LibreOffice Writer now supports first page header/footer

Posted on: Wed 10 October 2012

Estimated read time: 1 minutes

When you want to have pages with different properties in Writer, you use page styles. If you want to do something similar in Word, you have to use sections. One of the benefits of page styles is that you can use them multiple times, and — as usual with styles — whenever you change your mind, you can edit just the style, and all its uses will be updated consistently. There is, however, one feature that Word sections have and we lacked so far: sections can have different headers and footers on first, left and right pages. In Writer, you had to use two different page styles if you wanted to achieve the same: typically named "First page", then a "Default". This was because Writer could differentiate only between right and left pages, not first ones.

In LibreOffice 3.7, there will be a new checkbox to "unshare" the header and footer of the first page with right/left pages:

http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/images/thumb/f/f2/Sw-firstpage-headerfooter.png/400px-Sw-firstpage-headerfooter.png

Right now, only ODF filters are updated to open / save this feature (as suggested by this old proposal) — in later versions it’s planned to update the DOCX, DOC and RTF filters as well, removing quite some code from import filters working around this limitation of Writer core.

Frugalware history

Posted on: Sun 16 September 2012

Estimated read time: 8 minutes

Given that Frugalware was founded by me, and recently James recently took over the project leadership, I think it makes sense to look back and summarize the past 6 years.

The beginning

It all started with this announcement about 6 years ago. It was a one-man show before, there was a manually written ChangeLog but even then there were already quite a few packages, so don’t ask me when I started hacking on this. Yes, normally there would be a first commit in git, but remember this was before git existed, and I hated centralized CVS so much that we didn’t use anything.

Looking back, it was all quite lame. :-) I used a mail address called "mamajom" (English translation could be "momonkey"), tied to an ISP, with a lengthy signature at the end of every mail I sent and was using my IRC nick instead of my real one everywhere… OTOH, I made some decisions I’m happy about even today. The first four developers (Ádám Zlehovszky, Krisztián Vasas, Zsolt Szalai and me) were all Hungarian and despite of this, I forced every code, test and documentation to be in English, to possibly turn the project into an international one in the future. And that proved to very, very useful.

It was between 0.1 and 0.2 that we (Krisztián, Zsolt and me) showed up in a Hungarian TV (video record) explaining Frugalware. This is something never happened later for some reason.

The way we found a free hosting at a university I never attended may be also interesting. In the grammar school, our IT teacher found my Linux distribution idea interesting enough to support, and his friend was a teacher at the Eötvös Loránd University, which is at the same Budapest city where I live. So, with my friend Botond Balázs (who later was my witness at our wedding) we bought an ultra-slow old PC (some Pentium 1 with a single HDD) and we were extremely happy, as the uni offered to host it for free. I remember it ran some Slackware version, as Frugalware didn’t support i586… ;-)

Early days

Then some more developers joined and we started to package all the usual free software which is available in other distributions but I personally didn’t use. Think of GNOME, Xfce, OpenOffice.org and so on.

Of course we were still lame, the announcements still were not spellchecked by someone native and knowledgeable enough, ending up in words like "splitted" or "optimalization". However, we started to use an SCM (Darcs, which was horribly slow, but at least not the centralized CVS crap). Another developer I should mention was Bence Nagy, he came up with the idea of how we should avoid duplication in FrugalBuilds, leading to the various package templates under source/include/ in the source tree.

Then we went multiarch, Krisztián Hamar contributed the x86_64 port to the 0.3 release. At the same time, I invented syncpkg, which avoided having to build the same package on multiple architectures manually.

We also got Gábor Lőcsei (later we met IRL and completed several bike marathons together, resulting in a great friendship) who helped users in general on IRC, but more importantly, for some time he did quite some bug triaging, leading to a much better bugzilla (actually it was running Flyspray at that time) state.

The constant questions of László Csécsy (who nowadays mostly hacks Drupal core and its modules) generated more and more improving documentation. We first started with a LaTeX documentation, then later turned it to an asciidoc one, in the hope of attracting more non-math contributors. ;-)

Then we started to have some beautiful artwork, Viktor Gondor contributed some really cool wallpapers.

Finally, I think the last two Hungarian guys who spent a hell of a time on the project was András Vöröskői (we still link his getting started HOWTO for new contributors) and János Kovács. I remember for a long time I used the home-hosted server of János when we didn’t have a fast dedicated i686 build server and my desktop was still 32bit.

Going international

Then things started to happen fast. Developers outside Hungary showed up: Gabriel Craciunescu from Germany and Michel Hermier from France worked a lot on KDE, Gabriel also hacked a lot of the core OS, like kernel, glibc, etc.

Priyank Gosalia from India started to work on GTK tools like a package manager frontend. David Kimpe contributed a PPC port years before I got my iBook (which I used as my primary box for a few years).

