If you ever tried to use graphical bullets in Writer (Format → Bullets and Numbering → Graphics), you may have noticed that only the ODF filter can load and save such a numbering. This is now improved a lot. Motivated by seeing this is now handled in the binary DOC filter, I now added support for this also to the DOCX and RTF import and export filters. If you want to play with this feature, core.git also contains a DOCX and an RTF sample as well.

LibreOffice started to use Gerrit for code review, and while occasional contributors can submit patches manually, in case one does many reviews, it’s handy to use a dedicated tool. In core.git, we have logerrit, but that’s not advised for regular reviewers, either, git-review is recommended instead.

So I looked into git-review. The good news is that it’s packaged already for most distributions, e.g. a simple

on openSUSE installs it.

I wanted to use this tool for two tasks:

Probably the browser interface is still the best to comment (especially inline comment) and approve changes, though David even submitted a proof of concept patch for that as well.

Finally, let me just clear two myths:

When you create a rectangle or text frame in Writer, you have two choices. You can use the draw toolbar to create a drawinglayer rectangle, and you can also insert a text frame. The drawinglayer shapes are shared between the LibreOffice applications, and already supported having not only a bitmap or a color but a gradient or a hatch as a background. The benefit of Writer text frames is that they can contain anything a normal Writer document can — think of columns, tables, etc. These features are not supported by drawinglayer rectangles.

So till now you had to decide what to pick, but it wasn’t possible to have both. LibreOffice 4.1 makes this situation better. Now it’s possible to have gradient backgrounds in Writer text frames as well:

The nice thing is that this feature was already supported by ODF, just not by Writer, so no such paperwork was needed this time. Also the OOXML filters are updated. As I already stated in this comment, the binary DOC and RTF filters are not yet touched regarding this feature — though I already looked into the RTF one, and have some idea what rework is needed there first.

We spent the last weekend in Brussels, at FOSDEM 2013. Outside attending great talks, I most enjoyed meeting people I haven’t met in person before, in no particual order:

Also fixed fdo#48440, fdo#58646 and fdo#59419 during less-interesting talks. ;-)

Additionally, during the last day we had time for some site-seeing, some pictures are here. Slides of other LibreOffice talks are also available.

I think the first attempt to track LibreOffice RTF Writer regressions (bugs not presenting in some earlier versions) was in this mail. That started with 14 bugs, and of course while I fixed a few, new ones were added as well. I guess this is mostly due to testing work, since new fixes are usually covered by unit tests, so re-introducing the same problems nowadays is a bit more work.

I remember I was down to one regression a few months ago, but we still had performance problems, which got solved a few weeks ago, so I had the idea that I want to go down to zero during the holidays. It seems today I finally managed to do so — bugs tagged as rtf_filter and regression are gone, thanks everyone who helped! :-)

For the reference here are the queries: RTF regressions, fixed RTF regressions, Writer regressions.

Now that the list is empty, feel free to tag more bugs as rtf_filter from the long Writer list when needed.

Update: the list is now empty again, as of 2014-11-24, for the 4.4 release. ;-)

The Free Software Conference 2012 — orginized by FSF.hu — was held today @ Budapest. I gave a talk about hacking on new Writer features (slides).

We (with Andras) also ran the LibreOffice booth, and in idle cycles I also had time to kill this annoying bug. This year speakers got a t-shirt and a fine lunch, thanks for the organizers! :)

During the weekend I was in Munich to visit our second LibreOffice hackfest this year. The archivements are detailed here. Here are a few interestings details I learned during this event:

Speaking about icecream — there were two reasons why I didn’t really use it:

It turns out none of this is really needed, so let me share the way to avoid these problems:

Additionally, if you run openSUSE 12.2, by default the daemon reports that the box can’t compile x86_64 binaries (probably it hasn’t been updated to deal with the 3.0 kernel or something), a quick workaround is to install Lubos' updated package:

Thanks for the organizers, once again this hackfest turned out to be really useful! :)

As usual, some pictures are available.

It’s possible you noticed that in each LibreOffice release notes, we have a line saying something like "improved DOCX support", but is rarely explained in detail. I’m posting here a few screenshots to correct this. The first series is a list of import fixes which are already available in our shipping 3.6 release. In each case I provide a test document, and a screenshot how it looked like with LibreOffice 3.3 and how it looks like with LibreOffice 3.6 today. Click on the images to get a larger image:

Now let’s also have a look at some OOXML features which will be imported correctly in our upcoming 4.0 release:

If you want to try these out yourself, get a daily build and play with it! :) If something goes wrong, report it to us in the Bugzilla, so we can try fix it before 4.0 is released. And remember, there are lots more improvements coming in LibreOffice 4.0, stay tuned!

It all started with this bugreport about a year ago. RTF has two different markups to describe shapes. The old one (used till Word 6.0) is called Drawing Objects, the new one talks about Shapes. The first picture shows the "support" for this syntax in LibreOffice 3.4, and the situation did not change with my RTF import rework, as I wasn’t aware of any document still using this old syntax. So when I got this bugreport, I knew it’ll take some time to produce the correct layout, but now during the LibreOffice conference I spent quite some time on this, and at the end even the Hebrew text is imported correctly. ;-)

Thanks to Lior who politely nagged me from time to time, this is now available on master (see the second picture), which will become LibreOffice 4.0.

When you want to have pages with different properties in Writer, you use page styles. If you want to do something similar in Word, you have to use sections. One of the benefits of page styles is that you can use them multiple times, and — as usual with styles — whenever you change your mind, you can edit just the style, and all its uses will be updated consistently. There is, however, one feature that Word sections have and we lacked so far: sections can have different headers and footers on first, left and right pages. In Writer, you had to use two different page styles if you wanted to achieve the same: typically named "First page", then a "Default". This was because Writer could differentiate only between right and left pages, not first ones.

In LibreOffice 3.7, there will be a new checkbox to "unshare" the header and footer of the first page with right/left pages:

Right now, only ODF filters are updated to open / save this feature (as suggested by this old proposal) — in later versions it’s planned to update the DOCX, DOC and RTF filters as well, removing quite some code from import filters working around this limitation of Writer core.