The Document Foundation Planet

 

February 17, 2025

Official TDF Blog

Community Member Monday: Ndidi Folasade Ogboi

Ndidi Folasade Ogboi

Tell us a bit about yourself!

I live in Lagos, Nigeria, and I spend my time dabbling into user experience design with research, although these days, I’m diving deeper into research. I’m a big fan of books, especially well-written fiction. Music is also a huge part of my life. Let’s just say I love anything that sounds good and sing-alongs during work.

What are you working on in the LibreOffice project right now?

I am an Outreachy intern working on improving the LibreOffice Writer templates with guidance from my mentor, Heiko Tietze. I have spent the last month understanding the community’s pain points by carrying out a survey, analysing their responses and working to create functional templates that they need. Currently, I am iterating on priority templates like DIN 5008 Business Letter, resume and academic writing templates.

I am also doing some more research on template standards and reflecting on how to create templates that would help users. My top priority is to understand styling and implement it in the templates I am creating and also curate template contents that fits into prospective user preferences.

Why did you choose to join the project, and how was the experience?

During my Outreachy contribution phase, I had a list of open-source projects I could choose from, but at the time, I wanted to test the limits of my capacity. As a UX designer with no coding background, the first task for this project was to submit a patch on Gerrit.

Every other contributor left the task obviously because of the task complexity and I remember one of my mentors, Ilmari telling me that the competition had become less tense due to the number of contributors dropping the project. It was a challenge that pushed me out of my comfort zone as it was my first time interacting with code. That was it for me. Completing that task gave me a sense of achievement and made me even more excited to continue with the project.

Ah, it was challenging at first. I also dealt with anxiety because there was so much to do and I didn’t know where to start but later, the bits started coming together. Luckily for me, I have a mentor who has been supportive since I started the project back in December and who has made my experience seamless. Whenever I face a blocker, I know I have a mentor who is always ready to provide me with resources and connect me with other members of the community that have resources that would be useful for each project phases.

Anything else you plan to do in the future? What does LibreOffice really need?

I have decided to continue contributing to adding more templates to Writer and helping improve other aspects of user experience through user research and design after my internship ends. I like it here. Working on templates in Writer is challenging no doubt – but I think I like the way it stretches me, and helps me expand my skills in the area of research and thinking about a broader user audience.

Speaking from a UX perspective, I think LibreOffice could greatly benefit from a modernized UI mostly to improve accessibility and efficiency. When I started using the Writer interface, it was quite hard for me to navigate at first; there were no modal pop-ups to help sort of onboard me into the whole experience and so having to navigate all alone made me reluctant to use the Writer tool. I also look forward to the implementation of AI because seriously, it just makes navigation and usability way easier. For example, the implementation of AI-powered suggestions for formatting would make LibreOffice feel more modern.

Thanks to Ndidi for all her contributions! 😊

by Mike Saunders at February 17, 2025 03:19 PM

LibreOffice Dev Blog

Understanding the existing code to provide better patches

LibreOffice inherits a gigantic code base from its ancestors, StarOffice and OpenOffice. Here I discuss some notes for the newcomers on how to better understand the existing LibreOffice code, and improve the patches.

Studying the Existing Code

As said, LibreOffice is a huge code base, containing ~10 million lines of mostly C++ code. There are different assumptions, conventions and coding styles across ~200 modules that LibreOffice has.

Therefore, it is important to first, study the existing code, through reading and debugging LibreOffice source code, to understand the things that it does, and the way you can implement your ideas, including bug fixes and adding new features.

And although implementing some ideas seem to be straightforward at first sight, it is meaningful to study the details.

Quality Assurance Point of View

First of all, you should understand the thing that you want to implement. No matter if it is a bug, a new feature, or just an EasyHack, you should understand what is requested, what works and what does not work. This requires careful reading of the Bugzilla pages.

User Point of View

Then, you should try to run LibreOffice to understand the exact place in the application where you want to change. LibreOffice user interface has thousands of dialog boxes, so you need to make sure that you understand the thing that you want to do.

Developer Point of View

And at last, you get into implementing something in the code. Here are some questions that you can ask yourself about the details, when reading the existing code:

  • Why this statement is here, in the first place? (detail-oriented view)
    • You can use git blame to see the last author of a specific line
    • You can use git log to study the details by knowing the commit hash
    • What can this part of code actually does?
    • Can I see its effect?
git log

git log

Or, you may be interested in the code behavior in the big picture:

  • What does the code do as a whole? (holistic view)
  • There are many other statements, functions and other constructs in the code. What do they do?
  • What is the overall goal of the code?
  • Can I test that in action?

You can do some small changes, before even getting into implementing your idea:

  • What happens if I remove it? (small changes)
  • Does the removal prevent the code from working?
  • Is it incomplete, or does it actually do something useful, which
  • will be absent if I remove it?

Then, you can work on the actual implementation. Ask yourself:

  • How can I implement the idea in its simplest form? (straightforward change)
  • Does it have side effects?
  • How can I make sure every thing else works as before?
  • How can I write a test for it?

After understanding some of the basic details about the way things work, you may go into improving your implementation.

  • How can I make it better? (sophisticated change)
  • Can I make the code more robust where it is brittle?
  • Can I complete the code where it is incomplete?

Final Notes

These were the questions to give you some ideas of some of the underlying complexities in the code. You can start from small changes to become familiar with these complexities, and then grow to do more complex stuff in the code.

We have various different EasyHacks in LibreOffice, with different difficulty levels. If you are interested in coding, you can always find something that fits you, and grow gradually.

You can read more in these links:

by Hossein Nourikhah at February 17, 2025 10:17 AM

February 13, 2025

Official TDF Blog

LibreOffice 25.2: The first week, in statistics

LibreOffice 25.2 banner

One week ago, we announced LibreOffice 25.2, our brand new major release. It’s packed with new features, and has many improvements to compatibility and performance too. So, what has happened in the week since then? Let’s check out some stats…

647,961 downloads

These are just stats for our official downloads page, of course – many Linux users will have acquired the new release via their distribution’s package repositories.

11,313 views, shares and likes on social media

Combining our Mastodon, Bluesky, X/Twitter and Facebook posts about the announcement, and all the likes, shares, views and comments, we get 11,313. Thanks to everyone who spread the word on social media! 😊

528 upvotes on Reddit

On release day, we organised an “ask us anything” event on Reddit. Members of The Document Foundation and LibreOffice community joined in the discussions and answered questions from users and potential contributors.

Huge thanks to our worldwide community of volunteers, and certified developers, for all their work on this release!

by Mike Saunders at February 13, 2025 08:28 AM

February 12, 2025

Michael Meeks

2025-02-12 Wednesday

February 12, 2025 05:42 PM

February 11, 2025

Michael Meeks

2025-02-11 Tuesday

  • Planning call, sync with Karen, Andras & partners. Out for a run in the afternoon with J. - lovely. Worked late trying to dig back through piled-up E-mail.

February 11, 2025 09:00 PM

LibreOffice QA Blog

QA/Dev Report: January 2025

General Activities

  1. Olivier Hallot (TDF) added help pages for new Calc functions TOROW(), TOCOL(), WRAPROWS(), WRAPCOLS(), EXPAND(), TAKE() and DROP(), added dark mode support to the help interface, improved help for PDF/UA, did cleanups in the Xapian-based search in online help, added help for tables styles in Writer and improved help related to printing
  2. Dione Maddern added a help page for Cell Appearance Sidebar deck
  3. Stanislav Horáček did some cleanups in help
  4. Gábor Kelemen (allotropia) added a detailed list of allowed PDF password characters into help and improved the developer tools for finding unneeded includes and UI strings that might need to be translatable
  5. Tomaž Vajngerl (Collabora) continued working on PDF 2.0 support and document themes and fixed an Excel compatibility issue with empty values of defined names
  6. Miklós Vajna, Andras Timar, Henry Castro, Gökay Şatır, Attila Szűcs, Szymon Kłos and Pranam Lashkari (Collabora) worked on LOKit used by Collabora Online
  7. Xisco Faulí (TDF) implemented new Calc functions, TOCOL, TOROW, WRAPCOLS, WRAPROWS, TAKE, DROP, EXPAND and CHOOSEROWS, added support for setuptools and pip in Python scripting, upgraded many dependencies, added some unit tests and did many code stability improvements
  8. Michael Stahl (allotropia) continued improving the correctness of HTML import regarding formatting and fixed issues with table splitting in Writer’s layout
  9. Mike Kaganski (Collabora) fixed an issue with opening newly-created database forms, fixed Basic isNumeric() function giving incorrect results, fixed an installation issue affecting Active Directory setups on Windows, fixed issues with allowed characters in file name when exporting as PDF, fixed wrong number of results being reported when going over 1000 while executing Find All in Calc, fixed inability to pass a Date object to an UNO API method, fixed an issue with handling of Variant types in Basic, made handling of conditional formatting with colour conditions more robust when moving columns, made intercepting .uno:Open command work again, fixed a crash related to regular expressions in Basic and made SQL queries handle negative values
  10. Caolán McNamara (Collabora) fixed crashes, fixed many issues found by static analysers and did code cleanups and optimisations
  11. Stephan Bergmann (allotropia) worked on the WASM build. He also adapted the code to compiler changes and did code cleanups
  12. Noel Grandin (Collabora) improved the speed of inserting rotated images to Writer. He also did many code cleanups and optimisations
  13. Justin Luth (Collabora) fixed DOCX import issues with frames before tables getting anchored to a table cell instead of an empty paragraph and missing header properties in page styles
  14. Michael Weghorn (TDF) continued cleaning up and reorganising accessibility-related code, did refactoring in Linux printer code and fixed some crashes. He also worked on using native widgets in Qt UIs
  15. Balázs Varga (allotropia) fixed import of cropped vector graphic objects in PPTX files, improved warnings related to allowed characters in the PDF password input dialog, made it possible to show or hide the text in some password dialogs (more to be included), fixed broken cropped SVG files in PPTX import and made it so the size values in Position and Size and Crop tabs in Image Properties dialog are synchronised
  16. Patrick Luby fixed artifacts showing in animated GIFs with Skia UI rendering on macOS, added Quick Look plugins for .od* files on macOS and made it so the Start Center menubar is shown in the default menubar on macOS
  17. Oliver Specht (CIB) made it so the table context menu in Draw/Impress includes hyperlink actions, made scrolling while selecting less hasty, made it so Ctrl+scrollwheel changes the slides per row setting when in View – Slide Sorter in Impress, made the status of numbered and bulleted list toggle state visible in toolbars and menus in Impress/Draw, made it possible to open the Edit Field dialog in read-only Writer documents and fixed losing chart number formatting when copying and pasting the chart
  18. Heiko Tietze (TDF) added a confirmation dialog when deleting all comments in Writer
  19. László Németh fixed loss of images anchored to page in subdocuments of Writer master documents and made bookmark boundary mark labels look cleaner in Writer
  20. Ilmari Lauhakangas (TDF) improved the layout of help and did cleanups in its CSS styles
  21. Christian Lohmaier (TDF) improved the Windows build setup
  22. Eike Rathke (Red Hat) added support for English (Guyana)
  23. Jonathan Clark (TDF) added support for Mongolian while enabling vertical text options for it, made the script type assignment algorithm in the context of mixed Western and Asian text more robust, implemented vertical CJK printing for all fonts on Windows and fixed borders of merged cells in Calc vanishing when changing sheet direction to right-to-left
  24. Sahil Gautam (allotropia) continued polishing the Libreoffice Theme rework
  25. Andreas Heinisch added support for importing inserted text tag “ins” from HTML, made it so the Edit… button in Writer’s Index dialog is disabled, if no concordance file has been selected and added first and secondary keys to the tooltips of index fields
  26. Chris Sherlock did code cleanups in VCL
  27. Laurent Balland did fixes in Lights, Focus, Forestbird, Yellow Idea and Vivid Impress templates
  28. Armin Le Grand (Collabora) did refactoring in item handling
  29. Björn Michaelsen did refactoring in Writer code
  30. David Gilbert added a readme for PDF import code
  31. Tibor Nagy (allotropia) fixed a PDF export accessibility issue and made the Formatting toolbar visible in sections that are marked as editable in read-only documents
  32. Jean-Pierre Ledure worked on the ScriptForge library
  33. Ahmed Hamed added a category to store favorite functions in Calc’s Function Wizard and Functions Sidebar deck
  34. Áron Budea (Collabora) fixed unwanted cell formatting reset upon changing language on a selection in Calc
  35. Adam Seskunas ported a Java test to C++
  36. Rafael Lima made solver’s Sensitivity Report prettier and did cleanups in item handling
  37. Jaume Pujantell (Collabora) fixed unneeded duplication of slide master when exporting to PPTX
  38. Skyler Grey (Collabora) made the iOS app use desktop clipboard code

Kudos to Ilmari Lauhakangas for helping to elaborate this list.

Reported Bugs

418 bugs, 50 of which are enhancements, have been reported by 246 people.

Top 10 Reporters

  1. Justin L ( 20 )
  2. Gabor Kelemen (allotropia) ( 18 )
  3. Aertx ( 12 )
  4. Eyal Rozenberg ( 11 )
  5. Telesto ( 10 )
  6. Aron Budea ( 9 )
  7. Michael Otto ( 8 )
  8. Jeff Fortin Tam ( 8 )
  9. Mike Kaganski ( 7 )
  10. Mihai Vasiliu ( 7 )

Triaged Bugs

362 bugs have been triaged by 67 people.

Top 10 Triagers

  1. BogdanB ( 45 )
  2. Buovjaga ( 37 )
  3. raal ( 37 )
  4. Heiko Tietze ( 28 )
  5. m_a_riosv ( 26 )
  6. V Stuart Foote ( 21 )
  7. Mike Kaganski ( 16 )
  8. Aron Budea ( 11 )
  9. Roman Kuznetsov ( 11 )
  10. Xisco Faulí ( 10 )

Resolution of resolved bugs

347 bugs have been set to RESOLVED.

Check the following sections for more information about bugs resolved as FIXED, WORKSFORME and DUPLICATE.

Fixed Bugs

157 bugs have been fixed by 29 people.