And needless to say, we still made mistakes. We thought that the development of the original Pacman package manager slowed down, its rewrite (providing a separate library and a console frontend, instead of one monolithic binary) seemed to never complete, and given that we were not Archlinux developers, we never got access to its CVS. We started to use that library API in the installer, testcases, GUI tools, while changing the API for them wasn’t an issue, since officially it was still unreleased. All this frustration (and underestimating the cost of maintaining a fork) resulted in our Pacman-G2 project. First it appeared to be shiny, but once Krisztián Hamar left Frugalware, we constantly lacked manpower and today the consensus is that with git, maintaining a patchset over pacman.git would be far better, just nobody did the work of merging the two projects. Pacman-G2 is in maintenance mode today, and it still well serves its purpose, but it didn’t see any new major feature in years.

We also saw a rewrite of the installer. The original one was written in bash, then the second was written in C, using libdialog. And currently James works on a third one, hopefully fixing lots of instability, resulting from the design errors of the current one. ;-)

More and more developers

And then somehow more and more developers came. Gourdin Gaetan (bouleetbil) and Sébastien Vincent (Baste) worked a lot on the GNOME support, James Buren took over the base system from me. Paolo Cretaro (Melko) does KDE bumps nowadays and Marius Cirsta (mcirsta) did heroic work of including OpenJDK 7 into Frugalware.

Abdelmoumene Hamza (Slown) is a guy who volunteered to do a log of boring work. When you can install a random Perl on Python module from a package, chances that it was packaged by Slown are high. ;-)

Regarding infrastructure, Benjamin Nolmans (Xarkam) stepped up, and finally converted the data from our Flyspray instance to the more mainstream and maintained Trac format. Regarding architectures Boris Albar (Elentir) contributed an ARM port. Our press noise was generated by Russell Dickenson (phayz) for a long time: he wrote newsletters regularly, and these days he works as a documentation writer for Red Hat.

For a long time, no more Hungarians joined the project. Then Bagdán Róbert (kikadf) came, and even if he’s rarely present on IRC, he still contributes from time to time, and these small, but valuable contributions are what keep Frugalware alive. :-)

Regarding other big upgrades, Daniel Exner (dex) was the guy who stepped up and finally packaged KDE4 for Frugalware. All KDE4 users meeting him should buy a beer for him. ;-) Anthony Jorion (pingax) joined in 2010, and since then he does XFCE updates.

Finally, I should not forget about Daniel Eledut (Devil505), who probably helped me the most with my "the rest" task: he really helped out in various areas, and he was a major Frugalware contributor for a long time.

The end of my leadership

Contributing to other projects is something I did regularly, since every time I got a bugreport for a package, first I created a patch to fix the problem (in case it could not be worked around in the buildscript), and then of course tried to upstream it, knowing the maintenance cost of non-upstreamed patches. Still, these were minor and my main project was Frugalware for years.

The bigger contributions came when I started to complete Google Summer of Code projects, first SWIG, then git, finally OpenOffice.org — which turned into LibreOffice. The motivation is easy: these were still Free Software hacking, but given that they are not bash hacking (like most packaging work for Frugalware), more interesting problem had to be solved, GSoC also provided nice payments, and needless to say: was useful to many people not using Frugalware.

The idea of passing over my leadership to someone else first came when I looked back, and I saw that I spend more time on LibreOffice than on Frugalware, even after the paid GSoC ended (later resulting in joining SUSE to work on LibreOffice fulltime). My focus somehow just shifted from hacking a distribution to hacking something that is directly useful for average users as well. It’s not worse or better, it’s just different, and after lots of years, I wanted to do something different.

To sum up, I did not reach my expectations as a project leader and I waited for a candidate I could teach and finally who could become as good as I was in earlier years, or hopefully even better. And then James came, who first took over the base system, and we agreed that after 1.7, he’ll do releases. So it was not unexpected, but still I was a bit surprised when I saw his role-changing commit. But needless to say, when thinking a bit more, it was completely logical, all I really do these days is fixing things left and right regarding my arm port needs, and maintaining the LibreOffice package.

Summary

The idea of writing this post is not mine. However, when I thought about how many individuals helped this project so far, I realized I really need to create a summary, thanking their work. Reading the above, I hope that in the past years my leadership to Frugalware were useful and I realize that these days I have to step back, given a better leader appeared. I honestly wish the project to see at least as many releases as we already have, now that fresh energy leads it. :-)

I tried to point out all our heroes during the last years, but it’s possible I forgot someone. If you think you’re missing from this post, please leave a comment. Thanks.

