I wrote about ECDSA handling in LibreOffice last year, back then the target was to be able to verify signatures using the ECDSA algorithm on Linux.

Lots of things happened since then, this post is meant to summarize those improvements. My personal motivation is that Hungarian eID cards come with a gov-trusted ECDSA (x509) cert, so handling those in LibreOffice would be nice. My goals were:

Let’s see what has happened:

I could test hardware-based signing after this, which was fine out of the box on both platforms. Some screenshots:

(There is no reason why this would not work on macOS, but I did not test that.)

Thanks Gabor Kelemen who helped me to get a sane card reader that has reasonable driver support on Linux.

All this is available in master (towards LibreOffice 6.2), or you can grab a daily build and try it out right now. :-)

I worked on a small feature to use Writer as an editor for the XHTML fragments inside Requirements Interchange Format (ReqIF) files. First, thanks to Vector for funding Collabora to make this possible.

Writer already supported XHTML import and export before (see my previous post) as a special mode of the HTML filter, this work builds on top of that. The main speciality around XHTML as used for fragments inside a ReqIF file is embedded objects.

The special mode to opt-in for ReqIF-XHTML behavior can actived like this:

Three different cases are handled:

Regarding how it works, the import is a series of unwrapping containers till you get to the real data and the export is the opposite of this. Here are the layers:

On export we do the opposite: save the file, put it into OLE2, then into OLE1, then into RTF, finally into XHTML.

There is no specification on how to put ODF files into OLE2, so I extracted the relevant code from LibreOffice’s binary MSO filters and now the Writer HTML filter uses that as well. This avoids code duplication and also could avoid inventing some new markup this way.

All this is available in master (towards LibreOffice 6.2), or you can grab a daily build and try it out right now. :-)

I worked on improving document load performance of Microsoft formats in general, and DOC/DOCX in particular in LibreOffice recently. First, thanks to TDF and users that support the foundation by providing donations for funding Collabora to make this possible.

I built on top of the great work of Tomaz, focusing on these secondary, but important formats.

The idea is that if you load an Microsoft binary or OOXML file, it should not be necessary to parse all images at load time, it’s enough to lazy read it when we first render e.g. a Writer page containing that image.

The focus here was documents containing large images. I tested with an Earth photo of size 8000x8000 pixels from NASA, making little modifications to it, so each picture has a different checksum, embedding them into a binary DOC file.

I measured the time from the soffice process startup to rendering the first page. We defer the work of loading most images now, as you can see on the chart. In contrast, we used to decompress all images on file import in the past. This means the new cost for e.g. 4 images is 37% of the original.

All this is available in master (towards LibreOffice 6.1), or you can grab a daily build and try it out right now. :-)

I arrived home from Hamburg yesterday where I participated in the LibreOffice hackfest over the weekend as a mentor. First, thanks to The Document Foundation — and all the donors for funding Collabora to make this possible.

There were a few topics I mentored:

The full list of achievements is on the wiki, if you were at the hackfest and you did not contribute to that section, please write a line about what did you hack on. :-)

Finally, thanks for the organizers and the sponsors of the hackfest, it was a really great event!

I worked on improving the ODT ↔ XHTML conversion performance for simple documents in LibreOffice recently. First, thanks to Vector for funding Collabora to make this possible.

Yesterday I gave an EPUB export in LibreOffice Writer FOSDEM talk at FOSDEM 2018, in the Open document editors developer room. The room was well-crowded — perhaps because the next talk was about LibreOffice/Collabora Online. ;-)

Quite some other slides will be available on Planet I expect, don’t miss them.

I worked on improving the EPUB3 export filter in LibreOffice further recently. First, thanks to Nou&Off in cooperation with a customer who made this work possible. Since the previous blog entry there have been a number of improvements around a next set of topics.

I worked on improving the EPUB3 export filter in LibreOffice recently. First, thanks to Nou&Off in cooperation with a customer who made this work possible. Since the previous blog entry there have been a number of improvements around 4 topics.

I worked on a new EPUB3 export filter in LibreOffice recently. First, thanks to Nou&Off in cooperation with a customer who made this work possible. The current state is that basic features work nicely to the extent that the filter is probably usable for most books (they typically mostly have just text with minimal formatting), so this post aims to explain the architecture, how the various pieces fit together.

The above picture shows the building blocks. The idea is that nominally EPUB is a complete export filter, but instead of doing all the work, we offload various sub-tasks to other modules:

The setup is a bit complicated, but it has a number of advantages:

As a user, here is a list of features you can expect working:

During development I regularly used epubcheck, so hopefully the export result is usually valid.

All this is available in master (towards LibreOffice 6.0), or you can grab a daily build and try it out right now. :-)

A year in LibreOffice’s PDF support was a talk I gave today at LibreOffice conference 2017. Given that this was one of the last talks at the whole conference, thanks to the ones who still did not go home, but listened. :-)