Top 10 Fixers

  1. Mike Kaganski ( 17 )
  2. Xisco Fauli ( 12 )
  3. Olivier Hallot ( 11 )
  4. Jonathan Clark ( 8 )
  5. Oliver Specht ( 7 )
  6. Patrick Luby ( 7 )
  7. Michael Weghorn ( 7 )
  8. Balazs Varga ( 6 )
  9. Noel Grandin ( 5 )
  10. Michael Stahl ( 5 )

List of critical bugs fixed

  1. tdf#164185 View -> Boundaries is turned off by default making it impossible to move image + caption frame ( Thanks to Ilmari Lauhakangas )

List of high severity bugs fixed

  1. tdf#164127 [Crash] Crash on returning to dialog window after switching to document while editing Basic-IDE dialog controls ( Thanks to Michael Weghorn )
  2. tdf#164640 List bullets formatting changed ( Thanks to Noel Grandin )
  3. tdf#164855 Crash while centering table contents ( Thanks to Balazs Varga )
  4. tdf#35361 [feature request: macOS] Support Apple Quick Look plugin ( Thanks to Patrick Luby )

List of crashes fixed

  1. tdf#156348 Crash if change in formatting in Writer by converting text to table with field variable ( Thanks to Michael Stahl )
  2. tdf#159377 CRASH at undo at after pasting table in footer (swlo!SwFormatFootnote::SetNumStr+0x3e26:) ( Thanks to Michael Stahl )
  3. tdf#160770 Crashes on second access of regex matches without VBA support option ( Thanks to Mike Kaganski )
  4. tdf#163335 Linux (qt6): crash whenever selecting text using cursor or keyboard going from right to left ( Thanks to Michael Weghorn )
  5. tdf#164127 [Crash] Crash on returning to dialog window after switching to document while editing Basic-IDE dialog controls ( Thanks to Michael Weghorn )
  6. tdf#164130 LibreOffice Calc crashes when doing a lookup in a sheet with a space in its name ( Thanks to Henry Castro )
  7. tdf#164179 Crash when switching the Short Name in Bibliography Entry dialog ( Thanks to Vojtěch Doležal )
  8. tdf#164620 CRASH: selecting all and deleting ( Thanks to Noel Grandin )
  9. tdf#164621 CRASH: pasting content ( Thanks to Oliver Specht )
  10. tdf#164783 Libreoffice crashes when clicking on grid form column header or in empty space below rows, gtk3+a11y ( Thanks to Michael Weghorn )
  11. tdf#164855 Crash while centering table contents ( Thanks to Balazs Varga )
  12. tdf#164899 [CRASH] LO crashes upon opening file with macro when the Tabbed interface is used ( Thanks to Michael Weghorn )

List of performance issues fixed

  1. tdf#137848 Inserted image slow (15 seconds, expected 3) ( Thanks to Noel Grandin )
  2. tdf#164853 unusual copy seen in find_if ( Thanks to Caolán McNamara )

List of old bugs ( more than 4 years old ) fixed

  1. tdf#105083 Impress: The numbered/bulleted list toggle button and menu items aren’t highlighted when a numbered/bullet list is active ( Thanks to Oliver Specht )
  2. tdf#117946 Impress: Slide Sorter: Ctrl+mouse wheel should change slides per row ( Thanks to Oliver Specht )
  3. tdf#121119 Loss of image anchored to page in a writer master document ( Thanks to László Németh )
  4. tdf#130672 base sql query parameter with negative value fails ( Thanks to Mike Kaganski )
  5. tdf#132770 Underline text using INS tag from HTML document do not appear ( Thanks to Andreas Heinisch )
  6. tdf#137848 Inserted image slow (15 seconds, expected 3) ( Thanks to Noel Grandin )
  7. tdf#34837 Merged Cell’s borders vanishes when changing sheet direction to (Right-To-Left) ( Thanks to Jonathan Clark )
  8. tdf#35361 [feature request: macOS] Support Apple Quick Look plugin ( Thanks to Patrick Luby )
  9. tdf#37507 Vertical scrolling with mouse cursor is too fast to control ( Thanks to Oliver Specht )
  10. tdf#41775 Don’t remove all menus when no windows are open – keep Tools and Help ( Thanks to Xisco Fauli )
  11. tdf#50743 FORMATTING: Highlighting scrolls automatically ( Thanks to Oliver Specht )
  12. tdf#66791 FORMATTING: Incorrect application of “Asian text font” for quotation marks when the paragraph contains a mixture of western and asian characters ( Thanks to Jonathan Clark )
  13. tdf#94193 Installer forces AD domain users in Administrators group to run as Administrator, otherwise custom actions are disallowed during execution stage and not completed ( Thanks to Mike Kaganski )

WORKSFORME bugs

54 bugs have been retested by 29 people.

Top 10 testers

  1. BogdanB ( 11 )
  2. raal ( 5 )
  3. V Stuart Foote ( 4 )
  4. Andreas Heinisch ( 3 )
  5. Timur ( 3 )
  6. Buovjaga ( 3 )
  7. Regina Henschel ( 2 )
  8. Aron Budea ( 2 )
  9. m_a_riosv ( 2 )
  10. Eduardo ( 1 )

DUPLICATED bugs

66 bugs have been duplicated by 26 people.

Top 10 testers

  1. Buovjaga ( 8 )
  2. Aron Budea ( 7 )
  3. BogdanB ( 6 )
  4. V Stuart Foote ( 6 )
  5. Gabor Kelemen (allotropia) ( 5 )
  6. m_a_riosv ( 5 )
  7. Jonathan Clark ( 3 )
  8. Roman Kuznetsov ( 3 )
  9. Timur ( 2 )
  10. Justin L ( 2 )

Verified bug fixes

22 bugs have been verified by 13 people.

Top 10 Verifiers

  1. Buovjaga ( 4 )
  2. Gerald Pfeifer ( 3 )
  3. BogdanB ( 2 )
  4. Aron Budea ( 2 )
  5. Piotr Osada ( 2 )
  6. Xisco Faulí ( 2 )
  7. Michael Weghorn ( 2 )
  8. Timur ( 1 )
  9. Alex Thurgood ( 1 )
  10. Regina Henschel ( 1 )

Categorized Bugs

354 bugs have been categorized with a metabug by 28 people.

Top 10 Categorizers

  1. Roman Kuznetsov ( 128 )

by x1sc0 at February 11, 2025 04:18 PM

February 10, 2025

Michael Meeks

2025-02-10 Monday

  • Up earlyish, parent/teacher call with E. mail chew, lots of 1:1's in a row all day, another parent/teacher call at lunch. Worked late.

February 10, 2025 09:00 PM

February 09, 2025

Michael Meeks

2025-02-09 Sunday

  • All Saints in the morning, played bass with Rick on drums. Back for home-made pizza lunch with N. and E. rested variously, played games with them; fond farewell of N. going back to Loughborough.
  • Caught up with M&D in the evening, and watched a rather weird film.

February 09, 2025 09:00 PM

February 08, 2025

Michael Meeks

2025-02-08 Saturday

  • Picked up E. from near Ely, and had a nice brunch with J&N&E. at Ben's Yard. Home, sung with N. playing the guitar for a bit, and relaxed with NYT games with J.
  • Watched About Time fun, bed early.

February 08, 2025 09:00 PM

February 06, 2025

Official TDF Blog

LibreOffice 25.2, the office suite that meets today’s user needs

The new major release provides many user interface and accessibility improvements, plus the usual interoperability features

Berlin, 6 February 2025 – LibreOffice 25.2, the new major release of the free, volunteer-supported office suite for Windows (Intel, AMD and ARM), macOS (Apple Silicon and Intel) and Linux is available on our download page. LibreOffice is the best office suite for users who want to retain control over their individual software and documents, thereby protecting their privacy and digital life from the commercial interference and the lock-in strategies of Big Tech.

LibreOffice is the only office suite designed to meet the actual needs of the user – not just their eyes. It offers a range of interface options to suit different user habits, from traditional to modern, and makes the most of different screen sizes, optimising the space available to put the maximum number of features just a click or two away.

It is also the only software for creating documents (that may contain personal or confidential information) that respects the user’s privacy, ensuring that the user can decide if and with whom to share the content they create, thanks to the standard and open format that is not used as a lock-in tool, forcing periodic software updates. All this with a feature set that is comparable to the leading software on the market and far superior to that of any competitor.

What makes LibreOffice unique is the LibreOffice Technology Platform, the only one on the market that allows the consistent development of desktop, mobile and cloud versions – including those provided by companies in the ecosystem – capable of producing identical and fully interoperable documents based on the two available ISO standards: the open ODF or Open Document Format (ODT, ODS and ODP) and the proprietary Microsoft OOXML (DOCX, XLSX and PPTX). The latter hides a huge number of artificial (and unnecessary) lock-in complexities that create problems for users convinced they are using a standard format.

End users can get first-level technical support from volunteers on the user mailing lists and the Ask LibreOffice website: https://ask.libreoffice.org. LibreOffice Writer Guide can be downloaded from https://books.libreoffice.org/en/.

New Features of LibreOffice 25.2

PRIVACY

  • LibreOffice can remove all personal information associated to any document (author names and timestamps, editing time, printer name and configuration, document template, author and date for comments and tracked changes).

CORE/GENERAL

  • LibreOffice 25.2 can read and write ODF version 1.4.
  • Many interoperability improvements with proprietary OOXML documents.
  • It is now possible to automatically sign documents after defining a default certificate.
  • Windows 7 and 8/8.1 are deprecated platforms, and support will be removed in version 25.8.
  • Extensions and features relying on Python will not work on Windows 7.

WRITER

  • Improvements to Track Changes management, to manage large number of changes in long documents.
  • Comments are now tracked in the Navigator when you move the focus into comments, while resizing the area containing comments now shows a visual guide.
  • Added options to set a default zoom level for opening documents, overriding the level stored in documents.
  • It is now possible to delete all content of a content type (excluding headings) via the Navigator.

CALC

  • Addition of a “Handle Duplicate Records” dialog to select/remove duplicate records in Calc.
  • Both the Function Wizard dialog and Functions Sidebar deck received improvements to searching and user experience.
  • Solver models can be saved into spreadsheets and Solver is able to provide a sensitivity analysis report.
  • Addition of new sheet protection options related to Pivot Tables, Pivot Charts and AutoFilters.

IMPRESS & DRAW

  • Many improvements to all Impress templates, which now have visible elements (font colour set to black) in Master Notes and Handout.
  • Objects can be centred on the Impress slide (or Draw page) in one single step.
  • Automatic repeating of slides can now be activated in windowed mode.
  • Overflowing text in presenter notes is no longer cut off when printing.

USER INTERFACE

  • The list of recently used files has now a checkbox “[x] Current Module Only” that allows to filter the list.
  • Object boundaries are now toggled independently of Formatting Marks.
  • The colour of non-printing characters and the background colour of comments can be customised.
  • Default items for unordered lists (also known as bullets) have been updated.
  • Significant improvements to application themes.

ACCESSIBILITY

  • Improved warning and error levels in the Accessibility Sidebar, with option to ignore warnings.
  • User interface elements report an accessible identifier which can be used by assistive technologies.
  • Windows: accessibility gets enabled whenever a tool queries information on the accessibility level, and accessible relations are correctly reported.
  • Linux: positions of UI elements (including on Wayland) are correctly reported on the accessibility level.

SCRIPTFORGE LIBRARIES

  • An extensible and robust collection of macro scripting resources to be invoked from user Basic or Python scripts.
  • The whole set of services (except when the native native built-in function is better) is made available for Python scripts with identical syntax and behaviour as in Basic.
  • The English documentation of ScriptForge libraries is now partially integrated in the LibreOffice help pages.

Contributors to LibreOffice 25.2

A total of 176 developers contributed to the new features in LibreOffice 25.2: 47% of the code commits came from 50 developers employed by ecosystem companies – Collabora and allotropia – and other organisations, 31% from seven developers at The Document Foundation, and the remaining 22% from 119 individual volunteer developers.

An additional 189 volunteers have committed 771,263 localized strings in 160 languages, representing hundreds of people working on translations. LibreOffice 25.2 is available in 120 languages, more than any other desktop software, making it available to over 5.5 billion people in their native language. In addition, over 2.4 billion people speak one of these 120 languages as a second language.

LibreOffice for Enterprises

For enterprise-class deployments, TDF strongly recommends the LibreOffice Enterprise family of applications from ecosystem partners – for desktop, mobile and cloud – with a wide range of dedicated value-added features and other benefits such as SLAs: www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-in-business/.

Every line of code developed by ecosystem companies for enterprise customers is shared with the community on the master code repository and improves the LibreOffice Technology platform. Products based on LibreOffice Technology are available for all major desktop operating systems (Windows, macOS, Linux and ChromeOS), mobile platforms (Android and iOS) and the cloud.

Migrations to LibreOffice

The Document Foundation publishes a migration protocol to help companies move from proprietary office suites to LibreOffice, based on the deployment of an LTS (long-term support) enterprise-optimised version of LibreOffice, plus migration consulting and training provided by certified professionals who offer value-added solutions consistent with proprietary offerings. Reference: www.libreoffice.org/get-help/professional-support/.

In fact, LibreOffice’s mature code base, rich feature set, strong support for open standards, excellent compatibility and LTS options from certified partners make it the ideal solution for organisations looking to regain control of their data and break free from vendor lock-in.

Availability of LibreOffice 25.2

LibreOffice 25.2 is available at www.libreoffice.org/download/. Minimum requirements for proprietary operating systems are Microsoft Windows 7 SP1 and Apple MacOS 10.15. LibreOffice Technology-based products for Android and iOS are listed here: www.libreoffice.org/download/android-and-ios/.

For users who don’t need the latest features and prefer a version that has undergone more testing and bug fixing, The Document Foundation still maintains the LibreOffice 24.8 family, which includes several months of back-ported fixes. The current release is LibreOffice 24.8.4.

LibreOffice users, free software advocates and community members can support The Document Foundation with a donation at www.libreoffice.org/donate.

[1] Release Notes: wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleaseNotes/25.2

by Italo Vignoli at February 06, 2025 12:04 PM

February 05, 2025

Official TDF Blog

LibreOffice at the Univention Summit 2025

LibreOffice at the Univention Summit 2025

The northern German state of Schleswig-Holstein is moving 30,000 PCs from Microsoft Windows and Office to Linux and LibreOffice. At the recent Univention Summit 2025 which took place on January 23 and 24 in Bremen, the LibreOffice project was present and met with the people overseeing the migration.

LibreOffice at the Univention Summit 2025

500 people attended the event, a mixture of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) providers and users from the public and private sectors. Many people who attended the LibreOffice stand were from foundations, state and federal organisations, as well as large companies that have plans to deploy FOSS.

Some of the topics at the stand were the Open Document Format 1.4, integration into third-party software, and training and support. Dirk Schrödter, Schleswig-Holstein’s Minister for Digitalisation, attended the stand and was informed about the upcoming LibreOffice 25.2 release. And the state’s CIO Sven Thomsen also joined us too.

We’re looking forward to following the migration to Linux and LibreOffice, and other federal states and organisations going the same path.

LibreOffice at the Univention Summit 2025

(Image credits: Staatsministerium.SH and Felix Kronlage-Dammers)

by Mike Saunders at February 05, 2025 11:15 AM

February 03, 2025

Jean Hollis Weber

Calc, Impress, Draw 24.2 guides published

Print editions of several LibreOffice 24.2 user guides were published in 2024. You can buy them from Lulu.com. Free PDFs, as always, are available from the LibreOffice website.

