog appearing when saving in other formats than ODF has been improved for better UX. The truncated button strings in translations have been fixed. (Josh Heidenreich, Andras Timar, William Gathoye)

Performance

• large amounts of dead code removal reducing code size & bloat (Caolan McNamara, Joseph Powers)
• legacy binary file format filters cleanup to remove un-used write support (Joseph Powers)

Other

• Liberation fonts now included in Windows builds [1] (Olivier Hallot)
• LibreOffice will now use the newest Berkeley DB installed on the system (at compile time), not the oldest. (Lionel Elie Mamane)
• LibreOffice will now accept using a Java that is a symlink (Lionel Elie Mamane, from a Debian/oo-build patch)
• Support for Java 7 (1.7) added. User can select between Java 6 or 7 engine, if both are installed
• Support for Duden Korrektor extension versions 5.0 and 6.0 added. Due to a bug in the extension, both versions refuse to install in LibreOffice 3.4 (see comment 7 in fdo#37561 for a workaround). The bug was fixed in Duden Korrektor 8.0. That is, LibreOffice 3.5 works with Duden Korrektor versions 5.0, 6.0 as well as 8.0. Duden Korrektor is a commercial extension providing various writing aids for the German language. (Fridrich Strba)
• Fixed the Check for Updates... mechanism, and implemented the server side. It checks for updates automatically at user defined intervals, and allows manual download of the newest version. (Jan Holesovsky)

Scripting

• Python UNO: It is now possible to initialize the members of an UNO structure by name instead of by position. (Lionel Elie Mamane) For example:

from com.sun.star.util import Date
d1 = Date(Year=2004, Month=11, Day=2)
d2 = Date(Day=2, Year=2007, Month=5)

Compare to initialization by position:

from com.sun.star.util import Date
d1 = Date(2, 11, 2004)
d2 = Date(2, 5, 2007)

• Improved error messages when Python UNO bridge fails to load (Lionel Elie Mamane)

Code cleanups

• In parallel to simplifying Windows installer, source code of setup.exe and support for NSIS was removed. (Andras Timar)
• Lot of unused code from solenv/bin/modules/installer was removed, for example packaging for unsupported platforms. (Andras Timar)

Localization

• Added Arabic, Aragonese, Belarusian, Bengali, Breton, Bulgarian, Scottish Gaelic, Greek, Gujarati, Hindi, Latvian, Brazilian Portuguese, European Portuguese, Sinhala, and Telugu spelling dictionaries. <Please check this list, it is just a sketch arranged from the git log and may contain errors or omissions!> (Andras Timar)
• Use of possessive genitive case and/or partitive month names if provided by a locale’s locale data (e.g., Russian, Polish, Finnish, Lithuanian, and others).
  If a day of month (D or DD) is present in a number formatter’s date format code, the month name for MMM or MMMM is displayed in possessive genitive case or partitive case.
  Else if no day of month is present, the month name is displayed as noun / nominative case.
  See blog for more details. (Eike Rathke)
• Corrections to Polish [pl-PL], Portuguese [pt-PT and pt-BR], Slovenian [sl-SI], and Latin [la-VA] locale data, esp. date formats. (Eike Rathke, Martin Srebotnjak, Mateusz Zasuwik, Olivier Hallot, Roman Eisele, Sérgio Marques)

Windows installer

• Instead of NSIS pre-installer + setup.exe loader + MSI file + separate CAB file + many language transforms + VC redistributable files, now we have a single MSI file with everything embedded. It contains language transforms as substorages, VC redistributables as merge modules and CAB file is embedded, too. (Andras Timar)

Most annoying bugs

The following annoying bugs were not fixed in time and will be addressed in the regular bug fix releases:

• LibreOffice <= 3.4.4 can not be updated to 3.5.x directly; first, it must be updated to 3.4.5 or uninstalled (fdo#45068)
• Microsoft Office complains that documents written by LibreOffice 3.5 are invalid; It is because Ms Office does not support ODF 1.2 documents. See the above for more details (fdo#44498)
• Writer crashes when Readability Report 2.0.0-beta1 extension is installed; please, update the extension to the version 2.0.4 (fdo#44116)
• Flat XML file formats, for example .fodt, are not associated with LibreOffice by default on Windows; they can be opened using LO open dialog; also they can be associated with LO manually; it will be fixed in 3.5.1 (fdo#31624)
• Importing uno libraries in python my crash python; to work around the problem remove two files that also ship with your distribution /opt/libreoffice3.5/ure/lib/libgcc_s.so.1 and /opt/libreoffice3.5/ure/lib/libstdc++.so.6 (fdo#45696)
• some presentations crash when viewing on MAC; it helps to disable hardware acceleration in Tools/Options/LibreOffice/View/Use Hardware Acceleration (fdo#45584)

See the complete list here.