We got a PPTX document, which has a table shape with pink background and a blurry shadow. Impress rendered a red background, making the text hard to read.

The request was to improve the shadow rendering to be PowerPoint-compatible and in general correctly support transparency when it comes to table cell fills and table shadows.

The table shadow now looks like this:

Matching the reference rendering:

While background was red previously:

You can see that not only the background in the top center cell is pink now, but the blurry table shadow is still correct.

If you would like to know a bit more about how this works, continue reading… :-)

As usual, the high-level problem was addressed by a series of fixes:

With these, it’s now possible to add transparency to both table cell fills and to table shadows, and the rendering will take both into account, correctly.

You can get a snapshot / demo of Collabora Office and try it out yourself right now: try unstable snapshot. Collabora intends to continue supporting and contributing to LibreOffice, the code is merged so we expect all of this work will be available in TDF’s next release too (7.3).

A paragraph might have an associated list in Writer and that list can have multiple levels. This is direct formatting. When it comes to paragraph styles, referring to a list was already possible, but defining a custom list level was not.

Loosing this information in Word documents was quite annoying, and it turned out that ODF also has markup for this, just LibreOffice didn’t implement it.

This work is currently done for the document model, scripting API and file filters: style previews & UI still needs finishing.

Writer can at the moment preserve list level info from ODT and DOCX files. Here is how a file written by Writer looks like in Word:

You can see that the style preview in Word takes the list level into account. Doing the same and applying the list level as part of applying the paragraph style on the Writer UI is still future work.

Thanks to Justin Luth who did the follow-up work to adapt the DOC filter accordingly, and also doing other related fixes.

If you would like to know a bit more about how this works, continue reading… :-)

Collabora intends to continue supporting and contributing to LibreOffice, the code is merged so we expect all of this work will be available in TDF’s next release (7.3).

I was working on a testcase for tdf#132696 when I noticed that the existing CppunitTest_oox_drawingml testsuite runs fine before my changes, also a newly added testGroupShapeSmartArt testcase runs fine in isolation, but if I run the whole testsuite, then it breaks.

Further investigation revealed that in case testGroupShapeSmartArt is executed first, then testTdf131082 fails. This means:

And at this point information from the first document is leaked to the second document, even if the first document was already closed by the time we performed the save. It turns out the root cause was i#114206 (reported in 2010), i.e. group shapes shared their property values till they got inserted to the document model. The first document import did not consume pending SmartArt properties on a to-be-inserted group shape, the second import was looking for pending properties, found them. And then the second document’s save wrote those pending properties to the file, leading to this unexpected leak.

Here is how the first document looks like, containing the blue rectangles (a SmartArt):

Here is how the second document looks like, without a SmartArt:

And here is how the second document looks, after saving to PPTX and reloading:

The fix is to split out part of SvxItemPropertySet to a separate class, so that we can keep sharing SvxItemPropertySet between multiple instances of the same shape type (describing the name and type of the various properties), while introducing a new SvxItemPropertySetUsrAnys that is specific to each not-yet-inserted shape. This way each pending shape is independent, and in case they are not inserted to the document model later, that results in no side-effects.

Collabora intends to continue supporting and contributing to LibreOffice, the code is merged so we expect all of this work will be available in TDF’s next release (7.3).

Excel has both form controls and ActiveX controls, and tdf#106181 XLSX export: output form controls last year started adding support for form control export to XLSX.

Hoping that this will be mostly shared drawingML export code fixing (benefiting DOCX and PPTX as well), it seemed reasonable to assume that we can improve button handling from the "it’s lost" state to "it’s good enough" with some effort.

Now Excel shows the button and you can click on it:

While it used to just refuse our export result:

If you would like to know a bit more about how this works, continue reading… :-)

As usual, the end goal was reached via a set of incremental commits:

Collabora intends to continue supporting and contributing to LibreOffice, the code is merged so we expect all of this work will be available in TDF’s next release (7.3).

Once you insert an image to a Writer document, you can customize its anchor type. The as-char anchor type is handy if you don’t want text to flow around the image. This has the side effect that a large image significantly increases the nominal height of a line. The problematic document had an image height of 118.9 cm (46.81 inch), so the unsigned integer used to represent its height wrapped around, leading to an incorrect layout.

Now it looks like the way you would expect it:

If you would like to know a bit more about how this works, continue reading… :-)

As usual, the end goal was reached via a set of incremental commits:

Collabora intends to continue supporting and contributing to LibreOffice, the code is merged so we expect all of this work will be available in TDF’s next release (7.2).