Calc (May 2024)
Impress (July 2024)
Draw (August 2024)
Writer (March 2024)

by Jean at February 03, 2025 06:19 AM

January 31, 2025

Official TDF Blog

LibreOffice QA Team: Fixing a bug in three days

LibreOffice QA Team on Matrix-style code background

LibreOffice is used by 200 million people around the world. Every major release goes through extensive testing, with Alpha, Beta and Release Candidate versions – and there are regular monthly minor updates to fix issues too. The QA Team analyses bug reports from users, and here’s an example of how quickly they work when everything goes to plan:

  • 2025-01-21 21:14:02 UTC: Bug report submitted.
  • 2025-01-23 18:16:53 UTC: raal from the QA Team looks at the bug report and rules out Linux.
  • 2025-01-25 06:05:46 UTC: Saburo confirms that the error occurs on Windows. And – which is extremely helpful – finds the commit that has caused the error.
  • 2025-01-25 08:08:16 UTC: raal informs the affected developer.
  • 2025-01-25 09:54:38 UTC: Mike Kaganski provides a bug fix.
  • 2025-01-25 11:35:15 UTC: After the bug fix has been successfully built and tested on all supported operating systems, it is included in the next daily build of LibreOffice.

Learn more about the QA Team, and give them a hand to gain experience in the world of QA

by Mike Saunders at January 31, 2025 10:33 AM

January 30, 2025

LibreOffice Dev Blog

Custom message boxes using VCL Weld

When you want to interact with users, sometimes simple dialog boxes are sufficient: a simple yes or no, or some info box. But in other cases, you may need more complex message boxes. Here I discuss how to use VCL Weld to create a custom one.

Simple Message Box

You can create a simple message box, using predefined templates like Info box using a code snippet like this:

std::unique_ptr<weld::MessageDialog> xInfoBox(Application::CreateMessageDialog(pParent, VclMessageType::Question, VclButtonsType::YesNo, u"Are you sure?"_ustr));
xInfoBox->run();

And, this is the result, which is very simple, without any title bar:

Yes / No message box

Yes / No message box

There are other predefined types, which can be used in different scenarios:

enum class VclMessageType
{
    Info,
    Warning,
    Question,
    Error,
    Other
};

But, if you want custom message boxes, you should be using weld mechanism, with its CreateBuilder function.

Custom Message Boxes

Below is the code from the source code sfx2/source/doc/QuerySaveDocument.cxx, which is inside sfx2 (framework) module. This dialog box is accessible across different modules, including Writer, Calc and Draw/Impress.

Let’s look into the code:

short ExecuteQuerySaveDocument(weld::Widget* _pParent, std::u16string_view _rTitle)
{
    ...
    std::unique_ptr<weld::Builder> xBuilder(
        Application::CreateBuilder(_pParent, u"sfx/ui/querysavedialog.ui"_ustr));
    std::unique_ptr<weld::MessageDialog> xQBox(
        xBuilder->weld_message_dialog(u"QuerySaveDialog"_ustr));
    xQBox->set_primary_text(xQBox->get_primary_text().replaceFirst("$(DOC)", _rTitle));
    return xQBox->run();
}

The code is using a UI file, named sfx/ui/querysavedialog.ui to create a message dialog, and then change the title of it.

QuerySaveDialog

QuerySaveDialog

If you look into the include file, include/vcl/weld.hxx inside Builder class, you may see functions like weld_… that are suitable to find various different UI elements from the UI, by mentioning the element ID. For example, to find a label with the ID equal to lable_id, you do this:

std::unique_ptr<weld::Label> m_pTextLabel label = m_xBuilder->weld_label(u"label_id"_ustr)

Result

This is the result, when you try to close an unsaved document.

QuerySaveDialog running

QuerySaveDialog running

Alternative Ways

This is not the only way you can create nice dialog boxes using VCL weld mechanism. There are some predefined message boxes that look nice which use weld mechanism, and are available for use via relevant C++ classes.

An interesting one here, is the QueryDialog, which is created by a factory method design pattern.

It uses a predefined dialog, using cui/uiconfig/ui/querydialog.ui as the UI file, and it contains a nice stock image! You can test it easily, by modifying a LibreOffice example, minweld.

IMPL_LINK_NOARG(TipOfTheDayDialog, OnNextClick, weld::Button&, void)
{
    VclAbstractDialogFactory* pFact = VclAbstractDialogFactory::Create();
    auto pDlg = pFact->CreateQueryDialog(getDialog(), u"Tips"_ustr, u"Tip of the day"_ustr, u"Are you sure you want to see the next tip of the day?"_ustr, false);
    sal_Int32 nResult = pDlg->Execute();
    pDlg->disposeOnce();

    if(nResult == RET_YES)
    {
        ++m_nCounter;
        m_pTextLabel->set_label(u"Here you will see tip of the day #"_ustr
+ OUString::number(m_nCounter) + ".");
    }
}

Assuming that you have a working build of LibreOffice, you can simply run the minweld workbench by invoking:

./bin/run minweld

The result looks much more interesting:

QueryDialog

QueryDialog

Final Words

The possibilities are endless! It only depends on your ideas and understanding of the user’s needs and requirements. It would be good if you look into what design team does to understand the design process:

by Hossein Nourikhah at January 30, 2025 03:01 PM

January 29, 2025

Marius Popa Adrian

Firebird Docker Images Now Under the Firebird Organization

We are pleased to announce the successful migration of Firebird Docker images to their new home:https://github.com/FirebirdSQL/firebird-dockerThe images are now published on Docker Hub athttps://hub.docker.com/r/firebirdsql/firebirdThanks to Adriano dos Santos Fernandes for his invaluable contributions and improvements throughout this process.

by Popa Adrian Marius (noreply@blogger.com) at January 29, 2025 07:11 PM

January 17, 2025

LibreOffice QA Blog

LibreOffice 25.2 RC2 is available for testing

LibreOffice 25.2 will be released as final at the beginning of February, 2025 ( Check the Release Plan ) being LibreOffice 25.2 Release Candidate 2 (RC2) the forth and last pre-release since the development of version 25.2 started in mid Juny, 2024. Since the previous release, LibreOffice 25.2 RC1, 104 commits have been submitted to the code repository and 55 issues got fixed. Check the release notes to find the new features included in this version of LibreOffice.

LibreOffice 25.2 RC2 can be downloaded for Linux, macOS and Windows, and it will replace the standard installation.

In case you find any problem in this pre-release, please report it in Bugzilla ( You just need a legit email account in order to create a new account ).

For help, you can contact the QA Team directly in the QA IRC channel or via Matrix.

LibreOffice is a volunteer-driven community project, so please help us to test – we appreciate it!

Happy testing!!

Download it now!

by x1sc0 at January 17, 2025 12:52 PM

January 16, 2025

LibreOffice Dev Blog

Outlook for the new year 2025

Happy new year 2025! I wish a great year for you, and the global LibreOffice community. Now that we are now in 2025, I briefly discuss the year 2024 and outlook for 2024 in the development blog.

LibreOffice Conference 2024, Luxembourg

LibreOffice Conference 2024, Luxembourg

At The Document Foundation (TDF), our aim is to improve LibreOffice, the leading free/open source office suite that has millions of users around the world. Our work is community-driven, and the software needs your contribution to become better, and work in a way that you like.

My goal here, is to help people understand LibreOffice code easier, and eventually participate in LibreOffice core development to make LibreOffice better for everyone. In 2024, I wrote 22 posts around LibreOffice development in the dev blog (4 of them are unpublished drafts).

Outlook For the New Year

Focus of the development blog for 2025 in this blog will be:

  • Introducing new EasyHacks
  • Describing user interface creation with VCL
  • Explaining LibreOffice architecture
  • Explaining Python interaction with LibreOffice

I have written about some of these topics in 2024. Therefore, this year I will try to expand the previous writings and provide new articles about them. For example, creating user interfaces using VCL with the help of glade interface designer will be one of important things to discuss.

You can give feedback by writing a comment here, or sending me an email to hossein AT libreoffice DOT org.

We provide mentoring support to those who want to start LibreOffice development. You are welcome to contact me if you need help to build LibreOffice and do some EasyHacks via the above email address. Also, you can always refer to our Getting Involved Wiki page:

Let’s hope a great year for LibreOffice (and the world) in 2025.

by Hossein Nourikhah at January 16, 2025 02:29 PM

January 13, 2025

Marius Popa Adrian

A sad day for the Firebird Project

Helen Borrie, a key figure in the Firebird relational database project and a longtime contributor at IBPhoenix, passed away on January 2, 2025. Her contributions were essential to Firebird’s creation and its development over the past 25 years.Read the rest of the official announcement

by Popa Adrian Marius (noreply@blogger.com) at January 13, 2025 01:15 PM

Jaybird 6.0.0 released

We're happy to announce the first release of Jaybird 6, Jaybird 6.0.0.

by Popa Adrian Marius (noreply@blogger.com) at January 13, 2025 01:06 PM

LibreOffice Design Blog

Results from a survey about Writer templates

By Ndidi Folasade Ogboi

LibreOffice Writer has long been a trusted tool for users worldwide, offering an open-source solution for documents. But what happens when we take a step back and look at the user experience? How do templates fit into the workflows of users, what makes a great template and where do users want LibreOffice writer to improve?…

by Heiko Tietze at January 13, 2025 10:06 AM

January 09, 2025

LibreOffice QA Blog

QA/Dev Report: December 2024

General Activities

  1. LibreOffice 24.8.4 was announced on December 19
  2. Olivier Hallot (TDF) improved the warning in Help when JavaScript is not active and did many cleanups in help pages
  3. Dione Maddern created a help page for Alignment Sidebar deck
  4. Alain Romedenne improved and updated help for ScriptForge libraries
  5. Bogdan Buzea improved some UI labels, improved help for superordinate object settings and cached spreadsheet formulas and did many code cleanups
  6. Tomaž Vajngerl (Collabora) continued working on PDF 2.0 and PDF/A-4 support
  7. Miklós Vajna, Rashesh Padia, Attila Szűcs, Bayram Çiçek, Szymon Kłos, Marco Cecchetti, Pranam Lashkari, Hubert Figuière (Collabora) worked on LOKit used by Collabora Online
  8. Xisco Faulí (TDF) worked on crash report analysis tools, upgraded many dependencies and did many code stability improvements
  9. Michael Stahl (allotropia) made style name handling more robust, improved the handling of hidden frames after recent changes and improved the correctness of HTML import regarding formatting
  10. Mike Kaganski (Collabora) added an application-wide Viewer mode where all files are opened in read-only state while all editing tools are disabled, dropped all code specific to Windows 7, 8 and 8.1 while also making use of new possibilities such as handling long Windows paths with wildcards, made the Unix document mailer script future-proof in case the attach parameter is disallowed in mailto URLs, fixed an issue with calculating minimum heights for menus, fixed an issue with the number format being reported incorrectly in Writer tables, fixed an issue with multi-selection in Calc showing an incorrect cell format and preventing change of format, fixed inability to edit doubles in Basic IDE’s Watch window and fixed an issue preventing the use of points for custom image height/width in the PNG export dialog
  11. Caolán McNamara (Collabora) improved dark mode support, fixed crashes and fixed many issues found by static analysers and fuzzers and did code cleanups
  12. Stephan Bergmann (allotropia) fixed an issue with emailing multiline messages on Unix and worked on the MAR updater and WASM build. He also adapted the code to compiler changes and did code cleanups
  13. Noel Grandin (Collabora) improved saving time of XLSX files with lots of conditional formatting, improved the speed of processing styles when opening DOCX files and worked alongside Michael Stahl in making style name handling more robust. He also did many code cleanups and optimisations
  14. Justin Luth (Collabora) fixed a DOCX compatibilityMode import and export issue, fixed an issue with imported area fill images not being saved with their associated documents, fixed a Calc comment copying crash and fixed an issue with tables of contents in DOCX files misbehaving when the printer list has been disabled
  15. Michael Weghorn (TDF) did a big reorganisation in accessibility-related code to make it easier to work with, continued working with Cambalache developer (UI editing app) and did various accessibility fixes. He also worked on using native widgets in Qt UIs
  16. Balázs Varga (allotropia) improved and expanded Writer’s accessibility warnings, fixed saving “Fit height to text” property of drawing objects to PPTX, fixed laying out of text in SmartArt objects found in PPTX files and implemented support for soft edge and glow effects in text frame objects in PPTX files
  17. Patrick Luby made resizing windows on macOS appear smoother, implemented jumping the view to the proportional location in the document when Option-clicking the scrollbar on macOS (instead of just advancing a single screen/page), implemented support for native macOS full screen mode, fixed an issue causing a long delay in opening the Print dialog on macOS when objects with transparency were present and fixed macOS printing issues related to page settings in Calc and brochures
  18. Jim Raykowski did a big rework of macro organiser dialogs, reducing them from five to one
  19. Oliver Specht (CIB) improved support for VML textboxes in DOCX files and fixed an issue with paragraph spacing of bullets in Impress
  20. Heiko Tietze (TDF) added visual feedback into the status bar for when AutoCalculate is active in Calc
  21. László Németh continued polishing support for inline headings in Writer documents
  22. Ilmari Lauhakangas (TDF) did code cleanups after the decision to remove support for Windows 7, 8 and 8.1 from version 25.8
  23. Christian Lohmaier (TDF) improved the Windows build setup
  24. Eike Rathke (Red Hat) improved date input detection in Calc and helped finish ODF 1.4 support for EASTERSUNDAY function
  25. Jonathan Clark (TDF) improved the detection of Asian scripts in text runs adjacent to weak punctuation characters or explicit direction marks
  26. Sahil Gautam (allotropia) continued polishing the Libreoffice Theme GSoC project
  27. Andreas Heinisch implemented support for pasting HTML strikethrough formatting, made it so the choice of “Link” when inserting an image is remembered during a session and fixed an issue with dashed lines sometimes becoming solid in imported graphics
  28. Chris Sherlock did code cleanups in VCL
  29. Vasily Melenchuk (CIB) fixed an issue with unwanted background fill in placeholders in PPTX files
  30. Laurent Balland replaced a binary DocBook template with an ODF one
  31. Xuan Chen fixed shading issues in custom shapes in PPT files
  32. Armin Le Grand (Collabora) worked on a renovation of graphics rendering on Linux with Cairo library
  33. Björn Michaelsen did refactoring in Writer code
  34. Ariel Darshan implemented support for autorepeating slides in windowed mode in Impress
  35. Samuel Adesola made it possible to access Writer’s view layout options via the View menu
  36. Marc Mondesir fixed touchpad scrolling for Slides and Pages panes in Impress and Draw
  37. Andrei Alin fixed a ReadLine API function not always stripping line-ending characters
  38. André Herbst fixed an issue with canceling a cell dragging operation leaving behind a visual glitch
  39. David Gilbert implemented support for clipping stroke paths in imported PDFs
  40. Tibor Nagy (allotropia) fixed an issue with overflowing text in Impress presenter notes getting cut off from printing, fixed presenter notes not being relayouted when changing paper size in the print dialog and similarly for changing orientation for handouts
  41. Mohit Marathe continued polishing the new Comments Sidebar deck
  42. Jean-Pierre Ledure worked on the ScriptForge library

Kudos to Ilmari Lauhakangas for helping to elaborate this list.

