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!

The next major LibreOffice version, 3.4, means some work for (Linux distribution, and other) packagers, as the build repo is now deprecated and packagers are suggested to use the bootstrap repo directly, which is a different build system.

On one hand, this is a nice cleanup - there is now a single configure script. OTOH this needs major rework of distro build scripts.

The interesting part here is that the official binary installers are not using the make DESTDIR=/some/path install method to install the compiled binaries, so it was discovered quite late that it wasn’t working properly. First Hanno and Petr worked on this, then I fixed a minor, but blocking glitch.

As a result 3.4 beta4 will be something packagers (even the ones not using the split build) can offer to distro users for testing without patching. Binaries for Frugalware users here (i686-only at the moment).

I just got the mail about my LibreOffice proposal got accepted to Google Summer of Code 2011. I’m looking forward to an exciting summer. :)

LibreOffice 3.4 will have a new feature, if you edit styles in Writer, then you can test your style changes without manually closing and opening the style edit dialog again.

Do you like this feature? There are still similar remaining dialogs to improve like this, send in a patch!

I got a report about two problems which got fixed in master now.

The first error is triggered, if you have special (in RTF terms, so for example { or }) characters in style names. The result was not so friendly when you opened such a document:

After applying the first fix, the document was imported but the original Тест text was replaced by something non-unicode:

The second fix addresses this, and now the result is the expected one:

There was a thread about this topic already, but just refusing to commit new files without documentation sounded too aggressive. So the current code just prints a warning.

It was also requested to show some good/bad examples. Lubos volunteered to add detailed instructions in the wiki, so I’m just describing in short what did I test so far.

A good example:

A bad example:

Example output when a warning is emitted: