The first Mac OS X version cut of the open source office suite, OpenOffice, has emerged blinking into the daylight. It's due to be officially announced at OSDCon later today.

This new version, 1.0, is a new branch, with a "boatload" of Mac-specific patches, that adds up to a 147MB download. But it prints and saves, so there's been much progress since a very rough cut appeared early this year. From the screenshots the font rendering looks no worse than running Microsoft Office v.X pre-10.1.5* (which added support for font smoothing).

The project home page is here, and there's a roadmap here. This runs under the XFree86 X server, but a native Quartz version is one of the project's goals. A mature, native OS X version of OpenOffice will be a boon for native Farsee, Arabic and Hebrew writers, as all these are or will be supported.

"We do need more developers to take the port to Aqua," Louis Suarez-Potts Community Manager for OpenOffice.org tells us. ®

Bootnote: Which alas, is what I'm running now on my G4, as I've run into this problem, which prevents me from updating 10.1 with any of the cached Software Updates in a parallel installation. Doh...!