Reported Bugs

400 bugs, 60 of which are enhancements, have been reported by 249 people.

Top 10 Reporters

  1. Eyal Rozenberg ( 13 )
  2. Justin L ( 12 )
  3. Gabor Kelemen (allotropia) ( 9 )
  4. Alex Kemp ( 9 )
  5. Roman Kuznetsov ( 8 )
  6. gplhust955 ( 7 )
  7. Robert Großkopf ( 7 )
  8. Anna ( 7 )
  9. Óvári ( 7 )
  10. Mike Kaganski ( 6 )

Triaged Bugs

365 bugs have been triaged by 69 people.

Top 10 Triagers

  1. Buovjaga ( 77 )
  2. BogdanB ( 62 )
  3. m_a_riosv ( 31 )
  4. V Stuart Foote ( 20 )
  5. Mike Kaganski ( 15 )
  6. zcrhonek ( 14 )
  7. Dieter ( 13 )
  8. raal ( 11 )
  9. Heiko Tietze ( 10 )
  10. Michael Weghorn (away) ( 8 )

Resolution of resolved bugs

371 bugs have been set to RESOLVED.

Check the following sections for more information about bugs resolved as FIXED, WORKSFORME and DUPLICATE.

Fixed Bugs

138 bugs have been fixed by 31 people.

Top 10 Fixers

  1. Balazs Varga ( 13 )
  2. Mike Kaganski ( 10 )
  3. Bogdan Buzea ( 9 )
  4. Caolán McNamara ( 6 )
  5. Patrick Luby ( 6 )
  6. Michael Weghorn ( 6 )
  7. Jonathan Clark ( 6 )
  8. Andreas Heinisch ( 4 )
  9. Justin Luth ( 4 )
  10. Heiko Tietze ( 3 )

List of high severity bugs fixed

  1. tdf#155211 Regression: dashed lines become solid when breaking imported SVG / exporting to SVG ( Thanks to Andreas Heinisch )
  2. tdf#163033 Crash when attempting to save a COPY of a sheet-with-comments from a now-closed spreadsheet ( Thanks to Justin Luth )
  3. tdf#164093 Crash when clicking on the Sidebar Tab menu button for SB deck selector pop-up menu with AT active on Windows ( Thanks to Michael Weghorn )
  4. tdf#164417 Autofiltered XLSX with dates cannot be opened in MSO ( Thanks to Balazs Varga )

List of crashes fixed

  1. tdf#163033 Crash when attempting to save a COPY of a sheet-with-comments from a now-closed spreadsheet ( Thanks to Justin Luth )
  2. tdf#163221 Hovering the mouse over a Basic dialog will make it grow or crash (Dialog Editor) ( Thanks to Noel Grandin )
  3. tdf#163948 Crash upon startup after enabling Notes Pane ( Thanks to Sarper Akdemir )
  4. tdf#164075 crashtesting: assert on import of rtf exported from LibreOffice ( Thanks to Justin Luth )
  5. tdf#164093 Crash when clicking on the Sidebar Tab menu button for SB deck selector pop-up menu with AT active on Windows ( Thanks to Michael Weghorn )
  6. tdf#164098 Typing tatweel character leads to a crash ( Thanks to Jonathan Clark )
  7. tdf#164299 Pasting from Calc to Impress in HTML format crashes LO ( Thanks to Oliver Specht )
  8. tdf#164359 Crash on double-click of level 2 word in Impress ( Thanks to Miklos Vajna )

List of old bugs ( more than 4 years old ) fixed

  1. tdf#113015 “Online updates” checks the updates of extensions installed too ( Thanks to Bogdan Buzea )
  2. tdf#124954 HELP for recalculating of formulas on opening of a spreadsheet needs updating ( Thanks to Bogdan Buzea )
  3. tdf#127937 Provide feedback of AutoCalculation at the status bar ( Thanks to Heiko Tietze )
  4. tdf#128957 UI Can’t set custom image height/width in PNG Options Window in points ( Thanks to Mike Kaganski )
  5. tdf#131332 HELP: replace custom date formats with ISO 8601 to stop promoting ambiguous formats ( Thanks to Bogdan Buzea )
  6. tdf#132111 Initial cell’s number format in Writer table is reported wrong ( Thanks to Mike Kaganski )
  7. tdf#135320 FILEOPEN PPTX: effect similar to soft edges (“inward soft edges”) not shown ( Thanks to Balazs Varga )
  8. tdf#135628 SendSimpleMailMessage bodytext with new lines ends up as multiple recipients ( Thanks to Stephan Bergmann )
  9. tdf#138615 Insure Windows wildcards work properly with long paths ( Thanks to Mike Kaganski )
  10. tdf#42989 FORMATTING: Selecting Multiple Cells with Different Formats Show as Same Format and Can’t Be Changed as a Group ( Thanks to Mike Kaganski )
  11. tdf#61358 UI: Remember state of option “Insert image from file -> Linked” ( Thanks to Andreas Heinisch )
  12. tdf#62845 Option for “Document Viewer Mode” (read-only mode by default) required. ( Thanks to Mike Kaganski )
  13. tdf#66791 FORMATTING: Incorrect application of “Asian text font” for quotation marks when the paragraph contains a mixture of western and asian characters ( Thanks to Jonathan Clark )
  14. tdf#79298 FORMATTING: Copy/paste: importing of strikethrough attribute doesn’t work ( Thanks to Andreas Heinisch )
  15. tdf#85428 Imported PDF displays extra-long lines for shaded area ( Thanks to Dr. David Alan Gilbert )
  16. tdf#88226 Excessive text in Presentation Notes is not printed ( Thanks to Tibor Nagy )

WORKSFORME bugs

44 bugs have been retested by 20 people.

Top 10 testers

  1. Buovjaga ( 9 )
  2. BogdanB ( 8 )
  3. V Stuart Foote ( 4 )
  4. m_a_riosv ( 4 )
  5. Robert Großkopf ( 3 )
  6. Telesto ( 2 )
  7. John ( 2 )
  8. Xisco Faulí ( 1 )
  9. Regina Henschel ( 1 )
  10. Alan ( 1 )

DUPLICATED bugs

63 bugs have been duplicated by 20 people.

Top 10 testers

  1. Mike Kaganski ( 11 )
  2. Buovjaga ( 11 )
  3. BogdanB ( 8 )
  4. V Stuart Foote ( 7 )
  5. m_a_riosv ( 7 )
  6. Timur ( 4 )
  7. Gabor Kelemen (allotropia) ( 2 )
  8. Eyal Rozenberg ( 2 )
  9. zcrhonek ( 2 )
  10. Roman Kuznetsov ( 1 )

Verified bug fixes

28 bugs have been verified by 14 people.

Top 10 Verifiers

  1. Buovjaga ( 7 )
  2. BogdanB ( 5 )
  3. Stéphane Guillou (stragu) ( 4 )
  4. Lars Jødal ( 2 )
  5. raal ( 1 )
  6. Gerald Pfeifer ( 1 )
  7. Eyal Rozenberg ( 1 )
  8. Mihai Vasiliu ( 1 )
  9. steve ( 1 )
  10. lol ( 1 )

Categorized Bugs

1175 bugs have been categorized with a metabug by 27 people.

Top 10 Categorizers

  1. BogdanB ( 1024 )
  2. Roman Kuznetsov ( 36 )
  3. Eyal Rozenberg ( 25 )
  4. V Stuart Foote ( 21 )
  5. Dieter ( 10 )
  6. Buovjaga ( 8 )
  7. Aron Budea ( 7 )
  8. Timur ( 6 )
  9. Stéphane Guillou (stragu) ( 6 )
  10. Telesto ( 5 )

Regression Bugs

58 bugs have been set as regressions by 16

by x1sc0 at January 09, 2025 01:08 PM

January 08, 2025

Miklos Vajna

Ignoring the paragraph margin at the top of pages in Writer

Writer has the concept of paragraph margins and page margins, but what happens when you combine the two? It turns out the expectation is that sometimes the top paragraph margin is ignored in this case. We'll see two cases where the behavior of Writer is now improved to better match Word in this regard.

This work is primarily for Collabora Online, but the feature is available in desktop Writer as well.

Motivation

As described in a previous bugreport, there was a first problem where Word ignored the top paragraph margin of a document, but Writer did not. A recent bugreport then pointed out that the first implementation went too far and now a wanted top margin was ignored. This lead to a set of conditions which now does a decent emulation of Word's rules in this regard.

Results so far

Here is the old Writer render result for a document where the top margin should be ignored:

Bugdoc: old Writer render

And here is the new Writer render result for a document where the top margin is ignored:

Bugdoc: new Writer render

Finally, the reference render result, showing the ignored top paragraph margin:

Bugdoc: reference render

As you can see, now the unwanted top paragraph margin is omitted at page top.

How is this implemented?

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

As usual, the high-level problem was addressed by a series of small changes:

Want to start using this?

You can get a development edition of Collabora Online 24.04 and try it out yourself right now: try the development edition. Collabora intends to continue supporting and contributing to LibreOffice, the code is merged so we expect all of this work will be available in TDF's next release too (25.2).

by Miklos Vajna at January 08, 2025 08:53 AM

January 03, 2025

LibreOffice QA Blog

LibreOffice 25.2 RC1 is available for testing

LibreOffice 25.2 will be released as final at the beginning of February, 2025 ( Check the Release Plan ) being LibreOffice 25.2 Release Candidate 1 (RC1) the third pre-release since the development of version 25.2 started in mid Juny, 2024. Since the previous release, LibreOffice 25.2 Beta1, 175 commits have been submitted to the code repository and 76 issues got fixed. Check the release notes to find the new features included in this version of LibreOffice.

LibreOffice 25.2 RC1 can be downloaded for Linux, macOS and Windows, and it will replace the standard installation.

In case you find any problem in this pre-release, please report it in Bugzilla ( You just need a legit email account in order to create a new account ).

For help, you can contact the QA Team directly in the QA IRC channel or via Matrix.

LibreOffice is a volunteer-driven community project, so please help us to test – we appreciate it!

Happy testing!!

Download it now!

by x1sc0 at January 03, 2025 01:07 PM

December 20, 2024

LibreOffice Design Blog

LibreOffice Themes will replace the color customization

Since the first implementation of a dark color theme we continuously improved the customization of LibreOffice. In a GSoC projects this year, Sahil Gautam made it possible to not only change the application colors but also what is defined by the operating system respectively the desktop environment.…

by Heiko Tietze at December 20, 2024 12:55 PM

December 18, 2024

LibreOffice QA Blog

QA/Dev Report: November 2024

General Activities

  1. LibreOffice 24.8.3 was announced on November 14
  2. Olivier Hallot (TDF) did big updates to screenshots in Help, added a help page for login/password dialog and improved help pages on Skia, Writer Navigator and Edit – External links in Draw and Impress. He also added extended tips for Style dialog and Skia options
  3. Pierre F. continued reorganising help pages for Calc functions
  4. Dione Maddern added help pages for Number Format and Design Sidebar decks
  5. Alain Romedenne improved help for BASIC’s Mid method and updated help for ScriptForge’s Exception.PythonShell() method
  6. Bogdan Buzea fixed over 50 issues pointed out by PVS-Studio static analyser, did other code cleanups and worked on harmonising the use of date formats in Help to ISO 8601
  7. Tomaž Vajngerl (Collabora) started working on PDF 2.0 and PDF/A-4 support
  8. Jaume Pujantell (Collabora) fixed an issue with fill content of graphic objects being lost upon PPTX export
  9. Bayram Çiçek, Szymon Kłos, Skyler Grey, Vivek Javiya, Marco Cecchetti, Pranam Lashkari, Hubert Figuière and Miklós Vajna (Collabora) worked on LOKit used by Collabora Online. Vivek also added a command to remove content control formatting
  10. Julien Nabet did some internal improvements to database code and fixed several issues pointed out by static analysers
  11. Xisco Faulí (TDF) fixed 80 issues pointed out by PVS-Studio static analyser, upgraded many dependencies, added a script to check the latest version of external libraries, expanded ODF 1.4 support with help from Regina and did many restructurings in automated tests as well as code cleanups
  12. Michael Stahl (allotropia) made document compression handling more robust, fixed an issue in the WMF export code causing incomplete redactions and did many improvements to hiding elements in Writer
  13. Mike Kaganski (Collabora) fixed a hang related to Windows clipboard, made copying of rich text take font encoding into account, fixed an issue with setting page backgrounds via Java API, made footnote/endnote navigation more robust, made it so nested footnotes in ODF files are ignored instead of causing a read error (support has to be added to ODF spec), made hyphenation code more robust, fixed an issue with certain documents opening as modified and fixed an issue with incorrect OLE object scaling during loading
  14. Caolán McNamara (Collabora) fixed an issue with tabs getting skipped when cycling with Ctrl+PgDn/PgUp in Calc’s Format Cells dialog, fixed crashes and fixed many issues found by static analysers and fuzzers and did code cleanups
  15. Stephan Bergmann (allotropia) worked on WASM build. He also adapted the code to compiler changes and did code cleanups
  16. Noel Grandin (Collabora) fixed an issue with Calc’s background colour conditional formatting sometimes missing newly added entries, made it faster to open XLSX files with lots of conditional formatting and made inspection of BASIC macros in the macro editor safer by detecting and skipping the display of very large UNO property values. He also did many code cleanups and optimisations
  17. Justin Luth (Collabora) fixed an issue with forms not being editable immediately after opening, fixed Sidebar display of background fill not being updated after changing page style in Writer, fixed right-clicking not activating rename or delete for the targeted background image in the Area tab of dialogs, fixed an issue with not being able to add or delete gradients and bitmaps for background fills, made Calc’s row height optimisation faster, fixed an Excel compatibility issue related to row heights and fixed None area colour in a page style not being retained upon DOC export
  18. Michael Weghorn (TDF) made the blinking indication animation of selected text objects respect operating system animation settings (to avoid causing trouble for hypersensitive users), fixed an issue causing unnecessary accessibility notifications related to Quick Find bar, worked with Cambalache developer to polish this UI editing app that aims to be a replacement for Glade and fixed a crash related to Orca screenreader. He also worked on using native widgets in Qt UIs
  19. Balázs Varga (allotropia) made Calc’s lookup functions more robust, added a “Summary below data” option for Calc’s Subtotals, added an option to sheet protection to keep Pivot Tables and Pivot Charts working and made the accessibility error reporting more finegrained and categorised better
  20. Patrick Luby made macOS dictation work smoothly, fixed an issue with Calc cells getting cleared when switching windows with certain types of keyboards on macOS, made it so modifier keys are ignored for trackpad swipe events on macOS to prevent unwanted actions and improved the overall smoothness of macOS UI
  21. Jim Raykowski made macro assignment smoother by pre-selecting the desired macro in the Customize dialog when arriving from the macro organiser dialog, made it possible to change footnotes to endnotes and vice versa via context menu entries in the Writer Navigator, improved the page change control in Writer Navigator, fixed unwanted opening of Sidebar in Math with Alt+2/3/4 shortcuts and added an expert option DisableLayerHighlighting for more finegrained control over when object highlighting is done while the mouse is hovered over the layer bar
  22. Oliver Specht (CIB) improved the correctness of cell padding import from RTF files, fixed SVG clipboard format support, made it so formatting is preserved when copying and pasting hyperlinks from Writer to Impress, made it so manually added bullets or numbering are reverted, if a paragraph style is applied, fixed an issue with incorrect spacing attributes in table cells in imported RTF files and enabled additonal functions in editable sections while in read-only mode
  23. Heiko Tietze (TDF) made view options for element boundaries more intuitive, improved the layout of File Properties dialog, made it possible to save user-defined Math formulas and added a command to center objects to slide/page in Impress/Draw
  24. László Németh worked on support for inline headings in Writer documents and fixed an issue with incorrect ordering of Table of Contents in PDF files when headings reside in text frames
  25. Ilmari Lauhakangas (TDF) fixed an issue with misleading tooltips for internal links in shapes, fixed a background colour issue in Math’s edit area and updated help for Status Bar and Image Compression dialog
  26. Christian Lohmaier (TDF) improved the Windows build setup
  27. Eike Rathke (Red Hat) added language and locale support for French (Republic of Guinea)
  28. Jonathan Clark (TDF) implemented support for font-relative units in indentation and margins, made it so exported SVGs have a direction attribute, so RTL text works as expected and took care of loose ends in the break iterator rework
  29. Sahil Gautam continued merging patches from the Libreoffice Theme GSoC project and continued polishing the Duplicate Records feature in Calc, including its Help
  30. Rafael Lima made it so the new Quick Find Sidebar deck is aware of dark mode
  31. Andreas Heinisch made Hyperlink dialog smarter in how it automatically grabs links from the clipboard, made it so navigating with arrow keys in Calc no longer disables highlighting of referenced cells and fixed a crash when editing Table of Contents with preview activated
  32. Bartosz Kosiorek implemented support for the units centimeter, percentage, hectare and are in libvisio
  33. Chris Sherlock did code cleanups in VCL
  34. Hossein Nourikhah (TDF) added a minimal vcl weld example application and fixed issues in Notebookbar definition files
  35. Vasily Melenchuk (CIB) made it so any task progress in LO status bar is also represented as progress in Windows taskbar
  36. Andras Timar (Collabora) made the XML in exported DOCX files satisfy the expectations of some third party applications
  37. Pierre Vacher made it so UNO API’s SortableGridDataModel service can be notified of changes
  38. Laurent Balland fixed bundled templates not being valid ODF due to compressed mimetype file (this issue was not in any release)
  39. Áron Budea (Collabora) fixed some issues reported by PVS-Studio static analyser
  40. Gülşah Köse (Collabora) fixed incorrectly detected hidden AutoFilter buttons in XLSX files and fixed XLSX import of AutoFilter ascending sort conditions
  41. Kurt Nordback fixed an issue with disappearing elements in Bubble charts and expanded the features of bar/pie of pie chart types
  42. Regina Henschel worked on better ODF 1.4 conformance
  43. Xuan Chen improved the build options benefiting CPU architectures such as riscv64
  44. Melvin George added a unit test for exporting footnotes to PDF
  45. Barry-Thomas-Paul: Moss improved the code for handling Python extensions

