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. :)

When we got back from Munich, Andras had an idea what is the current bottleneck with the build when there are a lot of languages enabled, and it was the po2oo script, which is part of translate-toolkit.

First I tried to optimize that script, but then I tried to do the same gettext-to-SDF conversion from scratch, without using that framework at all, and it seems that caused a drastic speedup.

There were a few iterations, but now the two patches are in master, along with a fix in fast_merge.pl, which was there since at least commit 654810b (2009-06-17). ;)

We were in Munich during this weekend, and I think all of us had great fun, kudos go to the organizers! If you are curious, there is a growing list of features implemented during the event.

Update: Oh, and I forgot to mention that we (Andras and me) especially thank the FSF.hu foundation for funding our travel!