LibreOffice’s user interface prohibited creating multiple signatures by the same author on a document, because there was no semantic meaning of signing the same document multiple times. I’ve recently extended the user interface to be able to provide a signature description: this way it makes sense to allow multiple signatures from the same author, because now each signature can have a different meaning. First, thanks to the Dutch Ministry of Defense who made this work possible.

When the user selects File → Digital Signatures, the dialog lists existing signatures together with their description (if they have any):

When the user clicks on the Sign Document button, the dialog for certificate selection now also asks for an optional description:

Changing the value of the description invalidates the signature. For this feature to work, I have extended LibreOffice’s ODF signature markup to store not only a <dc:date> element as signature metadata, but also the <dc:description>. Given that the metadata of an ODF signature is not part of the ODF specification, it is allowed to extend the metadata with custom child elements, so it was not necessary to submit an ODF enhancement proposal for this file format change at this stage. As usual the commits are in master, so you can try this right now with a 5.2 daily build. :-)

As it has been reported, the RTF includepicture field was ignored on import. As writerfilter has quite some shared code for DOCX and RTF import, I also looked at the state of linked graphics in the DOCX import, and that wasn’t better, either.

Although, the root causes were different. ;-) Regarding DOCX, a linked and a non-linked graphic has quite similar drawingML markup: the only difference is if the graphic has a relationship alias (embedded case) or a (possibly relative) external URL. Relative external URLs were broken, as the writerfilter → oox call (to import the graphic) did not forward the base URL, so oox had no chance to properly resolve a relative URL.

Regarding RTF, a linked graphic is represented as an includepicture field, and now the RTF tokenizer resolves that to a real graphic. As you can see on the above screenshot series (new Writer behavior, old Writer, and reference), we now behave the same way as the reference (or the Writer DOC import).

A related interesting fact I noticed is that includepicture fields in OOXML are valid, but it seems Word never writes them: either their expanded field result is outdated (e.g. it’s some text), or if the user updates the field, then their implementation instantly replaces the field with a drawingML markup that links the graphic.

Yesterday I gave a Mail merge embedding in LibreOffice Writer talk at FOSDEM 2016, in the Open document editors developer room. The room was well-crowded — seems this year LibreOffice Online was a hot topic. ;-)

We also had a hackfest with about 20 hackers attending, (again) kindly hosted by Betacowork on Thursday and Friday, before FOSDEM.

There were a few topics I hacked on:

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

Quite some other slides are now available on Planet, don’t miss them.

While I added support for page background colors in the RTF import back in 2013, the export part was missing up to now.

If you set a solid color fill for a page style, and you export it to RTF, here is how the reference rendering output looks like:

However, in Libreoffice only the background of the paragraph reflected the color set by the user:

After implementing this feature in the RTF export filter, it now looks much closer to the reference:

At the moment only solid fill is implemented, so other advanced fill types like graphics or gradients are still missing.

As it has been reported in tdf#94377, the state of Writer comment contents in the RTF export filter wasn’t great.

With two recent changes, however, the situation is now much better:

It wasn’t necessary to implement this from scratch, because comment contents uses the same editeng store as the shape text, and there formatting was already handled. A benefit of this code sharing is that shape text also handles multiple paragraphs without a problem now. :-)

The commits are backported to libreoffice-5-1, so users will see them already in the upcoming 5.1.0 release.

Robinson just branched off libreoffice-5-1 from master in LibreOffice’s core.git repository, so time to talk about what happened behind the scenes in the 5.0 → 5.1 development cycle from my side.

One stylistic detail that annoyed me for a while was the inconsistency around naming class member variables. In new code it’s common to give them an m_ (or at least an m) prefix, but in older code that wasn’t that common, and various custom hacks were invented to differentiate between pointers which point to the same memory address, but one being a parameter of a member function, and the other being a member variable.

Probably the worst scenario is when one was an abbreviation of the other, like pTable and pTbl or pCursor and pCrsr. I took this as an opportunity to play with Clang’s LibTooling, and I wrote two tools back during the Cambridge hackfest to automate the process of finding and fixing missing prefixes.

To scope the renaming, I changed all classes in the sw module having more than 20 unprefixed members to follow the above convention, hopefully this nicely improves code readability, together with the mass-rename of pointless abbreviations, also done before the branch-off, so affecting both libreoffice-5-1 and master. :-)

Both LibreOffice Writer and Impress has the ability to export the document as PNG, which is one way to create thumbnails for documents — i.e. being able to preview them before the real loading of the document happens. It turns out Calc did not have this feature, and given that ScModelObj also supports the css::view::XRenderable interface (just like Writer), I hoped that it won’t be too complex to add one.

You can refer to Fridrich’s overview blog post for the complete list of steps on how to add a new filter to LibreOffice, here the following steps were needed:

If you can’t wait till LibreOffice 5.1 is released to try out this new feature, you can get a daily build. :-)

While LibreOffice’s Android port has as good support for ODF as the desktop version, flat ODF was lagging behind. There were two reasons for this:

With these two fixes my favorite test documents (of which the ODF version worked already previously) in flat ODF version also load properly in all Writer, Calc and Impress — as can be seen on the above montage of screenshots.

This use-case came up during this year’s LibreOffice conference. I started the Impress slideshow a few minutes in advance, so the audience could check if they are at the correct room, seeing the title side. Right after starting the slideshow, the presentation timer also started to count. I had to stop and start the presentation, so I had an idea how much time my talk took so far. The side effect of this workaround was that the audience saw an ugly short flash while the presentation was not running at the moment I started talking.

Because hacking the presenter console requires you to have two monitors, it’s not something I looked into during the conference’s hackfest, but now here it is: I added a button to just restart the timer, then it’s not needed to stop/start the presentation manually.

The icon is just a placeholder for now, the real design is in progress.

I had the pleasure to share where we are wrt. the Android port of LibreOffice yesterday. Abstract on the conference website, slides at the usual place, video record "soon" as usual. :-)