The same feature in normal HTML linking / citation is well-known: you can place anchors in your document and then links can refer to not only to your page, but also can set the fragment part of the URL to jump to a specific section directly. E.g. this link will jump to the "Motivation" section of the above referred previous post.

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could also jump to a specific page of a scientific PDF?

You can add such references by choosing the Insert → Table of Contents and Index → Bibliography Entry menu item. Set Bibliography Source to Document Content and press the New button. The appearing dialog now has widgets to set a specific page number:

This is then stored in the URL by setting its fragment to page=..., and typically PDF readers understand this syntax, so when you click on the URL, the PDF will open exactly on the cited page.

This also works the other way around: URLs with such syntax are presented to the user with the dedicated widget to see, edit or delete the page number of the URL.

Finally, if you refer to different pages of the same source, the bibliography text generator detects this and lists the source in the bibliography only once.

If you would like to know a bit more about how this works, continue reading… :-)

As usual, the high-level problem was addressed by a series of incremental development steps:

Collabora intends to continue supporting and contributing to LibreOffice, the code is merged so we expect all of this work will be available in TDF’s next release (7.2).

Both Word and Writer allow specifying borders for any kind of table cells. When the user creates a vertically merged cell, there is a covering cell and there is one or more covered table cells.

The Writer approach is to render the cell borders according to the properties of the covering cell. This has the benefit that each edge of the table cell has a single border style (e.g. dashed or hairline).

The Word approach is to render the cell borders as if there would be no vertical merge, according to the properties of the covered cell. This has the benefit that merging the content of cells vertically doesn’t change the border rendering, but it also requires more complex code for painting.

Writer can now detect that your tables originate from Word formats and render table borders the Word way in that case.

Here is how the new rendering result look like:

And here is how it used to look like:

And finally the reference rendering is:

You can see that the B4 and B5 cells are covered, they had some unwanted border on their left side and this is now gone.

If you would like to know a bit more about how this works, continue reading… :-)

Collabora intends to continue supporting and contributing to LibreOffice, the code is merged so we expect all of this work will be available in TDF’s next release (7.2).

I posted about Writer gutter margin in general back in February, and two follow-up requests accumulated around this new feature since then.

First, the gutter margin could be on the left or at the top for non-mirrored documents, which initially sounded like a complete solution, but later it turned out that right-to-left (RTL) documents want it on the right.

Second, there was a request from the OASIS TC to to implement the ODF filter differently for gutter margin.

Neither of these is simple to do, so this hackweek was a good opportunity to address these problems.

Here is the layout and user interface for RTL gutter looks like:

You can see how the gutter is on the right (not the left) and you can alter this behavior with a dedicated checkbox on the UI.

If you would like to know a bit more about how this works, continue reading… :-)

Finally I had a little bit of remaining time, so I addressed a request from the OASIS ODF TC:

Collabora intends to continue supporting and contributing to LibreOffice, the code is merged so we expect all of this work will be available in TDF’s next release (7.2).

Generating a bibliography (table) for a document is a two-step process: first the user inserts bibliography entry fields to refer to sources, then later the bibliography can be auto-generated. It was not great that details of a source was only visible in the Writer edit window after generating the bibliography table. A somewhat related shortcoming was that URLs of sources were handled as plain text, while users expect that references are also clickable, similar to e.g. table of contents.

This is how a tooltip looks like, available even if there is no bibliography table yet:

And URLs in the bibliography table are now clickable:

If you would like to know a bit more about how this works, continue reading… :-)

As usual, the high-level problem was addressed by a series of incremental development steps:

Collabora intends to continue supporting and contributing to LibreOffice, the code is merged so we expect all of this work will be available in TDF’s next release (7.2).

Word has a gutter margin feature, and we saw that some UI-level workaround appeared to have something similar based on the LibreOffice technology. We thought it’s much better to impelement this properly, so that the result is interoperable with Word, and also available both in Online and on the desktop.

This is how the UI looks like in Online:

This is how the new render result looks like:

Matching the reference rendering:

While the gutter was just missing previously:

You can see that the gutter margin is now handled properly.

If you would like to know a bit more about how this works, continue reading… :-)

As usual, the high-level problem was addressed by a series of incremental development steps:

With these, it’s now possible to add, modify, render and delete gutter margins for your documents, while preserving them during ODT and DOCX import/export, without introducing any weird fake line shapes.

You can get a snapshot / demo of Collabora Office and try it out yourself right now: try unstable snapshot. Collabora intends to continue supporting and contributing to LibreOffice, the code is merged so we expect all of this work will be available in TDF’s next release too (7.2).