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From time to time developers feel that they have little time, but they would want to take care of many bugs. Last week I was frustrated enough to actually design a T-shirt for just that. ;-)
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TL;DR: see above — it’s now possible to have complex Writer content (charts, tracked changes, tables, fields, etc.) inside drawinglayer shapes, yay! :-)
The problem
Writer in LibreOffice 4.3 can have two kind of shapes: drawinglayer ones or Writer TextFrames. (Let’s ignore OLE objects and Writer pictures for now.) Drawinglayer shapes can be triangles (non-rectangular), rectangles can have rounded corners and so on, but shape text is handled by editeng — the same engine that is used for Impress shapes or Calc cells. OTOH a Writer TextFrame can contain anything that is supported by Writer (Writer fields, styles, tables, etc.), but its drawing capabilities are quite limited: no triangle, rounded corners, etc. Together with CloudOn, we thought the best would be to be able to have both, and started to use the "shape with TextBox" term for this feature.
A user can already sort of to do this by creating a drawinglayer shape, then a Writer TextFrame, and by setting the properties of the Writer TextFrame (position, size, etc) to appear as if the TextFrame would be the shape text of the drawinglayer shape. The idea is to tie these two objects together, so the (UI and API) user sees them as a single object.
Results
I’m providing here a few screenshots. Above, you can see an ODF document having a rectangle with rounded corners, still containing a table.
Given that OOXML has this feature since its birth, I’m also showing a few DOCX documents, which are now handled far better:
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chart inside a left arrow callout:
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tracked changes inside a cloud callout:
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SmartArt inside a snip diagonal corner rectangle:
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Table of Contents inside a pentagon:
Details
What follows is something you can probably skip if you’re a user — however if you’re a developer and you want to understand how the above is implemented, then read on. ;-)
Situation in 4.3
From the drawinglayer point of view: SwDoc contains an SdrModel
(SwDoc::GetOrCreateDrawModel()), which contains a single SdrPage
(SdrModel::GetPage()) — Draw/Impress contain multiple sdr pages. The
SdrPage contains the shapes: e.g. a triangle is an SdrObjCustomShape. For
TextFrames, a placeholder object called SwVirtFlyDrawObj is added to the
draw page.
The writer-specific properties of an SdrObject is stored as an SwFrmFmt
object, an SwFrmFmt array is a member of SwDoc ("frame format table"). The
anchor position and the node index of the frame contents counts as a property.
At UNO level, a single DrawPage object is part of the Component (opened
document), which abstracts away the internal SdrPage.
For TextFrames, the UNO API works exactly the same way, except that the
implementation stores all properties of the TextFrame in the SwFrmFmt (and
some properties are different, compared to a drawinglayer shape).
One remaining detail is how the shape text is represented. In case of
drawinglayer shapes, this is provided by editeng: internally an EditTextObject
provides a container for paragraphs, at UNO API level SvxUnoTextContent
provides an interface that presents paragraphs and their text portions.
For TextFrames, the contents of the frames is stored in a special section in
the Writer text node array (in the 3rd toplevel section, while the 5th
toplevel section is used for body text), that’s how it can contain anything
that’s a valid Writer body text. An offset into this node array of the
"content" property of the SwFrmFmt.
Document model
At a document model level, we need a way to describe that an SdrObject
(provided by svx) has an associated TextFrame (provided by sw). svx can’t
depend on sw, but in the SwFrmFmt of the SdrObject, we can use the so far
unused RES_CNTNT ("content") property to point to a TextFrame content.
So behind the scenes the UNO API and the UI does the following when turning on the TextBox bit for a drawinglayer shape:
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creates a TextFrame
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connects the
SdrObjectto the TextFrame
Also, every property of the TextFrame depends on the properties of the
SdrObject, think of the followings:
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position / size is the largest rectangle that fits inside the shape
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borders are disabled
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background is transparent
Finding the largest rectangle that fits inside the shape is probably the most
interesting here, it’s implemented in SwTextBoxHelper::getTextRectangle(),
which uses SdrObjCustomShape::GetTextBounds().
UNO API
The UNO API hides the detail that the TextFrame and the SdrObject are in
fact two objects. To get there, the followings are done:
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SwXShapeis modified, so that in the TextBox case not editengine, but the attached TextFrame is accessed whengetText()is invoked. This was a bit tricky, asSwXShapedoesn’t have an explicitgetText()implementation: it overridesqueryInterface()instead (seeSwTextBoxHelper::queryInterface()). -
SwXDrawPage(itsXEnumerationAccessandXIndexAccess) is modified to ignore TextFrames in the TextBox case -
SwXTextPortionEnumerationis modified to ignore TextFrames in the TextBox case -
SwXText::insertTextContent()andSwXText::appendTextContent()is modified to handle the TextBox case
Layout
This was the easiest part: the "merge TextFrame and SdrObj into a shape with
TextBox" approach ensured that that we use existing layout features here, no
major effort was necessary here.
