Software Update: Apache OpenOffice 4.1.2

The final release of version 4.1.2 of OpenOffice has been released. This open source office suite started in 1984 as StarOffice. In 1999 it came into the hands of Sun Microsystems and then in 2010 it ended up with Oracle. After a number of developers switched to LibreOffice out of dissatisfaction with how Oracle managed this project, the source code was eventually donated to the Apache Software Foundation. OpenOffice comes with a word processor (Writer), a spreadsheet program (Calc), a presentation program (Impress), a drawing program (Draw), a database program (Base), and a scientific notation program (Formula). The release notes for version 4.1.2 look like this:

Improvements/Enhancements

• Several distinct enhancements were applied to the WebDAV management and file locking: OpenOffice is now able to properly interact with Microsoft Sharepoint, enabling a more productive usage in corporate-level environments. These enhancements were funded, and contributed upstream, by the Emilia-Romagna regional administration (Italy), where OpenOffice was adopted a few years ago.
• The PDF export dialog was redesigned for better usability on small laptop screens.
• Underlying libraries for the solver and digital signing functionality have been updated, for better performance and increased security.
• OpenOffice 4.1.2 fixes security vulnerabilities. see the security announcements page for more information.

Removed/Retired Features

Support for the ancient .hwp file format was retired. This was a rarely used format created with versions of the program named “Hangul Word Processor” prior to 1997; therefore impact on users is expected to be minimal. The few users who have files in the .hwp format should convert them to ODF using Apache OpenOffice 4.1.1 before upgrading.

Bug Fixes

• 125326 – SVG]Missing type attribute of style element does not get default value
• 107619 – Bug in Find & replace with regular expression
• 125991 – Fatal Error “index out of bounds” on Gtk
• 126480 – Update metadata for OpenOffice 4.1.2
• 118923 – Build of OS/2 tree
• 125501 – Spellcheck does not work, category B modules are missing (OS/2)
• 125592 – 4.1.1 RC3 (os/2) can’t open encrypted file, NSS modules are missing
• 126586 – automation deadlock: osl_closeSocket() doesn’t wake up thread stuck in accept()
• 125613 – Insert Picture from file do not work
• 126447 – When using LanguageTools, toggling the checkbox “check grammar” in the spell checker removes content
• 125897 – Color palette has ‘Blue 1’ as the same color as ‘Sky Blue 1’
• 63015 – DF-Export and Type1-Fonts: Error exporting umlaut
• 105098 – [Mac] inserting files (eg images) into a document by drag & drop isn’t possible
• 121492 – Base can’t filter by dates
• 122712 – PDF Export dialog too tall for some monitor screens
• 124158 – Update CoinMP
• 125194 – Cannot work with shared documents on Sharepoint webdav
• 125519 – CRASH when step through document from page to page
• 126281 – Remove HWP (Hangul Word Processor) filter
• 126305 – WebDAV lock on 4.1.1 does not work
• 126582 – When trying to access a read/only share on Sharepoint an error is shown
• 126120 – [IT] Wrong translation for “Record changes” (record di dati)
• 126572 – Update OpenSSL to 0.9.8zg
• 117989 – Basic functions Day(), Hour(), Minute(), and Second() return wrong results for dates <1900-1-1
• 123901 – formula DGET() gives #VALUE! error when fetching calculation resulting in string
• 124712 – Build broken on Linux Ubuntu 14.04 (undefined reference to __cxa_atexit)
• 125776 – Support Xcode 6 and API changes in 10.9 platform SDK
• 125815 – support build with OSX 10.10 SDK
• 126495 – Update English dictionary to version 2015.09.01
• 126573 – Update English dictionary to version 2015.10.01
• 126454 – Update English dictionary to version 2015.08.01
• 126258 – javadoc fails to build
• 126541 – Remove dependency on Google Code for 4.1.2 builds
• 126588 – Update Portuguese dictionary to version 15.10.3.1
• 126567 – Update copyright year
• 126578 – Update configure.in from trunk’s configure.ac
• 126579 – Update set_soenv.in from trunk
• 126553 – Port FreeBSD build enhancements

Language Support

• OpenOffice 4.1.2 supports the same languages ​​as OpenOffice 4.1.1.
• The following translations were updated: Italian.
• The following dictionaries were updated: English en-GB, English en-US, English en-CA, Portuguese pt-PT.

For a complete list of available languages ​​and language packs see this page.

Additional Platform Support

• Binaries are still provided for the same platforms as OpenOffice 4.1.1: Windows, Mac OS X, Linux 32-bit and 64-bit (RPM and DEB).
• Thanks to build system fixes, OpenOffice can now be built on modern Linux distributions.
• OpenOffice 4.1.2 contains improvements that allow for an out-of-the box build on FreeBSD (courtesy of Don Lewis and Pedro Giffuni)
• OpenOffice 4.1.2 contains improvements that allow for an out-of-the box build on OS/2 (courtesy of Yuri Dario).

Known Issues

• Mac OS X: Apache OpenOffice 4.1.2 will be flagged by the Gatekeeper facility in Mac OS X. This is a new feature to help guard against malware on Mac systems. There is a procedure laid out at the following link to allow applications not installed from the Mac App store to run. see the Mac support article.
• Mac OS X: Due to a known bug in Oracle Java installations of Apache OpenOffice on OSX that do not have the legacy Apple Java 6 installed will not be able to recognize Oracle Java 7, 8, and possibly 9. The work around until the Java bug is fixed is to install the legacy version of Apple Java from the following link: Legacy Apple Java 6. This will allow the portions of AOO that require Java to run properly.
• For developers: the source package of OpenOffice 4.1.2 will not build on 32-bit versions of Ubuntu 14.04 and similar distributions. The source fails to build in main/svl with this error: undefined reference to `__stack_chk_fail’. This can be worked around by copying and pasting the command that fails and running it manually with “-lc” appended (as the missing __stack_chk_fail symbol is present in libc, but the linker doesn’t search there).
• For developers: the OpenOffice SDK won’t build with Java 8. Either build with –disable-odk or see the dev list archives for possible solutions.