We are glad to announce that the next OpenOffice.org version (OpenOffice.org 1.1) has reached an important milestone and is now available for download as OpenOffice.org 1.1 Beta. It represents a significant advance in the application and incorporates the features and changes introduced in the developer builds over the past year. The release includes a massive amount of new and exciting functionality, features and bugfixes, the highlights are:

• Many new import/export formats like PDF, Macromedia Flash, DocBook, several PDA Office file formats, flat XML and XHTML
• Support for Complex Text Layout (CTL) and vertical writing languages, such as Thai, Hindi, Arabic, Hebrew
• Enhanced integration with Java, with up to 10 times better performance
• Support for Accessibility throughout the entire suite
• Support for add-on components
• Initial support for recovering damaged OOo files
• Support for a new data source type - MySQL
• Improved online help (F1)

A more complete list of features is available. Or you can rush ahead and download it.

While OpenOffice.org 1.1 beta is ready for day-to-day use and we would like as many people as possible to test it we must be stress that this is still a beta version and thus contains more bugs than a final version would. The QA project wants all bug-submitters to keep in mind that they should rember to pick the right version number (”1.1 beta”) when submitting bugs to IssueZilla (http://www.openoffice.org/project_issues.html).

Thanks for supporting the OpenOffice.org project