This branch of the office suite is nearing EOL status

Oct 7, 2015 08:59 GMT  ·  By

The Document Foundation has revealed that the first Release Candidate for LibreOffice 4.4.6 has been released, and it packs quite a lot of changes and improvements.

The developers from The Document Foundation usually provide support for a particular branch of the office suite for quite some time and numerous point releases are made. A good example is the 4.4.x branch of LibreOffice, which was released all the way back in January 2015. The end of life for LibreOffice 4.4.6 is expected on November 18, but that doesn't mean the application won't work after this date, just that no other fixes will be submitted for it.

A new version of LibreOffice, 5.0, has been released already, and it even received a couple of updates until now, so users already have a really good version available to replace the current one. The recent launch is just for RC1, and it looks like another one is coming.

What's new in LibreOffice 4.4.6

As you would expect, this is just a maintenance release, and there’s not much to see. Interestingly enough, even if it's an advanced version and the product is reaching end of life soon, developers still found quite a few things to fix.

According to the changelog, a fix substituting missing glyphs has been added, a number of DOCX-related improvements have been made, a file in a mounted WebDAV drive will no longer ask for user name and password, and drag and drop for images into Writer no longer opens Draw.

Moreover, the automatic font color now works correctly, when OpenGL is enabled, drop-down arrows, check marks, scrollbars etc. are no longer upside down, the footnote font size is no longer imported incorrectly, and many other smaller fixes have been added.

You can download the source packages for LibreOffice 4.4.6 RC1 from Softpedia if you want to compile them yourself, but you can also find the binaries for some of the components. In any case, you need to make sure that you don't run two different versions at the same time.