LibreOffice 3.5 approaches with first release candidate

The Document Foundation has published the first release candidate (RC1) for version 3.5.0 of LibreOffice. No new features have been added to the 3.5.0 release candidate since the beta releases and the development team has focused on addressing bugs found in the earlier development versions.

Version 3.5.0 will be major update that already includes a number of performance improvements and new features, such as an updated interface for handling headers and footers. Other changes include the addition of an import filter for Microsoft Visio documents in Impress / Draw, improvements to grammar checking and various dialogue updates. The final version of LibreOffice 3.5.0 is expected to arrive in early February.

Over the past weekend, 21 and 22 January, as part of the project's second bug hunting session, members of the Quality Assurance (QA) team and some experienced LibreOffice developers helped those testing the release to report bugs in the open source office suite. Normally users can only report problems in LibreOffice via Bugzilla. However, in the recent sessions, bugs could also be sent in using IRC chat and email; during the first bug reporting session in December, more than 150 volunteers reported over 70 bugs.

Further information about the upcoming 3.5.0 update can be found in the release notes. LibreOffice 3.5.0 RC1 is available to download for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux from the project's site. Users testing the release are encouraged to provide feedback and report any bugs that they encounter.

The most recent production release of LibreOffice is version 3.4.5; released earlier this month, 3.4.5 is a bug fix update to the current 3.4 branch. Source code for LibreOffice is licensed under the LGPLv3.

See also:

• "Call for locations" for LibreOffice 2012/13 conferences, a report from The H.
• LibreOffice - a dive into the unknown, a feature from The H.

(crve)