Release Notes for Apache OpenOffice 4.1.2

General Remarks

Apache OpenOffice 4.1.2 brings stability fixes, bug fixes and enhancements. All users of Apache OpenOffice 4.1.1 or earlier are advised to upgrade. You can download Apache OpenOffice 4.1.2 here.

Please review these Release Notes to learn what is new in this version as well as important remarks concerning known issues and their workarounds.

Our Bugzilla issue tracking database provides a detailed list of solved issues.

General areas of improvement include: Writer, Calc, Impress/Draw, Base, compatibility with Microsoft-based environments, build system improvements. Further details on each of these areas are below.

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

See the list in Bugzilla

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: http://www.openoffice.org/download/other.html

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.

Installation Information

Installation instructions can be found at: http://www.openoffice.org/download/common/instructions.html

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