Last week I went to Zaragoza to give a talk on how LibreOffice handles interoperability at Protocols Plugfest Europe 2015 on Tuesday. Although I was told this conference is a successor of the previous Zentyal Summit (and I were not there) the conference seemed well-attended — proof above. :-)

Jacobo also gave a LibreOffice-related talk on Wednesday.

On the same day, there were some explicit spare time, so I took the opportunity to walk in the historical parts of the city, see my photos and a panorama if that kind of pictures are of your interest. FWIW, Hotel Sauce has free wifi in the rooms, that’s kind of impressing for a two-star category. ;-)

As usual, thanks Collabora for sponsoring this travel!

TL;DR: Import of old-style (pre-2010 for RTF, pre-2007 for DOCX) math equations embedded into text documents should be now imported as editable embedded math objects.

Longer version: if you want to embed math equations into RTF or DOCX files, you have two choices. The older approach is to embed a MathType OLE object into the file, the newer one is a native OOXML markup, which has an RTF markup equivalent as well. Handling of the later has been implemented by Luboš Luňák for DOCX a long time ago, and I contributed the RTF equivalent almost 3 years ago.

What remains is the handling of the older version, the embedded OLE object. Previously only the replacement graphic was imported, so regardless of the Tools → Options → Load / Save → Microsoft Office → MathType to Math checkbox, the result was never editable.

Here is how it looks like now:

Given that the RTF and the DOCX importers share lots of code in the writerfilter/ module, I implemented the same for the DOCX import at the same time, too. The interesting challenge was that writerfilter wants an XFilter implementation for the embedded object if it is to be handled internally by LibreOffice, but the MathType filter (originally created to handle math objects inside binary DOC files) didn’t have one. Once I implemented such a filter wrapper, the rest wasn’t too hard.

Here are test documents if you want to try it yourself. You’ll need a 5.0 daily build for that, though. ;-)

If I’m at describing features new in LibreOffice Writer 5.0 file filters, here are a few more:

And a number of bugfixes for the RTF filter:

Do these sound interesting? Look at what others did for LibreOffice 5.0 on the TDF wiki, even if it’s far from complete, as the 5.0 branch is not yet created. :-)

On Saturday I gave a talk at the Open IT 2015 conference about the new features of LibreOffice 4.3 and 4.4. My uploaded slides are available here.

Thanks Óbuda University for hosting us, it was a great event! Other than talking to the usual suspects like Tamás Zolnai or Gábor Kelemen, I enjoyed two OpenStreetMap talks: it was extermely cool to hear that finally the turistautak.hu community changed their license in February so that all their free maps can be imported to OpenStreetMap — finally one pointless fight ends.

On Tuesday the 5th Open Source Budapest meetup was held, I was one of the invited speakers, and gave a lightning talk about ged2dot, both as a standalone Python script and as a LibreOffice extension.

My uploaded slides are available here.

In from selections to graphic handling, I wrote about how we let the LibreOffice Android app select, resize and move images and shapes. Now that we have all type of selections (at least for Writer) in this TDF-funded project, let’s do some formatting! The example implemented by Jan Holesovsky here is to mark the text bold, but you can imagine that using the same technique a number of other character or paragraph properties could be set the same way with little work.

Here is how it works:

If you are interested how this looks like, here is a demo (click on the image to see the video):

Notice that Calc also gained a number of new features, like cell selection, blinking cursor, text selection with much help from Henry Castro.

Now that Writer is nearly functional for the basic editing features that would be good to see in all four applications, time to look at what’s new in Impress-land!

To bring Impress in line with Writer, we implemented the followings with Tomaž Vajngerl:

Here is a demo to show this in action:

For many of the above features, the core part was already implemented due to Writer shapes, what was missing is to call the same editeng methods from Impress and/or do missing core coordinates → LOK coordinates conversions. The later is twips for both cases in Writer, but Impress works in 100th millimeters internally, so it was necessary to do a number of conversions here and there so that LOK callbacks always emit coordinates in twips.

We also prepared more in-depth technical documentation about the Android editing work, libreofficekit/README and android/README now has much more details about how exactly the editing works.

That’s it for now — as usual the commits are in master (a few of them is only in feature/tiled-editing for now), so you can try this right now, or wait till the next Tuesday and get the Android daily build. :-)

In from input handling to selections, I wrote about how we let LibreOffice Android app draw the selections around text content natively. A next step in this TDF-funded project is to provide selections around more UI elements: images and shapes.

Here are a number of challenges we (Tomaž Vajngerl and me) faced while we implemented this:

If you are interested how this looks like, here is a demo (click on the image to see the video):

Notice how the word selection in a table turns into a table selection, or how a long push inside an empty cell creates a selection containing only the empty cell.

