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SmartArt improvements in LibreOffice

Estimated read time: 2 minutes

I recently dived into the SmartArt support of LibreOffice, which is the component responsible for displaying complex diagrams from PPTX, especially in case only document model and the layout constraints are given, not a pre-rendered result.

First, thanks to our partner SUSE for working with Collabora to make this possible.

The problem

There are several ones. :-) If you are just interested in high quality viewing of PPTX files, then your problem started with PowerPoint 2007 not writing a pre-rendered drawingML markup of the diagram to the files, only PowerPoint 2010 started behaving like this. Additionally, if a diagram is not edited, then re-saving with PowerPoint 2010 doesn’t seem to generate the drawingML markup, either. This means that data + constraints cases are quite frequent even today.

Also, one day Impress should be able to actually edit these SmartArts as well, so having the knowledge how to lay out SmartArt (even if it’s import-time-only at the moment) is a good thing.

Results so far

I always write cppunit tests when I work on filter code (in this case OOXML), so far all fixes were visible in just two test files: smartart-vertial-box-list.pptx and vertical-bracket-list.pptx.

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

smartart-vertial-box-list.pptx, baseline

smartart-vertial-box-list.pptx, current

smartart-vertial-box-list.pptx, reference

vertical-bracket-list.pptx, baseline

vertical-bracket-list.pptx, current

vertical-bracket-list.pptx, reference

In terms of code commits, the fixes are split into several ones:

Clearly the results are not perfect yet, but in both cases nothing was visible, and now all text is readable, so we’re moving in the right direction!

All this is available in master (towards LibreOffice 6.2), so you can grab a daily build and try it out right now. :-)


Text layout performance in LibreOffice conference lightning talk

Estimated read time: 1 minutes

Last Friday I gave a Text layout performance lightning talk at LibreOffice Conference 2018. Click on the image to get the hybrid PDF slides!


ReqIF import/export in LibreOffice Writer conference talk

Estimated read time: 1 minutes

Earlier today I gave an Editing ReqIF-XHTML fragments with Writer talk at LibreOffice Conference 2018. The room was well-crowded — perhaps because the previous talk was about OOXML interoperability. ;-)

I expect quite some other slides will be available on Planet, don’t miss them.


odfsig: an Open Document Format (ODF) digital signatures tool

Estimated read time: 1 minutes

I created a toy project to experiment with a few technologies I wanted to try out (cmake, googletest, xmlsec outside LibreOffice, libzip and AppVeyor). The result is a tool with a similar interface as pdfsig from poppler (for PDF files), just for ODF: a cmdline executable to verify the digital signature(s) in an ODF document.

The source code now has CI on Linux and Windows, so perhaps in a shape that is interesting for others to have a look as well. And if not, then no problem, it was interesting to put together these building blocks and see them working as expected. :-)


mutt/vim offline address book with multiple sources

Estimated read time: 1 minutes

I used to have a hackish setup to trigger address book in the form of code completion from vim, when mutt starts it. I recently migrated the last part of it from python2, so it’s now in a relatively consistent state. On a boring flight trip I finally got around to summarize how it works, perhaps it’s useful to someone else as well. :-)

By multiple sources, I mean Google Contacts for my private account, and LDAP for work-related accounts. I have one script for each to have a local backup:

Then comes mutt/contacts/search, which can read these backups from $HOME/.mutt/contacts/ (you can create symlinks to decide which backup should be included in the search results).

The rest is just a short search.vim that integrates the search script into vim, so when mutt starts it with ft=mail, the search script is invoked when you start typing and you press Ctrl-X Ctrl-O (trigger code completion).

And that’s it, I can start typing mails to friends and customers even without network connectivity, without manually maintaining an own address book just for mutt!


Custom user profiles with unoconv

Estimated read time: 2 minutes

https://farm2.staticflickr.com/1859/43598513125_55bed46184_o.png

Background: I was benchmarking Online vs jodconverter vs unoconv the other day for Collabora’s document conversion page. One problem with measuring unoconv performance was that it provided no ways to run multiple unoconv processes in parallel, while the underlying soffice binary obviously allows this.

So while unoconv is not capable of launching the soffice process in a chroot (improves security), nor is capable of forking an already pre-initialized soffice process (improves performance, both are things Online can do for you), there is no real reason why you should not be able to run multiple unoconv processes in parallel. The previously mentioned benchmarking would be quite unfair if even this kind of multiprocessing would be ignored, but unoconv had no way to specify a custom user profile, which has to be different for each soffice process.

