Apache OpenOffice 3.4.0

What's new in this version:

License Change:
- The License has changed to our simpler, non-restrictive, Apache License 2. The Apache License will make adoption, distribution and modification of the software easier for all users and developers. Of course the software remains free, and the source code with its updates will continue to be available through the Apache Software Foundation servers.

Misc. Updates:
- In accordance to the new license all the software components have been updated to use licenses that are in line with ASF guidelines. No critical functionality was lost, and we did update many libraries that will work better on most situations. Many internal libraries and headers were updated with modern versions that provide the same or superior functionality. On selected platforms the "Liberation" fonts were replaced with the improved Google Chrome fonts.

Calc: Faster LP solver:
- The previous Linear Programming solver has been replaced with the faster and better designed CoinMP from the Computational Infrastructure for Operations Research (COIN-OR) project.

Apache Tomcat updated:
- The Apache Tomcat servlet was updated from the older version 5.0.30 to version 5.5.35 which brings in years of performance and security improvements without changing the API. We plan to continue updating components without causing any regression on the current code.

Support for Line Cap Property:
- Now you can add a cap to the end of a line. Such caps are not only known in the ODF1 .2 standard but in HTML5 and SVG too. Also other Office Suites provide caps in different styles to be added to thick lines.

Support for shear transformations for GraphicObjects:
- GraphicObjects which get created when inserting graphics in Draw/Impress and Spreadsheet support now not only rotation but also shear, slant and distort. The visualization during interactions was improved, also the break for vector-based GraphicObjects to draw objects was improved. Writer has its own GraphicObjects; the ones from the other applications can be copied to it as workaround.

Support for attributes and transformations for OLEObjects:
- OLEObjects (OLE is for Object Linking and Embedding) in Draw/Impress and Spreadsheet support now all draw attributes and geometrical transformations. They can have line style, fill style, shadow and text. They support all transformations, e.g. rotations and shear. This is handy for e.g. having a mathematical formula shown rotated by 90 degrees or adding a border to a chart. Break to draw objects is also enhanced.

Enhanced crop support for GraphicalObjects:
- Crop for GraphicObjects now works correctly together with horizontal and/or vertical mirroring in all applications.

Support for Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG):
- SVG is now supported as content for GraphicObjects in all applications. The new implemented generic SVG interpreter supports SVG format 1.1. The geometric content is internally processed as vector data in all usages, e.g. PDF export and printing, which guarantees good visualization quality. SVG graphics can be broken to draw objects and be processed further.

Support for MultiImage in ODF:
- For SVG support it was necessary to allow multiple image representations for one GraphicObject to be present in the ODF file format, e.g. a pixel graphic and the original SVG is written in case of a GraphicObject with SVG content. This allows it to stay compatible with other and older ODF supporting applications.

Enhanced chart visualization:
- The visualization quality of charts has been enhanced by using a new mechanism for more direct visualization. This increases speed, reduces memory usage and enhances chart visualization in all visualizations, including PDF export and printing.

Writer: Asian Language Word Count:
- The word count of Asian languages is now correct. Previous releases were counting terms instead of words when counting words of Asian language text. Notice that file word count will not be automatically updated for existing text documents. You need to make a change to the document in order to force an update of the file word count.

New regular expressions (regexp) engine:
- The existing regular expression engine has been replaced by the ICU engine. This solves several bugs in "Find and Replace" with the old implementation and speeds up the search.
- The new engine also offers better standards compliance especially regarding Unicode, which also means that some non-standard syntax extensions like \< and \> for word boundary matching are now deprecated. For the convenience of a smooth upgrade experience they get emulated by the \b operator though.

New Color Picker dialog:
- The old color picker which is used in the office code for over a decade has been replaced by a new, more intuitive one which offers a wide variety of color selection possibilities. This feature was developed by Christian Lippka; kudos to him for offering it under Apache License. A picture says more than words.