LibreOffice Writer can now attach comments to text ranges

Posted on: Fri 10 August 2012

Estimated read time: 1 minutes

More than 10 years ago, a bug was opened in the OpenOffice.org bugzilla to support this feature. Later this got imported to LibreOffice’s bugtracker. Now that LibreOffice 3.6 is out, time to talk more about what features will show up in 3.7, and this will be one of them:

https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/images/thumb/5/5e/Comment-text-range.png/400px-Comment-text-range.png

Now that it’s there, let’s have a look at the details:

ODF 1.2 already supports commenting text ranges, but LibreOffice support was missing.
Word already supported it as well, and now LibreOffice RTF/DOCX import/export filters are updated to take care of the new feature.
If I was already messing with comments, I also implemented roundtrip of comment author initials to ODF (see proposal), so now if you open a DOCX/RTF file in LibreOffice, save it as ODF, and later save it back to DOCX/RTF, this information won’t be lost.

Finally, one known limitation is that the text range currently can’t include multiple paragraphs — something to improve later if necessary.

LibreOffice can now import/export native RTF math expressions in Writer

Posted on: Wed 01 August 2012

Estimated read time: 1 minutes

You may remember that LibreOffice 3.5 learned to import RTF OLE objects (including math expressions) in Writer. In LibreOffice 3.7, the same is now true for math expressions expressed using native RTF math markup:

$https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/images/thumb/1/1e/Rtf-math-native.png/400px-Rtf-math-native.png$

If you are interested in the details, then the nice thing about this implementation is that:

The importer internally turns RTF markup to OOXML tokens, and that does the hard job.
The non-XML-specific part of the existing OOXML export was abstracted to a base class, and that’s the driver of the RTF exporter.

So if you like this new feature, don’t forget to thank Luboš Luňák, who is the author of the OOXML math import/export. :-) In case you way to play with this feature, test documents are available.

GRUB2 vs. RAID1, cfdisk and serial console

Posted on: Sun 29 July 2012

Estimated read time: 2 minutes

Since the Frugalware 1.7 release is near, and it uses GRUB2 by default, I created a virtual machine, that is similar to the one we use under genesis.frugalware.org, which hosts this blog as well.

The relevant details:

it has two RAID1 arrays with ext3:

$ mount|grep /md
/dev/md126 on / type ext3 (rw,relatime,errors=continue,barrier=1,data=ordered)
/dev/md127 on /home/ftp/pub type ext3 (rw,relatime,errors=continue,barrier=1,data=ordered)

the partition tables are created by cfdisk:

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1              63  1465144064   732572001   fd  Linux raid autodetect

the machine has a serial console configured:

# cat /proc/cmdline
root=/dev/disk/by-uuid/7e41c95d-cd73-4043-b0ba-4797af6ddeff ro vga=normal nomodeset console=ttyS1,115200

Now the question is how does this config deal with the GRUB2 upgrade. First, don’t miss the official upgrade howto, it covers most cases. What I want to detail here is how did I avoid starting from scratch and creating a proper partition table using fdisk.

Here are the steps I needed:

Backup. Yes, I did screw up for the first time, so it’s really needed.
Resize parts of the / RAID1 (/dev/sda1 and /dev/sdb1) with gparted livecd (resizing ext3 from cmdline parted didn’t work for me).
mdadm re-creation as described in the upgrade howto, from fw install cd, so you’ll have the required 1.0 metadata.
Reinstall GRUB1 to sda and sdb, since the physical location of GRUB1’s stage* changed.
Boot back to 1.6, run pacman-g2 -Syu, and grub-install — again, see the upgrade howto for details.

Now given that serial console needs a custom GRUB config and kernel parameters, you need to modify GRUB2’s /etc/default/grub. Here is my diff:

/etc/default# diff -u grub.orig grub
--- grub.orig   2012-07-19 01:57:20.000000000 +0200
+++ grub        2012-07-29 14:45:50.000000000 +0200
@@ -1,11 +1,12 @@
 GRUB_DEFAULT=0
 GRUB_TIMEOUT=5
 GRUB_DISTRIBUTOR="Frugalware 1.6"
-GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"
+GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="vga=normal nomodeset plymouth.enable=0 console=ttyS0,115200"
 GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX=""
 GRUB_PRELOAD_MODULES=""
-GRUB_TERMINAL_INPUT=console
-GRUB_TERMINAL_OUTPUT=gfxterm
+GRUB_TERMINAL_INPUT=serial
+GRUB_SERIAL_COMMAND="serial --speed=115200 --port=0x3f8"
+GRUB_TERMINAL_OUTPUT=serial
 #GRUB_GFXPAYLOAD_LINUX=keep
 GRUB_GFXMODE=auto
 #GRUB_DISABLE_LINUX_UUID=true

(Refer to this post if you don’t know the needed port number.)