So I filed a GitHub pull request on 1st Jun, and finally it was merged on 10th Aug.

Here is how you can use it for example:

unoconv --user-profile /tmp/tmpf_yreswi -f pdf --port 2002 test.txt
Note
It’s your responsibility to give --port a unique value, but that’s not too hard: if you use a thread pool to launch the unoconv processes, then you can add the thread index to a base port and that will give you a unique port.

So this is available in unoconv master (towards unoconv 0.8.2+1), you can grab the sources from git and try it out right now. :-)


API improvements in LibreOffice

Estimated read time: 3 minutes

https://farm2.staticflickr.com/1793/43859007612_ca207fed0f_o.png

I worked on two small features to extend the public (UNO) API of LibreOffice. First, thanks to Vector for funding Collabora to make this possible.

Aliased paths and text in the PNG export for Draw

The UNO API of Draw allows you to build quite complex and custom shapes, but you may want to export the rendered result to a bitmap for testing purposes, so you can assert that the actual result matches a reference one.

One problem in this area is anti-aliasing, which can easily differ between machines. Given that normally aliased rendering is ugly, there is now a way to enable AA, but disable it just during a single invocation of the PNG exporter.

The above picture shows how the AA result looks like. You could write a Basic macro like this to trigger the PNG export from Draw:

xExporter = createUnoService("com.sun.star.drawing.GraphicExportFilter")
xExporter.SetSourceDocument(ThisComponent.DrawPages(0))
Dim aArgs(1) As new com.sun.star.beans.PropertyValue
aArgs(0).Name  = "URL"
aArgs(0).Value = "file:///tmp/debug/aa.png"
aArgs(1).Name  = "MediaType"
aArgs(1).Value = "image/png"
xExporter.filter(aArgs())

Let’s see how it looks like if you turn AA off:

https://farm2.staticflickr.com/1832/43859007522_aeb4516f02_o.png

You just need to specify a new Antialiasing key under FilterData:

Dim aFilterData(0) As new com.sun.star.beans.PropertyValue
aFilterData(0).Name = "AntiAliasing"
aFilterData(0).Value = False
xExporter = createUnoService("com.sun.star.drawing.GraphicExportFilter")
xExporter.SetSourceDocument(ThisComponent.DrawPages(0))
Dim aArgs(2) As new com.sun.star.beans.PropertyValue
aArgs(0).Name  = "URL"
aArgs(0).Value = "file:///tmp/debug/non-aa.png"
aArgs(1).Name  = "FilterData"
aArgs(1).Value = aFilterData()
aArgs(2).Name  = "MediaType"
aArgs(2).Value = "image/png"
xExporter.filter(aArgs())

You can imagine which rendering result is easier to debug when the reference and the actual bitmap doesn’t match. ;-)

Note
This feature is available for other bitmap formats as well, PNG is only an example.

Default character style in Writer

In most cases you don’t really need a default character style: if you’re fine with a default, then the default paragraph style should be enough for your needs. In general, paragraph styles can contain character properties, so if the default is fine for you, you just don’t set a character style.

However, there is an exception to all rules. If you want to reset the current character style, it makes sense to just set the CharStyleName property to a default value, especially since this works with paragraph styles already.

Now you can write C++ code like this (see SwUnoWriter::testDefaultCharStyle() for a full example):

xCursorProps->setPropertyValue("CharStyleName", uno::makeAny(OUString("Standard")));

And it’ll be handled as Default Style in English builds, or their localized versions in a non-English UI.

All this is available in master (towards LibreOffice 6.2), or you can grab a daily build and try it out right now. :-)


Improved ECDSA handling in LibreOffice

Estimated read time: 2 minutes

I wrote about ECDSA handling in LibreOffice last year, back then the target was to be able to verify signatures using the ECDSA algorithm on Linux.

