SmartArt allows declaring your content and requirements for a graphic, then the layout will take care of arranging that in a suitable way. It is allowed to declare conflicting requirements, and rules can specify how to resolve those conflicts. The below example document has shape widths defined in a way that multiple child shapes wants to have a width of 100%, but simply scaling down all child shapes does not give a correct result. Rules define what to scale down and what to leave unchanged.

Here is how this works in practice:

If you would like to know a bit more about how this works, continue reading… :-)

This declares that an earlier shape in a linear layout is on top of a later shapes, not the opposite. The default is that newer shapes are on top of older shapes. This is not a visible problem usually, but once you start using negative widths in a linear layout, you can have overlapping shapes. The above example has 3 text shapes, which are overlapping with the "background" arrow shape. This is expressed by having 100% width for child shapes (OK to scale down), then a -100% width for a dummy shape (not scaling) and finally a 100% width for the background arrow (not scaling).

All in all, now the background arrow shape has a good position and size, and the text on the arrow is readable.

You can get a snapshot / demo of Collabora Office and try it out yourself right now: try unstable snapshot. Collabora is a major contributor to LibreOffice and all of this work will be available in TDF’s next release too (7.1).

The PDF format allows assigning a shape (a form xobject) to a digital signature in the PDF file, and if you use e.g. Adobe Acrobat, then it fills this shape with some visible information about the digital signature. Draw used to write a placeholder widget there (a 0x0-sized rectangle on the first page, at position 0x0). This is valid, but it’s not close to real-world signatures, where signing has a visual effect as well.

Here is how this works in practice:

You can see how the 2 added signatures are visible and Adobe Acrobat confirms they are valid, too.

If you would like to know a bit more about how this works, continue reading… :-)

If you use a HW-based certificate, this second step will ask for your certificate PIN.

You can get a snapshot / demo of Collabora Office and try it out yourself right now: try unstable snapshot. Collabora is a major contributor to LibreOffice and all of this work will be available in TDF’s next release too (7.1).

Users sometimes want to specify the vertical position of their shapes in text documents in a way that is relative from the bottom of the page content area. Also, this improves consistency, specifying a position that is relative from the top of the page content area is already possible.

Alternatively, it is possible to have the same calculated position when positioning from the top of the page content area. The downside of this approach is that the position changes when the page height changes. So if the user intention is to position a shape 2 cm above the bottom of the page content area and the page height changes, the shape has to be manually re-positioned. This manual re-positioning is not needed with the new page-content-bottom vertical relation.

For example, if a shape has a height of 10 cm and a 2 cm spacing is wanted between the bottom of the shape and the bottom of the page content area, the position can be set to -12 cm, and then the 2 cm spacing will be maintained, even after the page height changes.

Here is how this works in practice:

You can see how the distance of the shape from the bottom is 2 cm, even if the page height changes.

If you would like to know a bit more about how this works, continue reading… :-)

now the import/export code maps this markup to the new feature.

There is a proposal to promote this from our extension namespace to normal ODF (thanks to Regina for the help there!).

You can get a snapshot / demo of Collabora Office and try it out yourself right now: try unstable snapshot. Collabora is a major contributor to LibreOffice and all of this work will be available in TDF’s next release too (7.1).

You can use Draw with a document which has a single page, which more or less acts as a canvas with unlimited size to handle vector graphics. The current limit of such a canvas in size is 600 x 600 cm. (And that can be increased further if there is demand without too large problems.)

Exporting such a document to PDF is a different matter, though. The specification (up to, and including version 1.5) says that the unit to specify sizes is points, and the maximum allowed value is 14 400. This means that there is no markup to describe that your page is 600 cm wide. PDF 1.6 (and newer versions) introduce a UserUnit markup to allow unlimited page size, and now Draw (and other apps) can use this to describe the increased size.

Another use-case can be a large sheet in Calc, exporting it to a single PDF page, so you can pan around easily on a touch device. If you have enough rows, then getting rid of this limit is helpful to deal with the large page height.

Here is how a large page looks like now in Draw and then in Adobe Reader:

You can see how both Draw and Adobe Reader show that the page width is larger than 200 ".

If you would like to know a bit more about how this works, continue reading… :-)

Here is how the PDF markup looks like for a 600 cm wide page:

Notice how we still avoid values larger than 14 400, but now the UserUnit says that 1 unit means 2 points.

You can get a snapshot / demo of Collabora Office and try it out yourself right now: try unstable snapshot. Collabora is a major contributor to LibreOffice and all of this work will be available in TDF’s next release too (7.0).

Padded numbering is a style where you insert 0 characters in front of an otherwise normal (Arabic) numbering, making sure that the result always has at least N characters. Up to now, you had to number your content manually to have this effect, while Word supports this feature.

OOXML supports padding up to 2, 3, 4 and 5 characters. The news is now now it’s possible to not only pad up to 2 characters, but also to any number between 2 and 5.

Here is how the current rendering of padded numbering looks like, with a custom prefix and suffix:

You can see how 0 is inserted before 999, but not before 1000 as this is the pad-to-4 case.

If you would like to know a bit more about how this works, continue reading… :-)

Here is how the pad-to-2 markup looks like:

And here is how you define pad-to-3:

The rest was reasonably straightforward, since the actual padding implementation just had to be generalized.

You can get a snapshot / demo of Collabora Office and try it out yourself right now: try unstable snapshot. Collabora is a major contributor to LibreOffice and all of this work will be available in TDF’s next release too (7.0).

Padded numbering is a style where you insert 0 characters in front of an otherwise normal (Arabic) numbering, making sure that the result always has at least N characters. Up to now, you had to number your content manually to have this effect, while Word supports this feature.

OOXML supports padding up to 2, 3, 4 and 5 characters. Padding up to 2 characters is the older feature, supported in DOC and RTF as well, so I focused on that piece.

Here is how the current, the baseline and the reference rendering of padded numbering looks like:

You can see how 0 is inserted before 1..9, but not before 10.

If you would like to know a bit more about how this works, continue reading… :-)

Then I found that footnote numbering needs explicit handling, so added support for padding in that case as well:

Finally I had a little bit of remaining time, so I extended support for the recently added Chicago numbering:

Padding up to 3, 4 and 5 characters would be possible to do, but it’s DOCX-only, and uses a different markup, planned to be done later.

All this is available in master (towards LibreOffice 7.0), so you can grab a daily build and try it out right now. :-)

Last year I posted about work to have semi-transparent rendering of not only shape fill and shape borders, but also shape text in Draw. Now the same semi-transparent text feature is available in Writer as well. This improves compatibility with Word, which supports the same feature in its DOCX format. You can access the new option in the Format → Character dialog.

Here is how the new, old and reference rendering looks like:

You can get a snapshot / demo of Collabora Office and try it out yourself right now: try unstable snapshot. Collabora is a major contributor to LibreOffice and all of this work will be available in TDF’s next release too (7.0).