Kudos to Ilmari Lauhakangas for helping to elaborate this list.

Reported Bugs

399 bugs, 65 of which are enhancements, have been reported by 264 people.

Top 10 Reporters

  1. Eyal Rozenberg ( 28 )
  2. Gabor Kelemen (allotropia) ( 18 )
  3. Mike Kaganski ( 11 )
  4. nobu ( 11 )
  5. Regina Henschel ( 8 )
  6. Dragan Marinović ( 6 )
  7. Gerald Pfeifer ( 5 )
  8. peter josvai ( 5 )
  9. László Németh ( 4 )
  10. Xisco Faulí ( 4 )

Triaged Bugs

416 bugs have been triaged by 72 people.

Top 10 Triagers

  1. Buovjaga ( 90 )
  2. m_a_riosv ( 37 )
  3. Heiko Tietze ( 36 )
  4. Mike Kaganski ( 20 )
  5. raal ( 20 )
  6. V Stuart Foote ( 17 )
  7. Stéphane Guillou (stragu) ( 12 )
  8. Nicole A. ( 10 )
  9. Julien Nabet ( 10 )
  10. Michael Weghorn ( 9 )

Resolution of resolved bugs

380 bugs have been set to RESOLVED.

Check the following sections for more information about bugs resolved as FIXED, WORKSFORME and DUPLICATE.

Fixed Bugs

118 bugs have been fixed by 30 people.

Top 10 Fixers

  1. Mike Kaganski ( 12 )
  2. Justin Luth ( 9 )
  3. Noel Grandin ( 5 )
  4. Heiko Tietze ( 5 )
  5. Balazs Varga ( 5 )
  6. Jonathan Clark ( 5 )
  7. László Németh ( 5 )
  8. Andreas Heinisch ( 4 )
  9. Michael Weghorn ( 4 )
  10. Caolán McNamara ( 4 )

List of critical bugs fixed

  1. tdf#163325 Crashes on Editing TOC when Preview is on ( Thanks to Andreas Heinisch )

List of high severity bugs fixed

  1. tdf#162992 FILESAVE : Cell filtering (list) not saved in XLSX format ( Thanks to Gülşah Köse )
  2. tdf#163667 Saving a particular spreadsheet takes a very long time ( Thanks to Noel Grandin )
  3. tdf#163842 XLS, XLSX Certain roundtripped spreadsheets not opening in Excel due to regression ( Thanks to Gülşah Köse )
  4. tdf#85976 [RFE] Add a “remove duplicate records” command ( Thanks to Sahil Gautam )

List of crashes fixed

  1. tdf#155449 Launching Orca after Writer sometimes crashes Writer (stack trace provided) gtk3 a11y atkwrapper.cxx ( Thanks to Michael Weghorn )
  2. tdf#163325 Crashes on Editing TOC when Preview is on ( Thanks to Andreas Heinisch )

List of old bugs ( more than 4 years old ) fixed

  1. tdf#103916 UI An added / modified gradient (dialog Page Background) is not available in other documents ( Thanks to Justin Luth )
  2. tdf#108189 inspection of object hangs LO – memory leak ( Thanks to Noel Grandin )
  3. tdf#122716 IMPORT Writer can lose encoding for some multibyte symbols when copy-paste from XLSX/Calc ( Thanks to Mike Kaganski )
  4. tdf#124741 Empty row height changes when exported to XLSX (width fixed) ( Thanks to Justin Luth )
  5. tdf#126857 One/some logic possibilities missing from context menu for alignment of images ( Thanks to Heiko Tietze )
  6. tdf#131862 ODF: Remove deprecated attribute table:cell-range-address from element ( Thanks to Regina Henschel )
  7. tdf#136003 PROTECT SHEET: Can’t delete rows, despite of allow to deletes ( Thanks to Sahil Gautam )
  8. tdf#36709 For first line indent using Ch (Characters) as unit, the indent value should change when font-size changes ( Thanks to Jonathan Clark )
  9. tdf#81913 Navigating with arrow keys disables cell highlighting (in text and in spreadsheet) ( Thanks to Andreas Heinisch )
  10. tdf#85976 [RFE] Add a “remove duplicate records” command ( Thanks to Sahil Gautam )
  11. tdf#86731 Spellcheck does not flag missing dictionary ( Thanks to Szymon Kłos )
  12. tdf#89352 Allow user to change all Footnotes to Endnotes, and vice-versa ( Thanks to Jim Raykowski )
  13. tdf#91315 Parentheses inverted in mixed RTL and LTR text in SVG export ( Thanks to Jonathan Clark )
  14. tdf#94147 Some Selected Objects Flash/Blink ( Thanks to Michael Weghorn )
  15. tdf#95239 Wrong ToC in Navigator and PDF when using frames ( Thanks to László Németh )
  16. tdf#95852 Can’t edit forms immediately after opening. WORKAROUND: Navigate to next page by clicking on left page list OR right-click ( Thanks to Justin Luth )

WORKSFORME bugs

44 bugs have been retested by …

by x1sc0 at December 18, 2024 02:45 PM

December 04, 2024

Miklos Vajna

Editeng RTF export: fixing a lost paragraph style

Impress shape text doesn't have much support for styles, e.g. the default UI in Writer gives you a paragraph style dropdown, and you don't get the same in Impress. Still, a paragraph style is attached to bullets based on their outline level, and Impress has a View → Outline menu item to give you that styled text you can copy. Pasting that to Writer started to lose styles recently and it's now fixed to work again.

This work is primarily for Collabora Online, but the feature is available in desktop Impress as well.

Motivation

As described in a previous commit, I had a case where lots of not needed paragraph styles were exported to RTF in case an Impress document had enough master pages. The idea was to only export actually used paragraph styles, to avoid wasting CPU power.

Turns out filtering out paragraph styles has to happen at two locations:

  • in the style table to assign an index to a paragraph style
  • when referring to those styles

The problem was that unused styles were removed from the style table, but not from the style → index mapping, so as soon as you had both used and unused paragraph styles, the declared and the referred style indexes didn't match anymore.

Results so far

Here is a sample paste result in Writer, where you can see that the text doesn't have a custom paragraph style:

Bugdoc: old Writer paste

And here is the same paste, now with paragraph styles restored:

Bugdoc: new Writer paste

As you can see, now the pasted text has paragraph styles.

How is this implemented?

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

The bugfix commit was editeng RTF export: fix broken offsets into the para style table.

The tracking bug was tdf#163883.

Want to start using this?

You can get a development edition of Collabora Online 24.04 and try it out yourself right now: try the development edition. Collabora intends to continue supporting and contributing to LibreOffice, the code is merged so we expect all of this work will be available in TDF's next release too (25.2).

by Miklos Vajna at December 04, 2024 10:34 AM

November 29, 2024

Chris Sherlock

The mess that is the VCL

 Let me count the ways, in no particular order and in no way exhaustive:

  • OutputDevice is the base class for printing, windowing and PDFs. It doesn't just do output. 
  • OutputDevice has GetOutDevType() because the base class needs to know what child class is using it. Ugh. 
  • OutputDevice drawing primitives not only draw, but they record a metafile. There are literally functions that turn off drawing and just let it record the metafile. I made an attempt at seperating the concerns, but it got nowhere. 
  • VCL relies on DrawingLayer and DrawingLayer relies on the VCL. 
  • There is a concept of a VirtualDevice, which is derived from OutputDevice. VirtualDevice does a bunch of things, but one of which is alpha-handling. In OutputDevice, there is a member which is a VirtualDevice. Each drawing function in Outputdevice calls upon the correlated drawing function in this member VirtualDevice.
  • Bitmaps don't get modified via the Bitmap class. Instead, you have to use BitmapInfoAccess, BitmapReadAccess and BitmapWriteAccess. I'm still puzzling out why these are seperate classes. 
  • Bitmaps are transformed in SalGraphics indirectly via OutputDevice. Except when they aren't, in which case it fails, whereby OutputDevice tries an alternative way via SalGraphics. Otherwise, it tries its own poor man approach at drawing the bitmap. Consequently, often times you bypass the platform optimized ways of doing things, because its not been implemented.
  • Fonts are lazy loaded from OutputDevice. There is no central font manager. To get the fonts, you have to go through SalGraphics. To get a SalGraphics, you need to initialize a lot of stuff not related to fonts. 
  • Font caching is done from OutputDevice. Lazily. Font data is updated for all frames. Frames are a concept needed for Windows. Frames are not a concept needed by Printers and VirtualDevices, or even PDFs. Note that Printers, VirtualDevices and PDFs all inherit from OutputDevice. 
  • OutputDevice converts between "logical" units and display units. It's a nightmare to know what each function needs what sort of units. For the mapping between units, I refer you to vcl/source/gdi/mapmod.cxx and vcl/source/outdev/map.cxx
  • There is tools and basegfx. They do the same thing, though basegfx is considerably better written. You have Size and B2DSize, Point and B2DPoint, Polygon and B2DPolygon, PolyPolygon and B2DPolyPolygon. OutputDevice must handle it all. 
  • Gradient handling is sort of half baked in OutputDevice, much of gradient handling is done in other modules. 
  • Font substitution is truly, truly weird. PhysicalFontSelect::FindFontFamilyByAttributes() has clearly got a bug in it - (e.g. ImplFontAttrs::None == ((nSearchType ^ nMatchType) & ImplFontAttrs::Rounded an XOR?) and it is a truly strange weighting scheme. Yes, I did try to untangle that beast with proper unit tests, but gave up after being told I was being unreasonable. 
  • There is VCL, canvas, cppcanvas and drawinglayer. drawinglayer is way better than VCL, but we are stuck with VCL for everything. 
  • Consider the following Window hierarchy: WorkWindow inherits from SystemWindow, which inherits from Window. Window holds an OutputDevice to do stuff. WindowOutputDevice derives from OutputDevice. This is needed because OutputDevice often needs to know if it is doing Window operations, via WindowOutputDevice. Try untangling this in your head.
  • Text layout is its own beast, and has its own set of classes. A lot of text layout is worked out in OutputDevice. 
  • Text layout is done via OutputDevice::ImplLayout(). I present to you the ImplLayout function signature:

        std::unique_ptr<SalLayout> ImplLayout(
            const OUString&, sal_Int32 nIndex, sal_Int32 nLen, const Point& rLogicPos = Point(0, 0),
            tools::Long nLogicWidth = 0, KernArraySpan aKernArray = KernArraySpan(),
            std::span<const sal_Bool> pKashidaArray = {}, SalLayoutFlags flags = SalLayoutFlags::NONE,
            vcl::text::TextLayoutCache const* = nullptr, const SalLayoutGlyphs* pGlyphs = nullptr,
            std::optional<sal_Int32> nDrawOriginCluster = std::nullopt,
            std::optional<sal_Int32> nDrawMinCharPos = std::nullopt,
            std::optional<sal_Int32> nDrawEndCharPos = std::nullopt) const; 
     

by Chris Sherlock (noreply@blogger.com) at November 29, 2024 10:58 PM

November 26, 2024

allotropia

Precision-engineering for JavaScript

This post is about recent improvements for ZetaJS, the JavaScript wrapper library for ZetaOffice’s WebAssembly version of LibreOffice:

There is something of a mismatch between the UNO type system and the JavaScript types used by zetajs. For example, JavaScript only has a single number type for both integer and floating point values, while UNO has a whole slew of different numeric types (BYTE, SHORT, UNSIGNED SHORT, LONG, UNSIGNED LONG, FLOAT, DOUBLE) that all map to that one JavaScript type. Similarly, the different UNO sequence<T> types all map to JavaScript arrays, where information about the UNO element type T is lost.