Lots of things happened since then, this post is meant to summarize those improvements. My personal motivation is that Hungarian eID cards come with a gov-trusted ECDSA (x509) cert, so handling those in LibreOffice would be nice. My goals were:

  • platforms: handling Windows as well, not only Linux/macOS

  • operations: handling signing as well, not only verification

  • formats: cover all of ODF, OOXML and PDF

Let’s see what has happened:

  • Linux, ODF, sign: we had hardcoded RSA algorithm when generating a signature, now we infer the sign algorithm from the signing cert algorithm (commit)

  • Linux, OOXML, sign: same problem with hardcoded RSA (commit)

  • Windows, PDF, sign: the certificate chooser had to be ported to from CryptoAPI to CNG (commit)

  • Windows, ODF, verify / sign: this was the largest problem, this required a whole new libxmlsec backend (interface, implementation, all in C90) and also required conditionally using that new backend in LibreOffice (commit)

  • Windows, OOXML, sign: this was almost functional, except that the UI recently regressed, now fixed (commit)

  • Finally now that everything is ported on Windows to use CNG, I could enable it by default yesterday.

I could test hardware-based signing after this, which was fine out of the box on both platforms. Some screenshots:

  • Linux:

https://farm2.staticflickr.com/1784/29321634078_8818b2d7ba_o.png
  • Windows:

https://farm1.staticflickr.com/927/42288765505_db72ee48f2_o.png

(There is no reason why this would not work on macOS, but I did not test that.)

Thanks Gabor Kelemen who helped me to get a sane card reader that has reasonable driver support on Linux.

All this is available in master (towards LibreOffice 6.2), or you can grab a daily build and try it out right now. :-)


Editing ReqIF-XHTML fragments in LibreOffice Writer

Estimated read time: 2 minutes

I worked on a small feature to use Writer as an editor for the XHTML fragments inside Requirements Interchange Format (ReqIF) files. First, thanks to Vector for funding Collabora to make this possible.

Writer already supported XHTML import and export before (see my previous post) as a special mode of the HTML filter, this work builds on top of that. The main speciality around XHTML as used for fragments inside a ReqIF file is embedded objects.

The special mode to opt-in for ReqIF-XHTML behavior can actived like this:

  • during import: --infilter="HTML (StarWriter):xhtmlns=reqif-xhtml"

  • during export: -convert-to "xhtml:HTML (StarWriter):xhtmlns=reqif-xhtml"

Three different cases are handled:

  1. Image with native data we don’t understand and just preserve.

  2. Image with OLE2 data, which we hand out to external applications (at least on Windows). On the above video this is an embedded PPSX file, handled by PowerPoint.

  3. Image with ODF data, which we handle internally. This is a Draw document on the above video.

Regarding how it works, the import is a series of unwrapping containers till you get to the real data and the export is the opposite of this. Here are the layers:

  • Larger ReqIF files have the .reqifz extension, and are ZIP files containing an XML file, having the XHTML fragments. This is not relevant for this post, as Writer assumes that extracting the XHTML fragment from ReqIF is done before you load the content into Writer.

  • XHTML always has a PNG image for the object, and optionally it has RTF as native data for the object.

  • The RTF file is a fragment, containing just an embedded OLE1 container.

  • The OLE1 container is just a wrapper around the real OLE2 container.

  • The OLE2 container either has the data directly or MSO has a convention on how to include OOXML files in it (see the PPSX example above), and we handle that.

On export we do the opposite: save the file, put it into OLE2, then into OLE1, then into RTF, finally into XHTML.

There is no specification on how to put ODF files into OLE2, so I extracted the relevant code from LibreOffice’s binary MSO filters and now the Writer HTML filter uses that as well. This avoids code duplication and also could avoid inventing some new markup this way.

All this is available in master (towards LibreOffice 6.2), or you can grab a daily build and try it out right now. :-)


Lazy reading images from Microsoft formats in LibreOffice

Estimated read time: 1 minutes

I worked on improving document load performance of Microsoft formats in general, and DOC/DOCX in particular in LibreOffice recently. First, thanks to TDF and users that support the foundation by providing donations for funding Collabora to make this possible.

I built on top of the great work of Tomaz, focusing on these secondary, but important formats.

The idea is that if you load an Microsoft binary or OOXML file, it should not be necessary to parse all images at load time, it’s enough to lazy read it when we first render e.g. a Writer page containing that image.

The focus here was documents containing large images. I tested with an Earth photo of size 8000x8000 pixels from NASA, making little modifications to it, so each picture has a different checksum, embedding them into a binary DOC file.

https://farm1.staticflickr.com/980/41838412652_c1cbefcfc1_o.png

I measured the time from the soffice process startup to rendering the first page. We defer the work of loading most images now, as you can see on the chart. In contrast, we used to decompress all images on file import in the past. This means the new cost for e.g. 4 images is 37% of the original.

All this is available in master (towards LibreOffice 6.1), or you can grab a daily build and try it out right now. :-)

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