Estimated read time: 2 minutes
The bibliography feature in Writer allows authors of e.g. scientific papers to track sources: first you can insert bibliography entry fields, then at the end you can generate a bibliography table automatically.
Writer now has two improvements in this area: more information about these entries in the form of a mouse tooltip and clickable URLs in the table.
First, thanks TUBITAK ULAKBIM who made this work by Collabora possible.
Motivation
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.
Results so far
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:
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 incremental development steps:
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sw tooltip on bibliography fields: add an SwTOXInternational factory and sw tooltip on bibliography fields: add a text factory that gives us a string were necessary refactors to get a string that looks like a row in the bibliography table, without having an empty bibliography table at hand
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sw tooltip on bibliography fields: add the actual tooltip functionality improved the UI to have a tooltip
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sw bibliography: make URLs in the bibliography table clickable implemented the clickable URLs feature
Want to start using this?
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).