LibreOffice 3.4 Will Have Native Support for Ubuntu Global Menu

The Document Foundation and LibreOffice developers have been keeping quite busy. The foundation is busying itself getting ready for the LibreOffice Conference in Paris this fall, organizing speakers, accepting papers, and other thankless tasks while developers are coding full steam ahead.

Version 3.4 will come with several new features besides its usual bug fixes and performance enhancements. For example, Writer will soon support color and line styles in columns and footers. Greek characters mode will be available for bullet lists too.

Calc will soon be able to support multiple subtotals for a given subset of number ranges on a single sheet. A complete rewrite of the drawing layer will improve "precision on re-positioning and re-sizing of drawing objects." Impress with sport improved HTML export with images.

The core will feature several nice changes as well. One will be the natural sorting of menu lists such as the paragraph type. For example, Heading 10 will follow Heading 9 as one might expect. Autocorrect enhancements such as typing http will no longer auto-capitalize the H. The mouse pointer should be more precise. LibreOffice should demonstrate smoother starts by starting the splash sooner in the process and faster startups due to code clean-ups.

And Ubuntu users might be particularly interested in the new native Unity global menu support coming in LibreOffice 3.4. Beta 4 was released May 6, RC2 is scheduled for May 23, and final is expected May 31.