Finally run grub-mkconfig to create the real config from the just modified default settings.
Reboot, and GRUB2, the boot process and the login prompt should be accessible over the serial console again.

Sorting photos by date using exif date info

Posted on: Mon 11 June 2012

Estimated read time: 2 minutes

For a family event I received photos from about 6 persons, and wanted to view all of them, sorted by date. The problem was that the timestamps of the files were sometimes incorrect, and also in all but one cases the exif timestamp was incorrect as well (but at least that was consistently incorrect, e.g. all behind of time by 20 mins, etc.)

So first I searched for a photo where a clock is shown, then matched photos by different authors showing the same action to know the time delta of each camera. The rest can be scripted: just read the exif info, apply the necessary time correction based on the camera model, and touch the file with the correct date. Then any image viewer can show the photos, sorted by date.

Here is the script I came up with:

for i in *.jpg
do
    # 2012:01:01 01:01:01 -> 2012-01-01 01:01:01
    date=$(exiv2 $i |grep timestamp|sed 's/.* : //'|sed 's/^\([0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9]\):\([0-9][0-9]\):\([0-9][0-9]\)/\1-\2-\3/')
    # date string -> epoch
    unix=$(date --date="$date" +%s)

    model=$(exiv2 $i |grep model|sed 's/.*: //')

    if [ "$model" == "NIKON D40" ]; then
        unix=$(($unix-1320)) # Alice
    else
        unix=$(($unix+3600)) # Bob
    fi

    # epoch -> date string
    date=$(python -c "import time; print time.strftime('%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S', time.localtime($unix))")
    # profit!
    touch --date="$date" $i
done
# write back the timestamps to the exif info (thx boobaa)
jhead -dsft *.jpg

And additionally if you don’t want to mess up the settings of the image viewer, you can use:

c=0; for i in $(ls -lhtr *.jpg|sed 's/.* //'); do c=$((c+1)); cp -a $i new/$(printf "%03d" $c).jpg; done

to order filenames based on the file timestamp.

Merging git notes

Posted on: Thu 07 June 2012

Estimated read time: 2 minutes

The git notes command is really about local annotation of commits — nothing to share. If you decide to still do so, for example the git-scm.com HOWTO can show you how to pull and push them. But what about merging? There is no UI for that, but — given that with git, everything is possible — you can still do so manually.

So the problem comes when Alice fetches notes, Bob does so, Alice pushes her notes back, Bob annotates a different commit and when Bob wants to push, he gets rejected, non-fast-forward. Normally you would merge or rebase in this situation, but given that git notes by default updates the refs/notes/commits ref and you typically have a different branch checked out, you can’t use git merge or git rebase directly.

What works is:

git checkout refs/notes/commits
git fetch origin refs/notes/commits
git merge FETCH_HEAD
git update-ref refs/notes/commits HEAD
git checkout master

Check out the notes, so if you have conflicts, you can resolve them.
Fetch remote notes to FETCH_HEAD.
Do the merge.
Necessary, as git merge won’t update the ref automatically, since we’re not on a branch.
Or whereever you were before.

And now you can push your notes, as detailed in the above referred blog post. Yes, rebasing would be possible as well, that’s left as an exercise for the reader. ;-)

LibreOffice can now import SmartArt in Writer

Posted on: Wed 06 June 2012

Estimated read time: 1 minutes

You may remember that LibreOffice 3.5 learned to import SmartArt in Impress. In LibreOffice 3.6, the same is now true for Writer:

https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/images/thumb/5/56/Smartart-sw.png/448px-Smartart-sw.png

Note that just like in Impress, Writer produces far from perfect result if the prerendered output of the diagram is not present in the document. In practice, we can open files produced by Word 2010 just fine, but problems with Word 2007 are expected.

In case you way to play with this feature, a test document is available.

Linux in the Education Conference 2012

Posted on: Sun 29 April 2012

Estimated read time: 1 minutes

The Hungarian Linux in the Education Conference 2012 was held today @ Budapest, I held a generic session about LibreOffice (slides), also talked a few guys into submitting Easy Hacks. ;)

Other interesting stuff: a free Logo interpreter in PyUNO by Laszlo, available here.

Thanks for the Hackfest 2012

Posted on: Mon 16 April 2012

Estimated read time: 1 minutes

http://libreoffice.hu/files/2012/04/335px-HHHackfest.png

We were in Hamburg during this weekend, and I think all of us had great fun, kudos go to the organizers! If you are curious, here are the topics I worked on besides mentoring when I was asked to do so:

implemented docx import of even/odd page breaks
implemented docx import + rtf import/export of the zoom setting
implemented \bin rtf keyword
added testcase framework for rtf export (thanks a Markus for helping that!)

Also thanks Stefan for correcting the misleading icons of the horizontal/vertical flipping in Writer. ;)