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:

• Laszlo explained on the train to Munich that single line spacing is 15% of the font size, by definition. That finally explains why it is that the height of a 12pt single-line paragraph in Writer is not 240 but 276 twips.
• Finally Michael motivated (and also helped!) me to improve the copy&paste in the new RTF filter, so it seems that removing the old filter completely is near.
• The ability to sign each other's gpg key was a great idea. I didn't know too much about this topic, so I read up on this here. (Additionally, the gpg-key2ps command from signing-party -- yes, there is such a package! -- is useful.)
• We set up a nice icecream farm from the laptops, one more aspect that boosted our productivity.

Speaking about icecream -- there were two reasons why I didn't really use it:

• it required re-configuring your build tree (--enable-icecream)
• it required shutting down your firewall

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

• look into the wiki, you only need to open a few ports, even broadcasting/auto-discovery works with a started firewall
• use CCACHE_PREFIX="icecc" make build-nocheck PARALLELISM=30 to enable icecream for a single make run

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:

zypper -p http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/llunak:/clang/openSUSE_12.2/ in icecream-0.9.7-64.1s.x86_64

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:

• document with a checked checkbox (test doc):

• document with contextual spacing enabled for the numbering (test doc):

• document with a field that has a custom font size (test doc):

• document with a SmartArt inside (test doc):

• document with lots of VML shapes (test doc):

• document produced by Microsoft Office 2010 (test doc, thanks Fridrich!):

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

• document with commented text ranges (test doc):

• document with a floating table (test doc):

• document with ink annotations (test doc, thanks Eilidh!):

• document with an OLE object inside a rectangle (test doc):

• document with an inline image with custom margins (test doc):

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.

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:

• ODF 1.2 already supports commenting text ranges, but LibreOffice support was missing.
• Word already supported it as well, and now LibreOffice RTF/DOCX import/export filters are updated to take care of the new feature.
• If I was already messing with comments, I also implemented roundtrip of comment author initials to ODF (see proposal), so now if you open a DOCX/RTF file in LibreOffice, save it as ODF, and later save it back to DOCX/RTF, this information won't be lost.

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:

• The importer internally turns RTF markup to OOXML tokens, and that does the hard job.
• The non-XML-specific part of the existing OOXML export was abstracted to a base class, and that's the driver of the RTF exporter.

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:

• implemented docx import of even/odd page breaks
• implemented docx import + rtf import/export of the zoom setting
• implemented \bin rtf keyword
• added testcase framework for rtf export (thanks a Markus for helping that!)

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