One interesting detail here was the positioning of as-character anchored
shapes having TextBoxes, that’s now handled in SwFlyCntPortion::SetBase().
Filters
The primary point of this feature is to improve Word (and in particular DOCX) compatibility, and of course I wanted to update ODF as necessary as well.
Regarding the new feature, I did the followings:
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DOCX import now avoids setting service name from original to
css.text.TextFramein case shape has shape text -
DOCX export now handles the TextBox case: reads Writer text instead of editeng text as necessary
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ODF export now adds a new optional boolean attribute to make export of the TextBox case possible
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ODF import now handles the new attribute and act accordingly
Note that regarding backwards compatibility, we keep supporting editengine-based text as well. This has the best of two worlds:
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existing ODF documents are unchanged, but
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the TextBox feature is enabled unconditionally in DOCX import to avoid formatting loss
User Interface
I took care of the followings:
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the context menu of shapes now provides an item to add / remove a TextBox to/from a shape
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when moving or resizing a shape, the TextBox properties are updated as well
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when the shape is deleted, the associated TextBox is also deleted
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editing individual TextBox properties is no longer possible, since they depend on the shape properties
Summary
If you want to try these out yourself, get a daily build and play with it! If something goes wrong, report it to us in the Bugzilla, so we can try fix it before 4.4 gets branched off. Last, but not at least, thanks for CloudOn for funding these improvements! :-)
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(via michaeljosh)
Last year I published some Writer training slides, which are hopefully a useful extension to in-tree documentation like sw/README and sw/qa/extras/README.
Last week I reviewed those slides and realized that some of them are outdated. So here comes an updated version:
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first part, up to, but not including layout
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second part, starting from the layout
The intention is that these build nicely on top of Michael’s generic intro slides, and with that, the reader can have a good "big picture" understanding of the code base. For the gory details, you always need to read the code anyway. ;-)
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I’ve arrived home yesterday from Zagreb where I gave a keynote at CLUC 2014 on Tuesday.
Here are a few talks I enjoyed:
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Dave Whiteland’s mysociety.org talk
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Harald Welte's osmocom.org talk
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Elizabeth Krumbach Joseph’s OpenStack talk (explaining how do they use gerrit, git-review and related tools)
Thanks Elizabeth for the above photo, and also to the organizers of the conference, it was a great one! ;-)
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Shapes in Writer are provided by LibreOffice’s drawing layer — they are independent from the normal Writer paragraphs. Given that the drawing layer does not support tracking changes, just Writer’s "native" paragraphs, fully featured tracked changes in real shape text would be quite some work. In case of ODF, the markup describes tracked changes in a way, so that in case the reader does not support tracking changes, it can at least read the normal and inserted text, i.e. the current version.
This is exactly what I implemented in the DOCX import filter now:
Previously we just ignored both inserted and deleted text, so if you had content which was all either deleted or inserted, you ended up having no shape text at all (can be tested using e.g. this test document):
To be fair, the reference layout looks like this:
I still hope to fix that as well one day, but the above fix is something we’ll already provide in 4.3. :-)
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OTRS is quite different to Bugzilla (what we use for upstream LibreOffice development for quite some time). On the plus side, e.g. it has strong support for multiple customers. OTOH, it deals with tickets instead of bugs, and sadly it doesn’t have a single identifier for tickets. It has a ticket number (which by default even includes the date), which is searchable, and it has a ticket ID, which is used for URL’s.
In case of Bugzilla, you can easily lookup "bug#12345" in Firefox. Create a bookmark with the following properties:
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Keyword: bug
and then you can just copy&paste bug#12345 to Firefox, replace the # with a space, and Firefox will do the right thing.
Unfortunately (due to the above detailed reasons), this is not possible with OTRS. So I decided to write a Supybot plugin that can notice "bug#12345" on an IRC channel, and give you the clickable URL (after finding out the ticket ID from the ticket number).
The result is available on GitHub, it looks like this:
09:58 < vmiklos> bug#1000068
09:58 < supybot> https://localhost/otrs/index.pl?Action=AgentTicketZoom;TicketID=73Given that I found no relevant hits when searching for supybot otrs, I hope this code may be useful for others as well.
Thanks to James Scott for his YouTube plugin that helped to quickly figure out the relevant Supybot API’s.
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When using text frames in Writer, you can always choose if you set an absolute size for it or you set a relative one. Oddly enough, in case of relative sizes, it wasn’t entirely clear what 100% percent means. With a bit of searching, the help says "it’s the page text area", which in practice means the page size, excluding the margins.
