A look at LibreOffice 4.4

Version 4.4 of the LibreOffice office suite was released in January. The 4.4 development cycle placed a significant emphasis on improving the user experience (UX) and polishing the user interface (UI), both of which are aspects of LibreOffice that have been the target of criticism in the past. Indeed, the new release does present a cleaner and more organized UI in many places—improvements that can make or break an office suite. But there are other noteworthy changes to be found in version 4.4, from improved interoperability with Microsoft Office to the results of a massive code-clean-up effort.

The latest release can be downloaded from the LibreOffice site. Linux builds are provided for 32-bit and 64-bit Intel systems, in RPM and Debian packages as well as in tar archives. There is a lengthy release notes page on the project's wiki that outlines the changes to each component (Writer, Calc, Impress, and so on).

Some of the most prominent new features, though, extend across all of LibreOffice's constituent parts—such as the UI enhancements. During Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2014, two students worked on converting all of LibreOffice's dialog boxes to the latest GtkBuilder format, which is both smaller and easier to work with than the older Glade format. Similarly, the drop-down toolbars and sidebars have been reworked, and many (if not all) right-click context menus have been reorganized.

The tricky aspect of this sort of development work is that it can easily go unnoticed, because it is largely about removing awkwardness: fixed-sized dialog boxes, drop-down menus that require a lot of scrolling, context menus that contain unnecessary (and rarely used) items. But if one knows where to look for them, the improvements are there to see. Take the "Bullets" and "Numbers" toolbar menus in Writer, for example. Clicking on the new menu items displays a rather large preview of each available style, which makes the alternatives instantly easy to distinguish from one another—something that was not so clear in older releases. But quantifying whether this change makes writing a little easier or much easier is hard to do.

Similarly, it is easy to point out that Cut, Copy, and Paste are now in the same position in every right-click context menu, but the practical impact it has is difficult to measure. Suffice it to say, then, that LibreOffice 4.4 incorporates a wealth of such changes that, when taken together, make the office suite far less frustrating to work in.

Of particular note on the UX front, the sidebar in Writer now provides access to the Styles and Gallery functions, which were previously hidden in separate dialog boxes. Styles allows the user to apply a pre-defined formatting style to selected text (e.g., footnotes, quotations, or various headers); Gallery offers drag-and-drop access to images that the user can place into a document. Both of these are functions that a typical user may need to drop into repeatedly during an editing session, so not having to open up a new window that steals focus from the main document is a big improvement.

The content of the toolbars has been significantly rearranged as well, with an eye toward making the most-common entries the easiest to reach. For those who read left-to-right languages, that means that the common entries are the furthest to the left, and the least likely to be hidden off screen. In retrospect, this seems like a rather obvious change to make, but in earlier versions of LibreOffice, the emphasis was evidently on grouping related toolbar items together. It is hard to be objective about which approach is universally better but, at the very least, not having important tools lost off-screen is certainly an improvement.

Users of a typographic bent will notice several improvements to the way fonts and special characters are treated. The character-selection widget (which is used to insert characters not found on the current locale's keyboard) has been simplified. There are also several interesting substitutions that are now automatically inserted by the spellchecker: typing (c) will insert the © sign; (tm) will insert ™, and so on. Version 4.4 also adds a new set of open-licensed fonts (Caladea and Carlito) designed to serve as drop-in replacements for Microsoft's Cambria and Calibri—which are, essentially, the modern equivalent of the so-called "core fonts" Times New Roman and Arial.

Among the many other application-specific improvements found in the 4.4 release, Writer now supports placing text into geometric shapes (and having the text confined to the outline of the shape) and the status bar at the bottom of the window now more clearly presents information about the current page. Calc's "Statistics Wizard," which automatically analyzes a set of cells, gained several new functions (like Quartiles and the Chi-square test). Draw finally gained a zoom tool, while Impress gained improved support for using OpenGL slide transitions. All applications can now export digitally signed PDFs; users must manually load their signing certificate into LibreOffice's certificate storage in order to take advantage of the feature.

There are quite a few additional file types now readable by LibreOffice 4.4. Much of the work involved in this area comes from the Document Liberation Project, a spin-off of LibreOffice that focuses on building file-format conversion libraries. Among the newly supported formats are Adobe PageMaker, MacDraw, RealAudio, Sony's LRF e-book format, Ogg Opus multimedia, and MPEG Audio.

Perhaps of more importance at a practical level, though, is that LibreOffice 4.4 updates its support of Microsoft's OOXML format to the latest revision. A sad fact of life is that the majority of LibreOffice users still need to exchange files with Microsoft Office users on a regular basis. LibreOffice may always lag somewhat behind Microsoft when it comes to OOXML file support (indeed, it is in Microsoft's interest to make competing office suites play catch-up), but there is no denying that it is a necessary feature.

The LibreOffice project reports that it undertook a major effort during the 4.4 development cycle to perform code reviews with the Coverity scanning service. The Coverity scans reportedly turned up more than 6,000 defects—all of which were fixed. That number included more than 1700 null pointer dereferences and 1100 uninitialized members. For a project of LibreOffice's size, it is impressive to see that much ground covered in such a relatively short time.

In some ways, LibreOffice 4.4 is not an exciting release: there is no banner-worthy new feature, but a great many small improvements instead. Then again, office suites might not ever need to trade on a reputation for excitement; steady progress and stability are more important. The UI and UX improvements offer a nicer visual design and an improved workflow, respectively; that might be enough to attract some more users to the project, but if their main impact is simply to make the editing experience smoother or more pleasing for existing users, that is a worthwhile end of its own.