Estimated read time: 1 minutes
(via cor4office)
The next step in the recent SmartArt story is my Improving SmartArt import in Impress talk at FOSDEM 2019, in the Open Document Editors devroom. The room was a bit far away from the popular places, but the livestream worked out nicely.
There was also a hackfest before the conference, I looked at RTF export of rotated Writer pictures.
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. I focus on the case when only the document model and the layout constraints are given, not a pre-rendered result.
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:
Continuous Block Process now reads space width from constraints.
Accent Process now has the missing bullets and fixes an incorrect large paragraph-level indent.
Organization Chart now has an initial implementation of the hierRoot and
hierChild algorithms.
Organization Chart now handles multiple employees for a manager.
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:
smartart-accent-process.pptx, baseline
smartart-accent-process.pptx, current
smartart-accent-process.pptx, reference
And here is how the baseline, the current and the reference rendering of Organization Chart looks like:
smartart-org-chart.pptx, baseline
smartart-org-chart.pptx, current
smartart-org-chart.pptx, reference
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. :-)
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. I focused especially on the case when only document model and the layout constraints are given, not a pre-rendered result.
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:
Values are not read from constraints (there was a reason for this, they can be complex, given that depending on the context, the unit is points or millimeters and the unit is always implicit).
ZOrder offsets were ignored.
Linear algorithm did not take size from constraints when it came to recursing into child algorithms.
Data point assumed that all text for it is a single "run" (i.e. either all text is bold or nothing, not half of it).
followSib axis was not implemented for forEach, so when you have arrow
shapes between objects, we created N arrows, not N - 1 ones.
Connectors were created as invisible shapes and had the wrong width/height aspect.
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:
smartart-accent-process.pptx, baseline
smartart-accent-process.pptx, current
smartart-accent-process.pptx, reference
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. :-)
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.
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.
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. :-)
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!
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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.
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. :-)
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:
google/contacts/backup
backs up Google Contacts to $HOME/.google-contacts/
ldap/contacts/backup
backs up from an LDAP source to $HOME/.ldap-contacts/
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!
Estimated read time: 2 minutes
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. :-)
Estimated read time: 3 minutes
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:
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. |
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. :-)
