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.

More than 10 years ago, a bug was opened in the OpenOffice.org bugzilla to support this feature. Later this got imported to LibreOffice’s bugtracker. Now that LibreOffice 3.6 is out, time to talk more about what features will show up in 3.7, and this will be one of them:

Now that it’s there, let’s have a look at the details:

Finally, one known limitation is that the text range currently can’t include multiple paragraphs — something to improve later if necessary.

You may remember that LibreOffice 3.5 learned to import RTF OLE objects (including math expressions) in Writer. In LibreOffice 3.7, the same is now true for math expressions expressed using native RTF math markup:

If you are interested in the details, then the nice thing about this implementation is that:

So if you like this new feature, don’t forget to thank Luboš Luňák, who is the author of the OOXML math import/export. :-) In case you way to play with this feature, test documents are available.

You may remember that LibreOffice 3.5 learned to import SmartArt in Impress. In LibreOffice 3.6, the same is now true for Writer:

Note that just like in Impress, Writer produces far from perfect result if the prerendered output of the diagram is not present in the document. In practice, we can open files produced by Word 2010 just fine, but problems with Word 2007 are expected.

In case you way to play with this feature, a test document is available.

The Hungarian Linux in the Education Conference 2012 was held today @ Budapest, I held a generic session about LibreOffice (slides), also talked a few guys into submitting Easy Hacks. ;)

Other interesting stuff: a free Logo interpreter in PyUNO by Laszlo, available here.

We were in Hamburg during this weekend, and I think all of us had great fun, kudos go to the organizers! If you are curious, here are the topics I worked on besides mentoring when I was asked to do so:

Also thanks Stefan for correcting the misleading icons of the horizontal/vertical flipping in Writer. ;)

We presented TDF on this conference with Andras today. It was nice to see familar and new faces as well, we turned some mentioned problems into bugreports and I also fixed the barcode extension to work again with LibreOffice 3.4+, as requested by a user.

We will give a talk about LPSP and CMIS with Cedric at FOSDEM2012. If you wonder what LPSP and CMIS are:

See you in Brussels!

There was an old Calc bugreport about this, and it was an interesting challenge, since I never touched Calc code before.

First, the references:

Given that there is no easy way to enter Ctrl-Shift-";" using a Hungarian keyboard, the Hungarian equivalent is Ctrl-Shift-".".

Actually, once this feature will be implemented, not sure how the Hungarian users will access it. :)