Apache OpenOffice 4.0.0

What's new in this version:

GENERAL REMARKS:
- OpenOffice 4.0 features an innovative new Sidebar user interface, additional language support for 22 languages (including 3 new languages), 500 bug fixes, improvements in Microsoft Office interoperability, enhancements to drawing/graphics, performance improvements, etc. You can read the details of these later in these Release Notes.


NEW FEATURES AND ENHANCEMENTS:
New Sidebar:
- The Sidebar makes better use of today's widescreen displays than traditional toolbars. The 'Properties' deck is context-sensitive and shows panels with the document properties that are most frequently used for the current editing task.

Interoperability Improvements:
- Fidelity and interoperability improvement is an ongoing goal for Apache OpenOffice. And there are many improvements going in to the new version.


DRAWOBJECT IMPROVEMENTS/ENHANCEMENTS:
New Color Palette:
- The Color Palette is enhanced and extended with a selection of more useful colors, arranged in a new scheme to make finding colors simpler. The new Palette is a mix of the Lotus Symphony Palette combined with the most useful original colors.

New Gradients:
- The Gradients are enhanced and extended with new, more useful ones, mainly taken from Lotus Symphony. The old ones are kept, but moved to the end of the list (not in the picture). These Gradients create much nicer fills for uses such as Slide Backgrounds.


NEW GALLERY THEMES AND GALLERY ENHANCEMENTS:
Refined the Selection Handles User Interface:
- Selection Handles were reworked to be more distinguishable.
- Transparency was added to give a slight 'clue' when the Handles cover something, but only for the Handle's fill (not their outlines) to not make them harder to view as necessary.
- The design was slightly rounded.
- Colors were tweaked a little bit for better identification (mainly when Handles are selected).
- When Keyboard-travelling over handles (CTRL-TAB) yellow handles used for CustomShapes now blink as the other handles to visualize the active handle correctly.

Refined Selection Visualization:
- For many occasions the selection of objects or multiple objects got enhanced using the selection color from the system.
- Usage and fetching of that system-wide SelectionColor was unified to guarantee it for all selections on all Systems.
- A slight blinking was added to identify objects where text can be added by starting to type or pressing return.

Better Print Preview:
- The PrintPreview in the Print dialog is now fully AntiAlialised. The previous version was not, thus thin lines could vanish or produce missing parts.

Enhanced conversion to Bitmap Graphics:
- The conversion to Bitmap graphics is greatly enhanced for all kinds of draw objects, including chart OLEs and others. This is not only useful for internally converting objects to bitmaps, but also used for exports where bitmaps are needed, and the system clipboard. It works with single objects as well as multiple selections. Transparencies of the object and AntiAliasing on its edges are perfect now.

Enhanced FillType 'Bitmap':
- All DrawingObjects which can have a Bitmap filling can now profit from the new, greatly enhanced Bitmap FillType.

Enhanced Copy/Paste:
- All applications now support transparent and anti-aliased versions of, for example, DrawObjects in the selection to be exchanged with external applications. This is a result of the enhanced conversion to Bitmap and adding the PNG graphic format to the supported clipboard formats. Non-Graphic objects are converted on-demand, and graphic objects are copied with full transparency and AntiAliasing support. It is now possible to Copy/Paste any object to an external PixelGraphic application, modify it as needed, and copy it back to any OpenOffice Application without quality loss. This allows everyone easy and complete image manipulation outside the Office with the tool of his choice and the capabilities he needs.

Enhanced Drag&Drop:
- Drag&Drop has been enhanced by an 'internal' mode. It is now possible to Drag&Drop anything 'onto' an existing DrawObject to change it's graphic or fill style when holding CTRL+SHIFT (Ctrl+Cmd on Mac) during Drag&Drop.

Adapt LineStart/End to LineWidth:
- It is practical when you change the LineWidth of an Object which has ArrowHeads defined at its start/end when the ArrowHeads used get adapted to your LineWidth change; else you have to adapt these by your own. This was already done for Draw and Impress. This is now unified and centralized and works in all OpenOffice applications.

SVG Export enhancements:
- Some enhancements for SVG export were added to avoid some quality losses. More improvements are planned in this area for future releases.

SVG/Metafile Break improvements:
- If an imported SVG/metafile is manipulated, it needs to be broken up into DrawObjects. This code was improved in this release. More improvements are planned in this area for future releases.

SVG Import improvements:
- Enhancements and bug fixes were made in the SVG Import code . Thanks to all Users who were reporting issues and providing test documents for SVG. If you have a SVG file which looks different than it should, do not hesitate to attach it to an issue in the Apache OpenOffice Bugzilla.

Picture Crop mode offers preview:
- When working on a GraphicObject it is allowed to set a Crop region for it. When using the interactive mode for that, the new version shows the non-visible part of the Graphic content (the croppped part) as transparent and surrounds it with a light border. This way you no longer have to guess where or how big the cropped data is.

Unified visualization of ColorPalette popups:
- All places where a ColorPalette popup is shown (the form where the colors are organized in a raster) are overhauled and made to use the same sizes and width. The width (12 columns) was adapted to the new designed ColorPalette. For a picture see 'New Color Palette'

Transparency support for pixel formats (PNG):
- When exporting selected drawing objects to formats that support transparency, e.g., PNG, OpenOffice now uses a transparent background by default. This allows to further use graphics created in other applications or for further processing.