Normally, that’s not an issue. When you call a UNO method that returns a LONG, you get a number just like when you call a UNO method that returns a DOUBLE, and your JavaScript code then has a number to work with, and that’s all. Similarly, when you call a UNO method that returns a sequence<LONG>, you get an array of numbers you can work with, just like when you call a UNO method that returns a sequence<DOUBLE>. And when you then call a UNO method that takes a seaquence<LONG> as an argument, you pass in an array of numbers, and the zetajs runtimes figures out how to dress that array up as a UNO sequence<LONG>, and all is well.

However, one place where UNO’s insistance on more precise typing gets in the way is the UNO ANY type. It is not just a means to transport any kind of UNO value, it also carries precise type information. A UNO ANY value that contains a LONG of value 1 is something different than a UNO ANY vlaue that contains an UNSIGNED LONG of value 1. And a UNO ANY value that contains a reference of type css.uno.XInterface to some UNO object is something different than a UNO ANY value that contains a reference of type css.lang.XComponent to the same UNO object.

Again, most of the time, those precise distinctions are irrelevant to most of the code. When you call a UNO method that returns an ANY, and you know that that ANY value must contain a LONG, you just want to get a JavaScript number out, regardless of what precise numeric UNO type was encoded in that ANY value. Similarly, when you call a UNO method that returns an ANY that must contain a css.uno.XInterface reference, you just want to get some JavaScript object that you can do further UNO method calls on (or null), regardless of what precise UNO interface type was encoded in that ANY value. And when you then call a UNO method that takes an ANY that must contain a LONG, you want to just pass in a JavaScript number, and the zetajs runtime shall figure out how to dress that up as a UNO ANY containing a LONG (or throw an exception, if you passed something that just can’t be dressed up accordingly).

But, sometimes, you need more fine-grained control. There might be a UNO method that takes an ANY argument and behaves completely differently when you pass it a LONG of value 1 or an UNSIGNED LONG of value 1. But when you call that UNO method with the JavaScript number 1, zetajs will always dress that up as a UNO ANY of type LONG for you, never as an UNSIGNED LONG. To solve that issue, the zetajs UNO binding also has the notion of a zetajs.Any JavaScript type, which records a value along with its precise UNO type. You can thus pass either a new zetajs.Any(zetajs.type.long, 1) or a new zetajs.Any(zetajs.type.unsigned_long, 1) when you call that picky UNO method.

Now, when a UNO method returns an ANY value, the zetajs binding used to be conservative: You might want to know exactly what UNO type it contains (even though, most of the time you don’t actually care), so it always returned those wrapped zetajs.Any objects that carry the precise contained UNO type. But that lead to awkward code. When you call e.g. x.nextElement() to get a UNO ANY that contains a reference to another UNO object, you had to unwrap that first (with zetajs.fromAny) before you could do any further calls on the obtained UNO object: zetajs.fromAny(x.nextElement()).doSomething(). But you know that this call to x.nextElement() will return an ANY containing an interface reference, and you don’t care about the exact UNO interface type—you just want to do another method call on the obtained object.

So, recently (in Let zetajs return unwrapped ANY representations), the zetajs binding was changed so that it now always returns unwrapped UNO ANY values: x.nextElement() no longer returns a zetajs.Any wrapper (on which you would need to call zetajs.fromAny first), it directly returns the relevant JavaScript object. And the resulting overall code looks way better: x.nextElement().doSomething().

When, in the other direction, you pass something into a UNO method that takes an ANY argument, you still have the same options you had before: Either, you simply pass the JavaScript number 1, and zetajs figures out for you that that should be dressed up as a UNO ANY of type LONG, or you want to be picky and pass in either a new zetajs.Any(zetajs.type.long, 1) or a new zetajs.Any(zetajs.type.unsigned_long, 1).

And when it comes time that you do want to be picky about the ANY values that you obtain as return values from UNO method calls, there’s now a $precise way to do that: x.$precise.nextElement() (and same for any other UNO method call) will always give you back a wrapped zetajs.Any value. See the updated The zetajs UNO Mapping for all the details.

by allotropiasoft at November 26, 2024 09:00 AM

November 22, 2024

LibreOffice Dev Blog

VCL weld: create LibreOffice GUI from design files

LibreOffice uses VCL (Visual Class Library) as its internal widget toolkit to create the graphical user interface (GUI) of LibreOffice. Here I discuss how to use UI files designed with Glade interface designer to create LibreOffice user interfaces with a framework called weld, which is part of LibreOffice core source code.

Creating a Minimal VCL Weld Application

In my previous blog post, you can find out about the structure of a minimal VCL application. Please refer to the below blog post to see how a Window is created in VCL, and how it can be used as a test workbench called minvcl. You can run it with ./bin/run minvcl after you build LibreOffice.

VCL application in its minimal form

Here I discuss how to go further, and create user interface with Glade interface designer, and do most of the things without writing code.

VCL Weld Mechanism

In order to simplify user interface creation in LibreOffice, experienced LibreOffice developer, Caolán, has introduced a mechanism to load UI files created with Glade interface designer, and use them as if they are UI files for each and every GUI framework that LibreOffice supports: from GTK itself to Qt, Windows, macOS and even the so-called gen backend that only requires the X11 library on Linux.

To illustrate how the VCL weld mechanism works, I have added a minimal example, minweld, as a test workbench. The structure of the code is very similar to the previous example, minvcl, but there are some changes in the code. In the new code, UI is created from a .ui file that is designed visually with Glade interface designer. The .ui file is an XML file which contains placement of widgets that should be displayed on the screen.

The complete code for minweld is available in the LibreOffice core source code repository, which can also be viewed online:

Glade UI File

In minweld, I have used an existing Glade UI file, tipofthedaydialog.ui. This is the user interface for displaying a tip of the day in LibreOffice at startup. Heiko, the TDF design mentor, has discussed this dialog box in detail before:

Easyhacking: How to create a new “Tip-Of-The-Day” dialog

But, you can assume that it is a simple .ui file, that one can create with Glade. Here, we use it to create our own user interface in C++. You may use any other .ui file that you have created with almost the same code.

Tip of the day displayed at LibreOffice startup

Tip of the day displayed at LibreOffice startup

This UI file is found in cui/uiconfig/ui/tipofthedaydialog.ui, and minweld loads it. This is how it looks when you open it in Glade interface designer:

tipofthedaydialog.ui in Glade user interface designer

tipofthedaydialog.ui in Glade user interface designer

Let’s look into the specifics of minweld.cxx.

Header Includes

Headers are almost the same, but here we use vcl/weld.hxx instead of vcl/wrkwin.hxx. Therefore, you can see this line in the code:

#include <vcl/weld.hxx>

Then we have the C++ code for the application. The TipOfTheDayDialog class is defined with:

class TipOfTheDayDialog : public weld::GenericDialogController
{
public:
    TipOfTheDayDialog(weld::Window* pParent = nullptr);
    DECL_LINK(OnNextClick, weld::Button&, void);

private:
    std::unique_ptr<weld::Label> m_pTextLabel;
    std::unique_ptr<weld::Button> m_pNextButton;
    sal_Int32 m_nCounter = 0;
};
...
}

As you can see, TipOfTheDayDialog inherits from weld::GenericDialogController, and not Application class as before. Also, TipOfTheDayDialog constructor receives a parent of type weld::Window*, which is nullptr now. The reason is that there is no parent window in this example. Using weld:: prefix is also done for other types of widgets that we use in LibreOffice. For example, we use weld::Button to denote a push button in LibreOffice, or in any application that is created with the vcl::weld mechanism.

Class Constructor

This is the code for the TipOfTheDayDialog constructor. Here, we initialize two member variables, m_pTextLabel and m_pNextButton which point to a label and a button, respectively. We will interact with these two in our code. There are string literals like lbText and btnNext , which are the IDs of those widgets in Glade. The IDs should be unique for linking to specific variables in the code.

TipOfTheDayDialog::TipOfTheDayDialog(weld::Window* pParent)
: weld::GenericDialogController(pParent, u"cui/ui/tipofthedaydialog.ui"_ustr,
u"TipOfTheDayDialog"_ustr)
, m_pTextLabel(m_xBuilder->weld_label(u"lbText"_ustr))
, m_pNextButton(m_xBuilder->weld_button(u"btnNext"_ustr))
{
    m_pNextButton->connect_clicked(LINK(this, TipOfTheDayDialog, OnNextClick));
}

One last step is linking the events with functions in the code. You may do that with the LINK macro. In the last line, connect_clicked activates OnNextClick from the class TipOfTheDayDialog, whenever m_pNextButton is clicked.

Event Handler

This is the implementation of the event handler. It should be started with IMPL_LINK macro, in the form of IMPL_LINK_NOARG(Class, Member, ArgType, RetType). The code is straightforward: It increases a counter which is initially zero, and displays it alongside a text:

IMPL_LINK_NOARG(TipOfTheDayDialog, OnNextClick, weld::Button&, void)
{
    ++m_nCounter;
    m_pTextLabel->set_label(u"Here you will see tip of the day #"_ustr
+ OUString::number(m_nCounter) + ".");
}

With a call to set_label function, m_pTextLabel is updated every time that you click on “Next Tip” button.

Running the Example

You may run the example after you have built LibreOffice from sources. Then, you may simply invoke:

./bin/run minweld

The result is a little bit different from the tipoftheday dialog in LibreOffice, as it does not use a picture. But, it has a nice feature: if you click on “Next Tip”, it will show a text and a counter that goes up whenever you click on it again.

Final Notes

You may look into the original “tip of the day” dialog box in cui/source/dialogs/tipofthedaydlg.cxx, which is more complex than the one that we created here, as it reads some data from the configuration and uses images. But, the idea is the same. Inherit a class from GenericDialogController, define and link variables to the widgets with their IDs, add event handlers. Now, the application with VCL graphical user interface is ready to use!

This is somehow similar to the way one creates dialog boxes with Qt and other widget toolkits. On the other hand, the VCL weld mechanism is different in the way that it uses such a toolkit to create UI on the fly. Therefore, if you choose a desired VCL UI plugin, then it will use that specific library for creating user interface. For example, you can run minweld example with Qt this way:

export SAL_USE_VCLPLUGIN=qt5

./bin/run minweld
The minweld example in Qt (light theme)

The minweld example in Qt (light theme)

You may also run it with GTK3 UI, this way:

export SAL_USE_VCLPLUGIN=gtk3

export GTK_THEME=Adwaita:light # For light/dark theme

./bin/run minweld
The minweld example in GTK3 (light theme)

The minweld example in GTK3 (light theme)

I hope that this explanation was helpful for you to understand the basics of GUI design and implementation in LibreOffice. You can try doing small improvements in LibreOffice GUI by looking into the EasyHacks that with the tag “Design“:

TDF Wiki: EasyHacks categorized by “Design” as the required skill

We welcome your code submissions to improve LibreOffice. If you would like to start contributing to LibreOffice, please take a look at our video tutorial:

Getting Started (Video Tutorial)

by Hossein Nourikhah at November 22, 2024 05:07 PM

November 21, 2024

Marius Popa Adrian

Read free book "Detailed New Featuires Of Firebird 5": available as HTML and as PDF

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by Popa Adrian Marius (noreply@blogger.com) at November 21, 2024 09:05 AM

November 14, 2024

LibreOffice Dev Blog

Notebookbar part 1: custom widgets for the tabbed interface

Notebookbar, or tabbed interface is an attempt to modernize LibreOffice user interface. In these series, I try to explain the implementation in LibreOffice code. In the first part, I discuss custom Glade widgets that are building blocks of Notebookbar user interface.

Building LibreOffice From Sources

If you haven’t built LibreOffice from sources before, you can refer to can refer to this tutorial:

Getting Started (Video Tutorial)

The next sections assume that you have a working build environment.

Custom Widgets in Glade Catalogs

Notebookbar implementation consists of .ui files, configuration files and C++ implementation. Let’s look into the user interface files.

First time that you clone LibreOffice source code, and try to open a Notebookbar UI file like this, you may see error:

$ glade ./sc/uiconfig/scalc/ui/notebookbar.ui

You may see an error, which indicates that a required catalog related to LibreOffice is not available.

Glade error

Glade error

To fix this issue, you have to know that Notebookbar uses custom widgets that with the Glade interface designer. These custom widgets are available from a Glade catalog with the name of LibreOffice.

Inside sc/uiconfig/scalc/ui/notebookbar.ui, you may see these two lines:

<requires lib="gtk+" version="3.20"/>
<requires lib="LibreOffice" version="1.0"/>

Glade catalogs are xml files with the keyword glade-catalog inside them, so we can search for this keyword:

$ git grep -l glade-catalog
extras/source/glade/libreoffice-catalog.xml.in
extras/source/glade/makewidgetgroup.xslt

The .in files is an input file in which the build process creates the final xml file out of it. Searching for glade-catalog inside the build folder results:

$ grep -lr glade-catalog
...
instdir/share/glade/libreoffice-catalog.xml

As you can see, the result goes inside the folder instdir/share/glade/, so to be able to use the catalog, you should add this folder to the glade catalog search path. One of the easiest ways to do this, is to add it via Glade interface itself. Use ☰ (hamburger menu), go to “Glade Preferences”, and add instdir/share/glade/ to the “Extra Catalog & Template paths”. Then, reload a notebookbar UI file, and the error should go away. This setting is saved inside ~/.config/glade.conf configuration file.

Custom Widgets for the Notebookbar

Inside the Glade custom catalog instdir/share/glade/libreoffice-catalog.xml, you can see 10 custom widgets:

$ grep "glade-widget-class\ " instdir/share/glade/libreoffice-catalog.xml
<glade-widget-class title="Notebookbar ToolBox" name="sfxlo-NotebookbarToolBox" generic-name="Notebookbar ToolBox" parent="GtkToolbar" icon-name="widget-gtk-toolbar">
<glade-widget-class title="Notebook switching tabs depending on context" name="sfxlo-NotebookbarTabControl" generic-name="NotebookbarTabControl" parent="GtkNotebook" icon-name="widget-gtk-notebook"/>
<glade-widget-class title="Horizontal box hiding children depending on its priorities" name="sfxlo-PriorityHBox" generic-name="PriorityHBox" parent="GtkBox" icon-name="widget-gtk-box"/>
<glade-widget-class title="Horizontal box hiding children depending on its priorities" name="sfxlo-PriorityMergedHBox" generic-name="PriorityMergedHBox" parent="GtkBox" icon-name="widget-gtk-box"/>
<glade-widget-class title="Box which can move own content to the popup" name="sfxlo-DropdownBox" generic-name="DropdownBox" parent="GtkBox" icon-name="widget-gtk-box"/>
<glade-widget-class title="Box which can hide own content" name="VclOptionalBox" generic-name="VclOptionalBox" parent="GtkBox" icon-name="widget-gtk-box"/>
<glade-widget-class title="Vertical box hiding children depending on context" name="sfxlo-ContextVBox" generic-name="ContextVBox" parent="GtkBox" icon-name="widget-gtk-box"/>
<glade-widget-class title="Managed Menu Button" name="svtlo-ManagedMenuButton" generic-name="ManagedMenuButton" parent="GtkButton" icon-name="widget-gtk-button"/>
<glade-widget-class title="NotebookBar Toolbar Addons" name="NotebookBarAddonsToolMergePoint" generic-name="ShowText" parent="GtkToolButton" icon-name="widget-gtk-toolbutton"/>
<glade-widget-class title="NotebookBar MenuItem Addons" name="NotebookBarAddonsMenuMergePoint" generic-name="ShowText" parent="GtkMenuItem" icon-name="widget-gtk-menuitem"/>

The previous xml shows the custom widgets that are building blocks of building Notebookbar. Let’s look into each of them, based on their title and names.

