31 Mar 2008 11:07
OpenOffice 2.4, which was released on Thursday, comes with an assortment of collaboratively engineered bug fixes and small, but significant, usability enhancements.
This picture, for example, shows a new "persistent" icon list that allows users to store all their custom icons in one, easy-to-find place.
Many users had been asking for the capability to reverse the direction of the axes within a graph — a feature now included in OpenOffice's chart function.
As it is has now become possible to display value and percentage value at the same time within a chart's data labels, it has also became necessary to allow those different values to be shown on separate lines within the label.
Although it is widely used, Adobe's Portable Document Format (PDF) is not a recognised ISO standard. Therefore, OpenOffice 2.4 has made it possible to export a document to the ISO-approved alternative, PDF/A. The benefit of this is primarily in archiving documents for future use, as there are several versions of PDF, as well as several options for it.
In PDF/A, also known as ISO 19005-1, fonts have to be embedded, and audio, video and JavaScript are not allowed.
The Writer application in OpenOffice 2.4 now has a new control in the status bar to show what language is being used at the current cursor position or selection — a function necessary for spellchecking purposes.
The control also allows the language to be changed for the entire document or selected text, without having to delve into the main menus.
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