Connectors support rotation:
- Connectors no longer disable rotation or shear tools when selected. While this is a small benefit with single connectors, it is very useful when selecting a number of graphic objects and wanting to rotate them. This was requested in the OpenOffice Community Forum, where a user wanted to rotate a drawing made of many draw objects and many connectors by 90 degrees. This is now possible without the inconvenience of deselecting all of the connectors.

Corrected Hatch fill style visualization:
- When zooming out or in small visualizations (e.g. Page Previews) objects or pages using a hatch fill style were poorly visualized since too many hatch lines were shown in a small area. The Hatch Fill Style now uses a minimal line distance to make it look good for visualizations in Edit Views. This was already the case in older office versions, but was lost in the redesign of the visualization.

Better gradient support in metafiles:
- Gradients in metafiles are rotated and sheared (slanted) together with the metafile and so behave similar to bitmap graphics. Start color and end color are included in those gradients now. This improvement becomes visible if you use a small number of gradient steps. All gradients are now shown in presentation mode the same as they are shown in edit mode.


CALC AND CHART IMPROVEMENTS/ENHANCEMENTS:
Support relative Pie Chart Height:
- For Pie charts imported from other formats, the Height attribute was not supported. This is added now and makes Pie Charts look more like the original.

New Functions:
- Calc now supports the spreadsheet functions: AVERAGEIFS, COUNTIFS, and SUMIFS. These functions allow you to combine several conditions.
- Calc now supports the function XOR. The function completes the already available set of Boolean functions.
- Calc now supports the functions LEFTB, RIGHTB, LENB, and MIDB. These functions are special versions for DBCS (double byte character set) languages.
- Calc's RAND function was reimplemented to use the Mersenne-Twister algorithm.


EXTENSIONS IMPROVEMENTS/ENHANCEMENTS:
New Toolbar management:
- Extensions now use a new Toolbar management, see https://issues.apache.org/ooo/show_bug.cgi?id=121577 ; at the moment, Extensions for 3.x that are using the deprecated mechanism will have to be updated to work with OpenOffice 4.0. Many popular extensions, including dictionaries, are not affected by the change.

Unified menu API:
- The Menu API has been unified, making it more clear and API-user-friendly. The following interfaces have been deprecated and replaced: css.awt.XMenuExtended, css.awt.XMenuExtended2, css.awt.XMenuBarExtended, css.awt.XPopupMenuExtended. See https://issues.apache.org/ooo/show_bug.cgi?id=121542#c2 for details.

PERFORMANCE IMPROVEMENTS/ENHANCEMENTS:
Many resource leaks were fixed:
- Many resource leaks were fixed, reducing memory requirements and improving application stability.

Speedup of Graphic Rendering:
- Bitmaps with transparency are painted directly
- Bitmaps which are transformed (rotated/sheared/mirrored) are painted directly
- Lines with LineWidth and/or transparence are painted directly
- Geometry and Pixel data is buffered in system-dependent formats
- For example, this allows even animated GIFs to be used as object fill style for any object and to transform these in real time (when supported on the system). It also greatly enhances visualization geometry during editing (in the EditViews) when supported.

ADDITIONAL LANGUAGE SUPPORT:
- For a complete list of available languages and language packs see the detailed download page. Several other language translations are in-progress and will be released when available.

IMPROVED QUALITY MANAGEMENT TOOLS:
New Automated Testing Framework:
- Apache OpenOffice 4.0 has a new automated testing framework based on JUNIT that tests in the areas
- BVT (Basic Verification Tests)
- FVT (Functional Verification Tests)
- PVT (Performance Verification Tests)
- SVT (System Verifcation Tests)


CHANGES THAT IMPACT BACKWARDS COMPATIBILITY:
Module binfilter removed:
- We no longer read or write the legacy StarOffice file formats (files with extensions .sdw, .sdc, .sdd, etc.). Removal of this code makes the OpenOffice codebase easier to maintain. The legacy formats have never been the default format in any version of OpenOffice. Users with legacy StarOffice documents are advised to re-save them into ODF format (.odt, *.ods, *.odp, etc.) *before upgrading to Apache OpenOffice 4.0. This can be done using File - Wizards - Document Converter in OpenOffice 3.x OpenOffice 1.x files (*.sxw, *.sxc, *.sxi) are still supported.

Python support updated:
- PyUNO is now compatible with the latest C-Python 3.x but in order to reduce the impact for existing applications, support for C-Python 2.x has been preserved and remains the default. The internal Python, used by default in the Windows and MacOS-X ports, has now been upgraded with version 2.7.5 which fixes hundreds of bugs and has important performance improvements but is still compatible with previous versions. Existing scripts may require minor adjustments but will normally just continue working as before.

Support for system C++ STL:
- The stlport4 template library was obsoleted with the TR1 report of the C++ standard and was deprecated and no longer maintained. Apache OpenOffice 4 switches to the system's native standard template library, so extensions written in C++ need to be recompiled with the Apache OpenOffice 4 SDK.

BUG FIXES:
- As of July 17th 2013 there were 498 verified issues that have been resolved.

Important bug fixes have been made in these areas:
- Support for Java 7, and the Java Access Bridge v2.0.3 implemented in JRE 1.7u6 and later has been restored. Windows OS users requiring Accessibility support for Assistive Technology tools can now use current Oracle releases of the Java SE 7 Runtime Environment and the Java Accessibility API on Windows.