Notebookbar widgets

In the next picture, you can see the notebookbar in LibreOffice, and compare it to what is visible in Glade user interface designer. As you can see, not everything is visible in the designer. Specifically, icons and text are not visible in the designer but are visible in the final application.

 

LibreOffice with Notebookbar

Notebookbar in LibreOffice

Main Widget

1. Notebookbar Tab Control: This widget has the name sfxlo-NotebookbarTabControl, and is the primary widget for Notebookbar. It can change the set of visible tabs based on the user context. Its parent class is GtkNotebook and provides context-sensitive tab switching.

Container Widgets

2. NotebookbarToolBox: This widget is named sfxlo-NotebookbarToolBox,  its parent class is GtkToolbar. It can contain toolbar elements.

NotebookbarTabControl

NotebookbarTabControl

3. Priority Horizontal Box: This widget has the name sfxlo-PriorityHBox, and its parent class is GtkBox. It is the horizontal box hiding children depending on its priorities. In this way, lower priority widgets becomes hidden to give the more important widgets room to be displayed on a screen that is not big enough to show all the available elements.

4. Priority Merged Horizontal Box: This widget has the name sfxlo-PriorityMergedHBox, and its parent class is GtkBox. It is the “horizontal box hiding children depending on its priorities”. This widget is also related to the previous one for creating more room for important widgets, but it is used inside the PriorityHBox.

5. Optional Box: This widget has the name VclOptionalBox, and its parent class is GtkBox. This “box which can hide own content”, is a widget that is useful for creating small areas dedicated to a specific purpose. For example, you may see Home-Section-Clipboard, which is used to define an area for clipboard related tasks inside Home tab.

6. Contextual Vertical Box: This widget has the name sfxlo-ContextVBox and is a “vertical box hiding children depending on context” and its parent class is GtkBox. It provides a box that can act based on the context, showing and hiding its children accordingly. You may look into sw/uiconfig/swriter/ui/notebookbar_single.ui, which provides an example use.

Here is the correct control hierarchy, as depicted and described in the TDF Wiki:

Correct Notebookbar controls hierarchy

Correct Notebookbar controls hierarchy

Menu Widgets

7. Dropdown Box: This widget has the name sfxlo-DropdownBox, its parent class is GtkBox and is a “box which can move own content to the popup”. This is also useful where the space for the tabbed interface is not big enough. The menu, is what you can see in “File” and “Help” menu in every notebookbar in LibreOffice tabbed interface. Please note that only 1 GtkBox child should be inside it, so that the popup works properly. In fact, the above diagram shows the correct usage.

8. Managed Menu Button: This widget has the name svtlo-ManagedMenuButton, and its parent class is GtkButton. It is a “Managed Menu Button”. It provides a button that opens a dynamic menu which is populated according to the context.

Custom Widgets for the Extensions

9. NotebookBar MenuItem Addons: This widget has the name NotebookBarAddonsToolMergePoint, and its parent class is GtkToolButton. Specifically, LibreOffice extensions can use it for adding additional tools to the notebookbar.

10. NotebookBar MenuItem Addons: This widget has the name NotebookBarAddonsMenuMergePoint, and its parent class is GtkMenuItem. This is also used for adding extra items into the notebookbar.

Final Notes

You can find useful information about Notebookbar in the design team blog:

And at last, these are some useful Wiki articles around Notebookbar in the TDF Wiki:

by Hossein Nourikhah at November 14, 2024 03:04 PM

November 08, 2024

allotropia

Announcing ZetaOffice, a new LibreOffice Technology product for web, mobile & desktop

Hamburg and Bolzano, November 8th, 2024 – During the two-day annual South Tyrol Free Software Conference, allotropia software GmbH today announces beta versions of its new product line “ZetaOffice”.

ZetaOffice is a new set of applications, libraries and services, all powered by the LibreOffice Technology stack. Featured among its products is ZetaJS, an innovative browser-based plugin, with unique programmability & embeddability – the perfect tool for complex office editing, process automation and line-of-business applications in the web.

Additionally, leveraging the unique portability and flexibility of the LibreOffice Technology stack, ZetaOffice will be available in bit-by-bit identical versions (allowing for perfect interoperability and feature parity) also for open-source-based mobile operating systems (Android, and derived OS), as well as for all relevant desktop operating systems (Windows, macOS, Linux – via flatpak and snapcraft).

“We’re very excited being able to offer powerful, data-sovereign Open Source office functionality on even more platforms today”, says Thorsten Behrens, owner and managing director of allotropia software. “In particular our innovative, WASM-based browser version of LibreOffice will be a game-changer for every web developer in need of processing, analysing or integrating with office documents.”

“This could not have come at a better time”, says Michiel Leenaars, director of strategy at philanthropic investor NLnet Foundation. “It is long overdue but certainly in the wake of the recent geo-political developments, we all recognise the urgent need for Europe to regain its technological independence when it comes to core technologies – as boring as these may seem. ZetaOffice shows that Europe has the talent and capacity to break with the past and create new paradigms and use innovation and collaboration to save the day.”

“ZetaOffice is the perfect addition to our portfolio of tools for document and business process automation”, says Uli Brandner, CEO and owner of CIB Group. “With solutions like CIB flow for workflow modeling and CIB coSys for high-quality template management, CIB Group already offers powerful digitalization tools. As demand grows to bring proven applications to the web and stay on the cutting edge of technology, ZetaOffice stands out as an innovative solution precisely tailored to our customers’ needs.”

A detailed blog post, including links to beta versions of the software, is available here.

For the products, please refer to our website at zetaoffice.net.

ZetaOffice and the team at allotropia thanks the European Commission’s Next Generation Internet initiative/NGI Zero for its financial contribution to the development of this software.

About ZetaOffice:

ZetaOffice is a product line based on LibreOffice Technology, comprising of desktop LTS products for classical office productivity requirements; a browser-native version based on WebAssembly for fast, client-side integration and automation of office technology; and an
upcoming mobile app widget, for deep integration in mobile line-of-business applications. ZetaOffice is focused on speed, superb embeddability, excellent inter-product as well as Office compatibility, and geared towards digital-sovereign & data protection needs.

About ZetaJS:

ZetaJS is a JavaScript library, available via the npm package manager, to enable developers to quickly & conveniently embed ZetaOffice WebAssembly in web applications. ZetaJS makes available the entire gamut of the LibreOffice programmability interfaces, providing a web-native component for JavaScript developers to deeply embed an office suite into their web apps. In contrast to classical cloud-office setups, ZetaJS can be used as an integral, client-side part of any web application – permitting users to interact with office documents as part of a larger application framework, with very low latency. That way, e.g. direct integration for editing, suggestions or running calculations in complex spreadsheets can be provided. Similarly, it’s trivially easy to implement direct, client-side rendering and export of office documents into PDF or HTML – all via a self-hostable, digital-sovereign Open Source solution.

About allotropia software GmbH:

The company allotropia software GmbH provides services, consulting and products around LibreOffice and related opensource projects. Founded in 2020 by long-time developers of the project, its stated mission is to make LibreOffice shine – in as many different shapes and forms as necessary to serve modern needs towards office productivity software. allotropia software GmbH is headquartered in Hamburg, Germany at the birthplace of the OpenOffice/LibreOffice project. For more information, visit allotropia.de, or follow fosstodon.org/@allotropia on Mastodon and LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/allotropia-software-gmbh

by allotropiasoft at November 08, 2024 10:59 AM

Launching ZetaJS for ZetaOffice

Today allotropia has launched the ZetaOffice range of products at the SFSCON in South Tyrol. ZetaOffice is a LibreOffice Technology built & designed for professional use in the browser, on the desktop and on mobile.

We are excited to additionally announce a massively improved way for which LibreOffice Technology can be used fully client-side on the web. As an additional building block, we have developed the ZetaJS wrapper, which enables convenient embedding and automating WASM (WebAssembly) builds of ZetaOffice via JavaScript. With that, all of the LibreOffice Technology APIs and features are available to web applications – and by leveraging WASM, which runs ZetaOffice client-side, no server or cloud services are needed. All processing is taking place on the client browser, which minimizes latencies & load (of course, a minimal static delivery of web application code, assets and the WASM binary is still needed, but that’s extremely light-weight). 

Examples

Let’s look at some simple examples to give you an idea, how easy ZetaOffice integration is. All comprise of an HTML and a JavaScript file. A ZetaOffice WASM build will automatically be included from the following URL. To replace it with a custom WASM build see config.sample.js of each demo.

https://cdn.zetaoffice.net/zetaoffice_latest/

Next you need to upload the zetajs/ folder onto a webserver of your choice, which sets the following HTTP headers (see developer.mozilla.org for further details):

Cross-Origin-Opener-Policy "same-origin"
Cross-Origin-Embedder-Policy "require-corp"

So back to the example code. The HTML files for all examples embed ZetaOffice and some JavaScript loading code. Please check the actual JavaScript file for the code interacting with ZetaOffice.

Lets have a look at the simple.html (see live). ZetaOffice displays its content using an HTML canvas. So in line 14 we initialize this canvas. Currently a list of attributes like is needed for the canvas. But we will migrate those attributes to the ZetaJS wrapper, so they won’t be needed anymore in the HTML code.

<canvas
  id="qtcanvas" contenteditable="true"
  oncontextmenu="event.preventDefault()" onkeydown="event.preventDefault()"
  style="height:100%; width:100%; border:0px none; padding:0;"/>

The Module variable on line 30 passes the information needed to initialize WASM binaries. First is the canvas. And second is an array of JavaScript files which will be executed in the main Web Worker running the WASM binary. Web Workers are a process like feature of the browsers WASM runtime environment. We pass the ZetaJS wrapper and a file with custom JavaScript code, in this example the simple.js. You may need to ensure, that the zeta.js is reachable under the given URL path.

Line 33 to 39 preload the soffice.js file to ensure, it’s not being blocked by the browsers origin policy when loaded from a foreign origin. Line 42 triggers a website resize event, to make ZetaOffice display nicely inside the canvas. This can be done more precise, as shown in the more complex demos. But for the start the resize event will be triggered after a fixed interval. And finally the soffice.js document is finally loaded which triggers the start of the WASM binary.

Second is the simple.js file. It’s running inside the same Web Worker as the WASM binary to enable interaction. When running in Chromium / Google Chrome you will find a dropdown list labeled “top” at the upper left of the “Console” tab in the developer tools. There you can select the em-pthread_1 Web Worker to debug code in the simple.js file.

Inside the simple.js you will find pretty much the same code as when controlling a LibreOffice running naively on Linux, Windows or any other native OS. It is using LibreOffice’s UNO interface. Most existing examples using UNO via Python or Basic can be easily moved to JavaScript.

The control flow is being passed by the Module.zetajs.thenwhich gets called as soon as the WASM binary is loaded. It passes the zetajs object from which we first get the common com.sun.star object (do not confuse it’s abbreviation css with HTML CSS). In the lines 11 to 21 we get some control objects via UNO, which allow us to trigger the load of an example office document example.odt which is embedded in the WASM binary.

Module.zetajs.then(function(zetajs) {
  function getTextDocument() {
    const css = zetajs.uno.com.sun.star;
    const context = zetajs.getUnoComponentContext();
    const desktop = css.frame.Desktop.create(context);
    let xModel = desktop.getCurrentFrame().getController().getModel();
    if (xModel === null
      || !zetajs.fromAny(
        xModel.queryInterface(zetajs.type.interface(css.text.XTextDocument))))
    {
      xModel = desktop.loadComponentFromURL(
        'file:///android/default-document/example.odt', '_default', 0, []);
    }
    const toolkit = css.awt.Toolkit.create(context);

Line 27 is where the actual application logic starts. In this simple example we get a cursor object from the document to insert the text string here! at the top. In the final section from line 32 to 38 each paragraph of the office document becomes colored in a random color.

    const xText = xModel.getText();
    const xTextCursor = xText.createTextCursor();
    xTextCursor.setString("string here!");
  }
  {
    const xModel = getTextDocument();
    const xText = xModel.getText();
    const xParaEnumeration = xText.createEnumeration();
    for (const next of xParaEnumeration) {
      const xParagraph = zetajs.fromAny(next);
      const color = Math.floor(Math.random() * 0xFFFFFF);
      xParagraph.setPropertyValue("CharColor", color);
    }

This other simple-examples/ show you a little more interesting tasks you can do with the same basic techniques as shown here. While the HTML files are all the same, the simple_key_handler.js (see live) shows you how to register to ZetaOffice event handlers. And finally rainbow_writer.js (see live) uses this to implement a small tool coloring text as you write it.

More Complex Examples

The next big step is in the standalone/ (see live) example. It adds a nice loading animation and shows you how to pass messages between the WASM Web Worker and the browsers main thread, handling the HTML page. This is being used to implement some simple controls on the HTML page for formatting text inside ZetaOffice. The demo is build as a npm package and can be run according to the contained README.md. Don’t forget to pass an URL to the soffice_base_url variable as explained above!

Additional examples are vuejs3-ping-tool/ (see live) and letter-address-tool/ (see live). The vuejs3-ping-tool/is again a npm package, and show-cases how to automatically fill spreadsheets documents with values, displaying them in nicely animated Calc charts. The other letter-address-tool/ example gives you an impression how to connect ZetaOffice with external data sources to automatically create letters from templates, and export the result as office document or PDF file.

Please share your feedback as a comment in the blog, or use the GitHub issue tracker for suggestions or bugs in the code!

by Moritz Duge at November 08, 2024 10:58 AM

Miklos Vajna

Handling page captures for Writer TextBoxes

Writer TextBoxes provide the user with shapes that can have complex geometry and complex content. There is also a feature to capture shapes inside page boundaries: now the two features interact with each other better.

This work is primarily for Collabora Online, but the feature is available in desktop Writer as well.

Motivation

As described in a previous post, Writer implements the TextBox feature with a pair of objects: a Draw shape (with complex geometry) and a (hidden) Writer TextFrame, providing complex content. To avoid wrapping problems, the underlying TextFrame always has its wrap type set to "through", i.e. text may wrap around the Draw shape, but the hidden TextFrame is always ignored during text wrapping.

In most cases this provides the expected behavior, because the user sees one object, so wrapping around at most one object is not surprising.