An other direction we’re working towards is to show / hide the soft keyboard of Android as you would expect it. On Linux, it’s easy: the keyboard is always available. However on Android you should track when it makes sense to use the keyboard and when not — and show/hide automatically according to the context. Examples:

Additionally, we need to handle the situation when this automagic goes wrong. The Android soft keyboard has a button to hide itself, but we added a toolbar button to force-show it, too (click on the image to see the video):

Finally, Siqi Liu added a new callback type, allowing to tap on hyperlinks and handle them according to how you configured URL handling on your Android device. Here is a demo to show this in action:

That’s it for now — as usual the commits are in master (a few of them is only in feature/tiled-editing for now), so you can try this right now, or wait till the next Tuesday and get the Android daily build. :-)

Earlier I wrote about my setup to hack libvisio. One missing bit was testing the contributed code. Testing can be performed at various levels, so far DLP libraries were tested by recording the output of the various foo2raw tools and then comparing the current output to some previously known good state. This has a number of benefits:

The same technique was used in LibreOffice for Impress testcases initially, however we saw a drawback there: Being automatically generated, you have no control over what part of the output is important and what part is not — both parts are recorded and when some part changes, you have to carefully evaluate on a case by case basis if the change is OK or not. The upshot is that from time to time you just end up regenerating your reference testsuite and till the maintainer doesn’t do that, everyone can only ignore the test results — so it doesn’t really scale.

In short, both techniques have some benefits, but given that the libvisio test repo is quite empty, I thought it’s a good time to give an other method (what we use quite successfully in LO code) a go, too. This method is easy: instead of recording the whole output of some test tool, output a structured format (in this case XML), and then just assert the interesting part of it using XPath. Additionally, these tests are in libvisio.git, so you can nicely put the code change and the testcase in the same commit. So the hope is that this is a more scalable technique:

Technically this method is implemented using a librevenge::RVNGDrawingInterface implementation that generates XML. For now, this is part of libvisio, so in case you want to re-use it in some other DLP library, you need to copy it to your import library, though if indeed multiple importers start to use it, perhaps it’ll be moved to librevenge. The rest of the test framework is a simple testsuite runner and a cppunit TestFixture subclass that contains the actual test cases.

So in case you are planning how to test your import library, then now you have two options, evaluate them and choose what seems to be the better tool for your purpose.

In from a living document to input handling, I wrote about how we handle touch and on-screen keyboard events in the LibreOffice Android app. A next step in this TDF-funded project is to provide more UI elements which are specific to touch devices: selections is one of them.

Here are the problems we had to solve to get this working:

Long push is reasonable to map to double mouse click, as in both cases e.g. in Writer the user expects to have a select word action. But for the adjustment of selections, we really had to define a new API (lok::Document::setTextSelection()) to allow setting the start or end of the selection to a new logical (in document coordinates, not paragraph / character indexes) point.

If you are interested how this looks like, here is a demo:

An other direction we’re working towards is to have the same features in other applications as well: Impress and Calc. Perhaps not so surprisingly, we hit similar problems in these applications as well that we had to solve in Writer. The typical problems are:

Here is how Impress looks like, with working tile invalidation, touch and keyboard handling:

Calc is lagging a bit behind, but it also has working tile invalidation and keyboard handling:

That’s it for now — as usual the commits of me and Tomaž Vajngerl are in master (a few of them is only in feature/tiled-editing for now), so you can try this right now, or wait till the next Tuesday and get the Android daily build. :-)

In from viewing only to a living document, I wrote about how tile invalidation can handle updates in the Android app in case what should be displayed on the screen changes. A next step in this TDF-funded project is to handle more than blinking text: keyboard and mouse/touch events from the user.

First let me enumerate over the issues we had to face:

As usual the commits of me and Tomaž Vajngerl are in master, so you can try this right now, or wait till tomorrow and get the Android daily build. However, if you are just interested how this looks like, here are some demos:

That’s it for now — next on our list are selections, so you can delete and overwrite more easily. :-)

Today is my last day in Brussels where I gave a TextBoxes: complex shapes with complex content and a LibreOffice on Android talk at FOSDEM 2015, in the Open document editors devroom. The devroom was well-crowded, with about 100 users in the rows of the audience — proof pictures above and below. ;-)

We also had a Hackfest with about 20 hackers attending, (again) kindly hosted by Betacowork on Monday and Tuesday:

There were a few topics I hacked on:

A full list of achievements is available, if you were at the hackfest and you did not contribute to that section, please write a line about what did you hack on. :-)

Quite some other slides are now available on Planet, don’t miss them. Mines are also uploaded.