Draw/Impress now has support for semi-transparent shape text, next to the existing transparency support in the context of shape fill colors and shape border colors.

First, thanks Vector who made this work by Collabora possible.

Here is how it looks:

What you can see is that next to the existing character color, now you can also set a transparency percentage to decide if the text should be entirely transparent, entirely opaque or something between the two.

The primary focus was Draw in this case, but this also helps PPTX support, as the importer/exporter now handles this for Impress documents as well.

All this is available in LibreOffice master (towards 6.5), so you can try it out right now, if interested.

Impress now has a much improved math handling in its importer from PPTX, eliminating annoying duplicated objects you had to delete after import, manually.

First, thanks TU Dresden who made this work by Collabora possible.

Here is how it looks:

What you can see is that the in the old case we managed to read both the actual math object and its replacement image from PPTX, which caused visible duplication due to working transparency handling. The new way just imports the math objects, and ignores the replacement graphic.

This new way (handling of the OOXML a14 feature flag) is enabled by default, except for Calc documents, where more works is needed before it can be enabled.

All this is available in LibreOffice master (towards 6.4), so you can try it out right now, if interested.

Writer now has a new "continuous endnotes" compatibility setting in its layout, allowing rendering endnotes in a way which is closer to what Word users expect.

First, thanks TU Dresden who made this work by Collabora possible.

Here is how it looks:

What you can see is that endnotes unconditionally start after the end of the document content in Word, while endnotes are unconditionally on separate endnote pages in Writer. The new ContinuousEndnotes layout compatibility flag in Writer allows rendering endnotes the Word way.

This new flag is enabled by default for DOC files, disabled otherwise.

All this is available in LibreOffice master (towards 6.4), so you can try it out right now, if interested.

Writer now has a new "allow overlap" shape property for anchored objects, which can ensure that objects with overlapping positioning properties don’t actually overlap.

First, thanks TU Dresden who made this work by Collabora possible.

Here is a video showing how it works:

Under the hood, this is a full new Writer feature, since previously shapes were always allowed to overlap with each other:

All this is available in LibreOffice master (towards 6.4), so you can try it out right now, if interested.

Yesterday I gave a Bottom to top, left to right writing direction in Writer talk at the LibreOffice Conference 2019. The room was well-crowded — perhaps because it was on the first day and in the largest room. ;-)

It contains some details which are not available in previous btLr blog posts, like what natural languages use this direction, how to replace real-world clocks without breaking compatibility and more!

I expect quite some other slides from other Collaborans and the wider community will be available on Planet, don’t miss them.

You can get a snapshot / demo of Collabora Office 6.2 and try the presented feature out yourself right now: try unstable snapshot. Collabora is a major contributor to LibreOffice and all of this work will be available in TDF’s next release, too (6.4).

I already wrote about the btLr text direction in the context of Writer table cells as a result of a Collabora hack week (part 1, part 2). The next step in this journey is btLr text direction of Writer Text Frames, and building on top of that: DOCX Text Boxes. Here is a series of screenshots showing the result:

You can see that the bug document is some kind of card you can print and fold in the middle: no matter if you are in front of the card or you are behind it, you always see the name and details of the person. Sure, you can do the same with a table with no borders, but using a Text Frame for this purpose is a sane use-case.

The text from the 3 paragraphs used to have the same horizontal position, and now it’s laid out the same way as Word does it.

Technically, this result is just the last commit in a series. I fixed the following problems since the last blog post on this topic:

All this is available in LibreOffice master (towards 6.4), so you can try it out right now, if interested.

Years ago I posted about a large rework to where Collabora helped a customer to make Writer read the drawingML markup for DOCX shapes. You can read the various benefits of this switch in that article — but similar to other large reworks, this also broke some previously working corner-cases, where test coverage lacked.

One of these is charts in group shapes. This needs explicit handling, as Writer normally handles charts as TextEmbeddedObjects, while code that imports charts from OOXML is not specific to Writer. The fix just tells the generic drawingML import to use a Writer-specific service name for the charts.

This is available in LibreOffice master (towards 6.3).

I already wrote about the btLr text direction in the context of Writer table cells as a result of a Collabora hack week. This is meant to be an update to present what happened in the past 2 months. Here is a video showing the results:

I fixed the following problems since the last blog post on this topic:

All this is available in LibreOffice master (towards 6.3), so you can try it out right now, if interested.