However, there is also an other feature, that shapes may be captured inside page frames: if their position would be outside the page frame, Writer corrects this, so they are not off-page. This also makes sense, so it can't happen that your document has a shape that is hard to find, due to a silly position.

The trouble comes when these two are combined: the Draw shape's position gets adjusted to be captured inside the page frame, but the TextFrame's wrap type is "through", and objects with this wrap type are an exception from the capturing mechanism, so the position of the two shapes get out of sync.

Results so far

The problem is now solved by improving the layout, so in case the TextFrame is actually part of a Draw shape + TextFrame pair (forming a TextBox), then we calculate the effective wrap type of the TextFrame based on the wrap type of its Draw shape, so either both objects are captured or none, which results in consistent render result.

Here is a sample document where all margins are configured to be equal, but capturing corrected the Draw shape (and not the TextFrame):

Bugdoc: old Writer render

And here is the same document, with consistent positioning:

Bugdoc: new Writer render

As you can see, now the rendered margins actually equal, as wanted.

How is this implemented?

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

The bugfix commit was sw textbox: capture fly when its draw object is captured.

The tracking bug was tdf#138711.

Want to start using this?

You can get a development edition of Collabora Online 24.04 and try it out yourself right now: try the development edition. Collabora intends to continue supporting and contributing to LibreOffice, the code is merged so we expect all of this work will be available in TDF's next release too (25.2).

by Miklos Vajna at November 08, 2024 07:58 AM

October 04, 2024

Miklos Vajna

Per-paragraph semi-transparent shape text in Impress

The SVG export in Impress now supports a per-paragraph setting to handle semi-transparent shape text, while previously this was only possible to control at a per-shape level.

This work is primarily for Collabora Online, but the feature is available in desktop Impress as well.

Motivation

As described in a previous post, Impress already had the capability to have semi-transparent shape text, but the SVG export of this for the case when not all paragraphs have the same setting was broken.

Transparency in SVG can be described as a property of a group (<g style="opacity: 0.5">...</g>) and it can be also a property of the text (<tspan fill-opacity="0.5">...</tspan>).

The SVG export works with the metafile of the shape, so when looking for meta actions, it tries to guess if the transparency will be for text: if so, it needs to use the tspan markup, otherwise going with the g markup is OK.

What happened here is that meta action for a normal text started, so the SVG export assumed the text is not semi-transparent, but later the second line was still transparent, so we started a group element, and this resulted in a not even well-formed XML output.

Results so far

The relevant part of the test document is simple: just 3 paragraphs, the second one is semi-transparent (and also has a bullet, as an extra):

Bugdoc: original Impress render

Once this was exported to SVG, this resulted in a non-well-formed XML, so you got this error in a web browser:

Bugdoc: old SVG render

Once tweaking the transparency mask writer to check if text started already, we get the correct SVG render:

Bugdoc: new SVG render

How is this implemented?

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

The bugfix commit was SVG export: fix handling of semi-transparent text inside a list.

The tracking bug was tdf#162782.

Want to start using this?

You can get a development edition of Collabora Online 24.04 and try it out yourself right now: try the development edition. Collabora intends to continue supporting and contributing to LibreOffice, the code is merged so we expect all of this work will be available in TDF's next release too (25.2).

by Miklos Vajna at October 04, 2024 06:22 AM

September 19, 2024

Björn Michaelsen

Nothing ever happens

Nothing ever happens.

And nothing ever happens, nothing happens at all The needle returns to the start of the song And we all sing along like before -- Del Amitri, Nothing Ever Happens

In my last post on Libreoffice I promised to talk about Writer changes once in a while, but then ... nothing ever happened. However, given that I had an annoying motorcycle accident in the meantime that turned out much more persistently annoying than originally thought, I think I have a bit of an excuse.

So ... what did happen? For one, I fixed quite a few regressions with my name on them, but ... is there much to talk about here? Mostly not: If you look at the fixes, they are often oneliners fixing something that seems rather obvious in retrospect. The more tricky question is: how did these get in in the first place? Its hard for me to say that, as the introducing commits are from even longer ago.

One thing is certain though: Often a unittest would have caught them, so whenever possible, I tried to create a reproducer adding such a test with the fix. To anyone writing bug reports: Creating minimal reproduction test is hugely valuable in this -- not just for finding the issue, but also as a starting point for a regression test. So if a bug bugs you and it is missing a minimal reproduction scenario, adding one is a great way to move this forward. Oh, and maybe verifying a bugfix, if someone provided a fix and the friendly bot say affected users are "encouraged to test the fix and report feedback".

While doing these fixes, I stumbled over Noel suggesting to speed up bookmarks in writer which is of course great, but I noticed that the code could be optimized a bit more as the bookmarks of a document are now sorted by their starting position (which was one of the first changes I made back on OpenOffice.org about more than a decade ago). Thus we can use bisectional search on the bookmarks here, which should be even faster. Now, it would be great if the discussion on this between Noel and me would available for others to learn from, wouldnt it? The cool thing is: it is.

All discussion happened on gerrit in the comments so if you want to learn about bookmark in Writer and how to maybe speed them up for documents that have a lot of them, that is a great starting point! Is there anything to add? Well maybe the following: Currently the bookmarks starting at the same position are currently not sorted. If one would sort them by their end position, the bisectional search could maybe cover even more? This would also remove one extra loop of logic and make the code simpler and easier to read.

The performance improvement is likely irrelevant -- esp. since there will be not that many documents with lots of bookmarks starting at the same position. The simpler code might be worth it though. So why wasnt it done?

It still can be tried in a follow-up, but speaking about regressions earlier: This has some obscure regression risk, because if we change the order of bookmarks starting at the same position from undefined to something ordered by the end position it might impact a lot of code using bookmarks. The function in question might actually be faster, but other functions (e.g. the inserting of new bookmarks) might actually be slower. So ... this is left as an exercise to the reader.

Comments? Feedback? Additions? Most welcome here on the fediverse !

September 19, 2024 11:30 PM

September 03, 2024

Miklos Vajna

Improved interactivity for LOK clients in Writer's layout

Writer now has support for doing partial layout passes when LOK clients have pending events, which sometimes improves interactivity a lot.

This work is primarily for Collabora Online, but the feature is useful for any LOK clients.

Motivation

I recently worked with a document that has relatively simple structure, but it has 300 pages, and most of the content is part of a numbered list. Pasting a simple string (like an URL) into the end of a paragraph resulted in a short, but annoying hang. It turns out we updated Writer's layout for all the 300 pages before the content was repainted on the single visible page. In theory, you could reorder events, so you first calculate the first page, you paint the first page, then you calculate the remaining 299 pages. Is this possible in practice? Let's try!

Results so far

The relevant part of the test document is simple: just an empty numbered paragraph, so we can paste somewhere:

Bugdoc: empty paragraph, part of a numbered list and then pasting an URL there

This is a good sample, because pasting into a numbered list requires invalidating all list items in that list, since possibly the paste operation created a new list item, and then the number portion has to be updated for all items in the rest of the list. So if you paste into a numbered list, you need to re-calculate the entire document if all the document is just a numbered list.

The first problem was that Writer tracks its visible area, but LOK needs two kinds of visible areas. The first kind decides if invalidations are interesting for part of the document area. LOK wants to get all invalidations, so in case we cache some document content in the client that is near the visible area, we need to know when to throw away that cache. On the other hand, we want to still track the actually visible viewport of the client, so we can prioritize visible vs hidden parts of the document. Writer in LOK mode thought that all parts of the document are a priority, but this could improved by taking the client's viewport into account.

The second problem was that even if Writer had two layout passes (first is synchronous, for the visible area; second is async, for the rest of the document), both passes were performed before allowing a LOK client to request tiles for the issued invalidations.

This is now solved by a new registerAnyInputCallback() API, which allows the LOK client to signal if it has pending events (e.g. unprocessed callbacks, tiles to be painted) or it's OK for Writer layout to finish its idle job first.

The end result for pasting a URL into this 300 pages document, when measuring end-to-end (from sending the paste command to getting the first updated tile) is a decrease in response time, from 963 ms to 14 ms.

How is this implemented?

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

As usual, the high-level problem was addressed by a series of small changes:

The tracking issue for this problem was cool#9735.

Want to start using this?

You can get a development edition of Collabora Online 24.04 and try it out yourself right now: try the development edition. Collabora intends to continue supporting and contributing to LibreOffice, the code is merged so we expect all of this work will be available in TDF's next release too (25.2).

by Miklos Vajna at September 03, 2024 06:08 AM

August 26, 2024

Roman Kuznetsov

The best LibreOffice extensions. Code Highlighter 2

When I translated one book about Python to Russian which contained many examples of Python code I though quite long how to highlight them in the normal text. For book writing I used LibreOffice Writer (of course) but Writer has no a standard tool for code highlighting.

So after some searching I found the LibreOffice extension - Code Highlighter 2. It is also available on our extension site. This extension makes code highlighting using Pygments Python library. There is support for many programming languages and many color styles for highlighting there.

The extension worked fine, but I didn't like that for highlighting I should manually select every code example in the text, then press some shortcut, then select another code example, etc...

I wrote an issue on the extension github page and after some discussions the extension author Jean-Marc Zambon implemented a new feature that allows to highlight all code example in the book in only one action using Paragraph style!

So my workflow in this case will be as follows:

  • Create a snippet for the AutoText with code example that has a special paragraph style (for example, with font name Consolas and font size 12pt) with name, for example too - 'Python_code'.
  • Use this snippet to insert code examples
  • In the end of book writing just use the new feature in the extension and highlight all code examples in only one action!

 


Above you can see examples of the Code Highlighter work with some light and some dark styles.

by Roman Kuznetsov (noreply@blogger.com) at August 26, 2024 11:18 AM

August 23, 2024

Caolán McNamara

Linux Namespaces and Collabora Online

In Collabora Online (for the normal mode of operation) we have a single server process (coolwsd) that spawns a separate process (kit) to load and manage each individual document. Each of those per-document kit processes runs in its own isolated environment. See architecture for details.

Each environment contains a minimal file system (ideally bind mounted from a template dir for speed, but linked/copied if not possible) that each kit chroots into, limiting its access to that subtree.

That chroot requires the CAP_SYS_CHROOT capability (and the desirable mount requires the CAP_SYS_ADMIN capability), and granting those capabilities to the coolforkit and coolmount binaries is a root privilege that, for typical deb/rpm packages, is done automatically at install time.

But it would be far more convenient not to require these capabilities to be set to do this isolation. They grant online more ability to affect its host system than it uses, we only want to mount dirs and chroot into dirs that belong to online and have no need or desire to make them available to any other process or user, and it's awkward, especially during development. to require root privileges to set these capabilities.

This scenario is not unique, and Linux provides namespaces, typically used by container implementations, to support achieving this. So recent work in Collabora Online leverages these namespaces to do its own layer of per-document kit isolation. (There's a good series of articles by Steve Ovens on the various namespaces, with the mount namespaces the most relevant one here.)

In essence, a user level process can create its own namespace in which it is apparently root from its own perspective, but as the original uid from the outside perspective and limited to operating on resources that the original uid is limited to accessing. So for each forkit, instead of requiring initial system capabilities and creating a system level bind mount we instead have no specific initial capabilities, enter a new namespace, unique to each forkit, in which that forkit becomes king of its own castle with apparent full capabilities, and can create bind mounts and chroot into its minimal file system.

Which is pretty magical to me as the whole existence of namespaces passed me by entirely without notice despite debuting over a decade ago.

Nothing is ever simple however, so some hurdles along the way.

Entering the namespace "requires that the calling process is not threaded" (man 2 unshare) which is not a problem for the normal use case in each kit, but did pose a problem for the test coolwsd does in advance to probe if there are working namespaces on the system in determine if it should operate kits in namespace mode or not. There it turned out that the Poco::Logger we use backups existing logs when it creates a new one, and then by default spawns a  thread to compress the old log.

I initially had the vague notion that I could treat a namespace as a sort pseudo-sudo and switch back and forth freely between them, but that's not the model, typically it's a one way journey. But namespaces can be stacked instead with a namespace where the original uid is mapped to (apparent) root then containing another namespace where the user is mapped back to the original uid again. So we do that, each forkit enters its initial namespace and is mapped to root, does the mounts, enters another nested namespace mapped back to the original uid, chroots and drops all of the capabilities gained on entering a namespace.  Which aligns the namespace mode with the expectations of the non-namespaces mode as to what effective uid the kit appears to run as.

The mounts that each forkit does are private to that forkit, so while in the non-namespace case the mounts are visible system-wide, in the namespace case the mounts are not visible either to other forkits or to the parent coolwsd. So how the document is provided by coolwsd to a child kit had to be adapted for the new mode of even less potential leakage between components.

There was a glitch in mounting, because when we bind mounts dirs from our system template we want them to be readonly, which requires the typical Linux 2 step process of mount and remount with readonly flags. This worked for the non namespace case, but failed for namespaces even though the initial mount succeeded. Here we had an extra flag of MS_NOATIME when remounting to potentially shave a little time off use of the kit jail, but in namespaces removing that option from the underlying system mount isn't permitted.

Despite that mount flag change giving working namespace-using kits directly inside toplevel OS, one of our lxc-using ci systems still refused to allow a readonly remount in a namespace to work. The catch here was that lxc is bundled with default apparmor rules which additionally restrict a readonly remount call to a certain set of arguments which our remount effort didn't match, so that had to be adjusted. Specifically the rather obscure MS_SILENT use.

Performance-wise, an unexpected (to me at least) side effect of using namespaces is that the coolwsd measurement of the time to spawn a forkit on my hardware has reduced from an average of 39.63ms per spawn to an average of an average of 6.15ms per spawn, which wasn't the primary goal but is a nice benefit.

Surveying distros where namespaces are available by default suggests:

RHEL/CENTOS

  • 8.0+ works with namespaces out of the box
  • 7.9 (EOL) not enabled by default, possible with
    • echo 10000 > /proc/sys/user/max_user_namespaces

Debian

  • 11+ (bullseye) works with namespaces out of the box
  • 10 (buster) EOL, not enabled by default, possible with
    • sudo sysctl -w kernel.unprivileged_userns_clone=1

Ubuntu

  • 16.04+ works with namespaces out of the box

Ubuntu 24.04 however, while supporting namespaces out of the box, has restricted namespaces via apparmor rules, which complicates things again so Collabora Online .deb packages install an apparmor profile to enable it to use namespaces out of the box.

by caolan (noreply@blogger.com) at August 23, 2024 11:17 AM

July 17, 2024

LibreOffice Design Blog

Peer-to-peer collaboration with LibreOffice

A while ago, Simon Phipps, member of the Board of Directors at The Document Foundation, shared the idea to introduce a peer-to-peer collaboration built in to desktop LibreOffice without the requirement for a cloud provider. This idea has received a lot of attention inside the organization and the design team has started to outline the project now.…

by Heiko Tietze at July 17, 2024 08:22 AM