And that’s where the problem lies: in many cases (importing foreign formats, cover page of a document, etc.) you want to have a textframe which is 100% wide, compared to the full page size, including margins. It was already possible previously to work this around by manually specifying the same size what was used for page size, but that’s ugly, you duplicate the setting at two places.
As you can see on the above screenshot, in LibreOffice 4.3, I now implemented this as a new option, you can choose what 100% means for both width and height. File filters are also updated accordingly: in case of ODF an extension is proposed, and also DOCX and RTF filters are updated, where the file format already supported this feature.
For the curious ones, the feature is in master for almost two months now,
but I only implemented my favorite part — RTF filter — only last week,
that’s the "news" here. ;-)
If you want to try these out yourself, get a daily build and play with it! If something goes wrong, report it to us in the Bugzilla, so we can try fix it before 4.3 gets branched off. Last, but not at least, thanks for CloudOn for funding this improvement! :-)
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I’m sure in this case a few words are worth more than the above picture, so let me describe what you see above. :-)
In case of opening an ODT, DOC or RTF document in LibreOffice Writer, you
already got some feedback on where the importer is, in case the process needed
more time than what you feel "instant". However, this wasn’t supported for
DOCX. According to git blame, I added this to my todo on 2012-10-29, and a
few months later also a
bugreport was opened,
requesting the same, but up to yesterday, nothing changed. However, now I’ve
implemented this on master, it’ll be part of the 4.3 release.
Back to where I started, what you actually see there is when LibreOffice is in the middle of the import process of the Holy Bible in DOCX format, which takes around 12 seconds on my machine. One could say that speed up quite acceptable for that amount of data, but with a progressbar, it’s definitely better. ;-)
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Last year in September we decided to get rid of the writerfilter-based DOC tokenizer, and I volunteered to actually do this. As cleanups in general have a low priority, I only progressed with this slowly, though yesterday I completed it, that’s why I’m writing this post. :-)
Some background: the writerfilter module is responsible for RTF and DOCX import in Writer. As the above picture shows, the currently used DOC import is independent from it, and there was also an other DOC import filter, that was in writerfilter which was disabled at runtime. As I don’t like duplication, I examined the state of the two filters, and the linked minutes mail details how we decided that the old filter will stay, and we’ll get rid of the writerfilter one. It’s just a matter of deleting that code, right? :-) That’s what I thought first. But then I had to realize that the architecture of writerfilter is a bit more complex:
It has the following components:
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the dmapper (domain mapper), that handles all the nasty complexities of mapping Word concepts to Writer concepts (think of e.g. sections ↔ page styles)
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one tokenizer for each (RTF, DOCX, DOC) format
The traffic between the tokenizers and dmapper is called tokens. Naturally it’s not enough that tokenizers send and dmapper receives these tokens, they should be defined somewhere as well. And that’s where I realized this work will take a bit more time: instead of having a single token definition, actually the ooxml tokenizer defined its own grammar, and doctok also defined two additional grammars. And of course dmapper had to handle all of that. ;-) Given that OOXML is a superset of the DOC/RTF format, it makes sense to just use the ooxml grammar, and get rid of the other two.
Especially that — by now you probably found this out — if I wanted to kill doctok, I had to kill the sprm and rtf grammars as well. Otherwise just removing doctok would break the RTF and DOCX import as well, as those also used the rtf/sprm grammars.
So at the end, the cleaned up architecture now looks like this:
And that has multiple advantages:
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It removes quite some code: In
libreoffice-4-1, the doctok was 78849 (!) lines of code (well, part of that was XML data, and some scripts generated C++ code from that). -
dmapper now doesn’t have to handle the rtf and sprm grammars anymore, so now there is a single place in dmapper that handles e.g. the italic character property.
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Smaller writerfilter binary for the end user: even if doctok wasn’t enabled at runtime, it was shipped in the installation set.
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Hopefully it’s now a bit more easy to understand writerfilter: at least e.g. if you want to look up the place where dmapper handles the character bold ("b") XML tag of OOXML, you don’t have to know that the binary DOC equivalent of that is sprmCFBold, just because we have an unused DOC tokenizer there as well. :-)
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Given that DOC and RTF formats are a dead end, I think it’s a good thing that in writerfilter now the grammar is OOXML (that keeps introducing new features), rather than some dead format. ;-)
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If you ever tried to use nested comments in Writer (make a selection, Insert → Comment, then make an overlapping selection, and do it again), you may have noticed that only the ODF filter can load and save such a document properly. Recently I have improved this situation a lot. Motivated by seeing this is now supported in the DOCX import filter, I now added support for this also to the DOCX export, RTF import/export and binary DOC import/export filters.