LibreOffice 3.5 is Available

As readers may recall, back in September 2010, the LibreOffice project was created as a fork of the existing OpenOffice project, to continue development of the productivity suite separately from Oracle.   The Document Foundation was set up to be the governing body for LibreOffice, much as the Mozilla Foundation oversees the development of Firefox, Thunderbird, and other projects.  LibreOffice is free (as in beer) to download, and is released under the GNU Lesser General Public License [LGPL], version 3.

The foundation has now announced the release of version 3.5 of LibreOffice, for Windows, Mac (Intel or PowerPC), and Linux.   It incorporates many security and bug fixes, as well as some new features, including:

• An import filter for Microsoft Visio documents
• Better font “hinting”
• Automatic check for updates
• Native PostgreSQL database driver
• User interface improvements

The foundation’s site has a more complete overview of new features and fixes, as well as the Release Notes.  You can download the new version here.

As with previous versions of LibreOffice and OpenOffice, the software is able to read documents in many proprietary formats, including Microsoft Office formats, and can save documents in many of them.  It has also had, for years, the ability to save documents in Adobe’s Portable Document Format (.pdf), making them accessible on many different platforms.

Incidentally, The Document Foundation has now been legally incorporated in Berlin, Germany, as a rechtsfähige Stiftung des bürgerlichen Rechts, a German endowed not-for-profit foundation.

(Mea culpa: The 3.5 release was made on February 14.  It was on my list of things to blog, but somehow slipped through the cracks.)