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Impress now has much better support for the shadow of table shapes: not only shape styles can result in table shadows, but it’s also possible to add this as direct formatting. Also the shadow result is PowerPoint-compatible in the direct formatting case.
Motivation
We got a PPTX document, which has a table shape with blurry shadow. The shadow was completely missing in Impress. It was discovered that in case you configure the default shape style to have shadow, then there is some initial table shadow support in Impress, but that was not used in the PPTX case.
The request was to improve the shadow rendering to be PowerPoint-compatible and in general support table shadows as direct formatting as a new feature.
Results so far
The table shadow now looks like this:
Matching the reference rendering:
While shadow was just missing previously:
You can see that not only the shadow is there, but also the cell backgrounds and the blurry shadow is rendered properly.
How is this implemented?
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 small fixes:
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tdf#129961 svx: add doc model xml dump for shadow-related pool items
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tdf#129961 svx: add UNO API for table shadow as direct format
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tdf#129961 svx: add rendering for table shadow as direct format
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tdf#129961 oox: add PPTX import for table shadow as direct format
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tdf#129961 oox: add PPTX export for table shadow as direct format
With these, it’s now possible to add, edit, render and delete these table shadows, while preserving them during ODP and PPTX import/export.
Want to start using this?
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).