I already wrote about the btLr text direction in the context of Writer table cells as a result of a Collabora hack week (part 1, part 2, part 3). This post is meant to be the final one (for now), given that both table cells and shapes / text frames are now working nicely with all major formats.

The first topic is that whenever I looked at supporting the new bottom-to-top, left-to-right direction, I always first checked if the more common top-to-bottom, right-to-left direction is working or not (this is used for e.g. Japanese rotated text). Turns out that Writer text frames were not exported to drawingML (part of DOCX), so I fixed that.

Similarly, there is the older shape markup in DOCX: VML. The tbRl direction from that was broken, too, now working nicely.

Then I could actually look at the btLr import from VML, which is now correct.

One of the motivations for this work was to get rid of the old, miserable hack where we did character-level rotation during import (which falls apart for multi-paragraph text). If the import mapping in itself is not painful enough, we had to undo the effect of this import hack at export time. When I could remove the last usage of this dreaded checkFrameBtlr() function in the export code, I mentally did a little dance. ;-)

Back to btLR fixing, exporting Writer text frames to DOCX is not interesting when you do DOCX editing, but it’s very much relevant when you do ODT → DOCX conversion. And the btLr case was of course not handled, fixed now.

RTF was broken in 4 different ways: import and export was broken for the btLr and the tbRl cases for text frames.

The last thing was the binary DOC export, where btLr text frames were not handled.

With these sorted out, I think the topic of table cells and shapes / text frames are now supported reasonably well. ODF could do the btLr writing direction for sections and pages as well, but I don’t see that as a priority. And hey, Word doesn’t support them, either. :-)

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 (6.4).

Years ago I posted about work to attach comments to text ranges. This improved compatibility with Word greatly, but it was always a piece of text that was commented, never frames. If you just selected a frame and tried to comment by selecting the menu entry or the Ctrl-Alt-C shortcut, nothing happened, because frame selection did not interpret comment insertion.

Examples for frames are images or charts. This needs explicit handling, so at the moment the at-char and as-char anchor types are supported, and you can simply insert the comment to a frame once the frame is selected. This works in both desktop Writer and Online.

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 (6.4).

In this post I would like to present the progress done earlier this year regarding the above mentioned diagram types — these are used in many documents.

The improvement (as always) come in small incremental steps:

With all these fixed, we reach a much better state for the mentioned diagram types.

The SmartArt test documents from sd/qa/unit/data/pptx/ is what I used for testing this work.

Here is how the baseline, the current and the reference rendering of Organization Chart looks like:

And here is how the baseline, the current and the reference rendering of Cycle Matrix looks like:

And finally here is how the baseline, the current and the reference rendering of Picture Strip looks like:

This is not not perfect yet, but it’s clearly a large improvement, all text is now readable from the diagrams and pictures are no longer missing!

All this is available in master (towards LibreOffice 6.3), so you can grab a daily build and try it out right now. :-)

If you work with tables in Word, it’s very easy to create this writing direction: the context menu in a table cell has a menu item to set the direction of the text, where you can rotate the text by 90 degrees counter-clockwise or clockwise. The counter-clockwise btLr direction is the problematic one. Support for tbRl was fine already, since that is needed typically for Chinese/Japanese scripts as well.

Here is how the baseline, the current and the reference rendering of btLr text looks like:

You can see how the second paragraph in the cell was missing from the rendered result and now we basically pixel-by-pixel match the reference.

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

The document model and UNO API were reasonably straightforward to implement, but the layout was much more challenging. Writer already supported 3 writing directions:

This new one is also a vertical direction, also left to right, but bottom to top. The initial layout contained code to read the new enumerator from doc model, extend the SwFrame class to handle this new bottom to top mode, some handling of switching between horizontal/vertical mode and at the end mapping from Writer layout’s direction to VCL’s "900" font orientation. There are more things to handle in layout, but this was good enough to look at other areas as well.

The ODF filter required updating, which was a bit challenging as it was necessary to write different attribute names depending on which enumerator is used from an emumeration, and we don’t have good support for this. Once the filter code was in place, I could write some layout-level tests as well.

Since we have .ui files for UI descriptions, adding UI support was really easy.

Time came to step away from coding for a moment and write up paperwork to propose this feature to be part of the next ODF version (thanks to Andras for the help there!).

Finally I went back to layout, and improved things a bit more: after fixing baseline offsets, the positioning of the text was exactly matching what Word does. How do I know? I used this little script:

Which allows seeing the differences between our and Word’s PDF output. Additional work was needed to handle multiple paragraphs in a table cell. At this stage I was happy enough with the rendering result, so finally pulled the trigger and replaced the old DOCX filter hack (using character-level rotation) with simple DOCX filter mapping from OOXML’s btLr direction to Writer’s btLr direction — i.e. what was already done for the tbRl case.

The feature works good enough already so that this new core feature can be used by the DOCX filter by default, but there are still a few rough edges:

All this is available in master (towards LibreOffice 6.3), so you can grab a daily build and try it out right now. :-)

In this post I would like to present the progress done last month regarding the above mentioned diagram types — these are used in many documents.

The improvement (as always) come in small incremental steps:

With all these fixed, we reach a much better state for the mentioned diagram types.

The SmartArt test documents from sd/qa/unit/data/pptx/ is what I used for testing this work.

Here is how the baseline, the current and the reference rendering of Accent Process looks like:

And here is how the baseline, the current and the reference rendering of Organization Chart looks like:

This is not not perfect yet, but it’s clearly a large improvement, all text is now readable from the diagrams and bullets are no longer missing!

All this is available in master (towards LibreOffice 6.3), so you can grab a daily build and try it out right now. :-)

In this post I would like to present the progress regarding the Accent Process preset, available in PowerPoint — which is used in many documents.

This exposed several shortcomings of the current diagram layout we have in LibreOffice:

With all these fixed, we reach a much better state for handling accent process.

smartart-accent-process.pptx is what I used for testing of this work.

Here is how the baseline, the current and the reference rendering of the test documents look like:

This is not not perfect yet, but it’s clearly a large improvement, all text is now readable from the diagram!

All this is available in master (towards LibreOffice 6.3), so you can grab a daily build and try it out right now. :-)