The Document Foundation Planet

 

December 23, 2024

Official TDF Blog

2024 – The Documentation Team Made LibreOffice Shine

2024 was a prolific year for the LibreOffice documentation.

With many guides updated and the application Help tracking closely the latest LibreOffice release, the team made all efforts to keep the pace of the development, bringing the new features to the public in the set of books, Help online and more.

To all the nice team, our Big Thank you!

by Olivier Hallot at December 23, 2024 07:38 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 19, 2024

Official TDF Blog

LibreOffice 24.8.4, optimised for the privacy-conscious user, is available for download

Berlin, 19 December 2024 – LibreOffice 24.8.4, the fourth minor release of the LibreOffice 24.8 family of the free open source, volunteer-supported office suite for Windows (Intel, AMD and ARM), MacOS (Apple and Intel) and Linux, is available at www.libreoffice.org/download.

The release includes over 55 bug and regression fixes over LibreOffice 24.8.3 [1] to improve the stability and robustness of the software, as well as interoperability with legacy and proprietary document formats.

LibreOffice is the only office suite that respects the privacy of the user, ensuring that the user is able to decide if and with whom to share the content they create. It even allows deleting user related info from documents. As such, LibreOffice is the best option for the privacy-conscious office suite user, while offering a feature set comparable to the leading product on the market.

Also, LibreOffice offers a range of interface options to suit different user habits, from traditional to modern, and makes the most of different screen sizes by using all the space available on the desktop to put the maximum number of features just a click or two away.

The biggest advantage over competing products is the LibreOffice Technology engine, the single software platform on which desktop, mobile and cloud versions of LibreOffice – including those from ecosystem companies – are based.

This allows LibreOffice to produce identical and fully interoperable documents based on two ISO standards: the open and neutral Open Document Format (ODT, ODS, ODP) and the closed and fully proprietary Microsoft OOXML (DOCX, XLSX, PPTX), which hides a large amount of artificial complexity, and can cause problems for users who are confident that they are using a true open standard.

End users looking for support can download the LibreOffice 24.8 Getting Started, Writer, Impress, Draw and Math guides from the following link: books.libreoffice.org/. In addition, they can get first-level technical support from volunteers on mailing lists and the Ask LibreOffice website: ask.libreoffice.org.

LibreOffice for Enterprise

For enterprise-class deployments, TDF strongly recommends the LibreOffice Enterprise family of applications from ecosystem partners, with three or five year backporting of security patches, other dedicated value-added features and Service Level Agreements: 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.

The Document Foundation’s migration protocol helps companies move from proprietary office suites to LibreOffice, by installing the LTS (long-term support) enterprise-optimised version of LibreOffice, plus consulting and training provided by certified professionals: 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 make it the ideal solution for organisations looking to regain control of their data and break free from vendor lock-in.

LibreOffice 24.8.4 availability

LibreOffice 24.8.4 is available from www.libreoffice.org/download/. Minimum requirements for proprietary operating systems are Microsoft Windows 7 SP1 (no longer supported by Microsoft) and Apple MacOS 10.15. Products for Android and iOS are at www.libreoffice.org/download/android-and-ios/.

Users of the LibreOffice 24.2 branch (the last update being 24.2.7), which has recently reached end-of-life, should consider upgrading to LibreOffice 24.8.4, as this is already the most tested version of the program. Early February will see the announcement of LibreOffice 25.2.

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

Enterprise deploying LibreOffice can also donate, although the best solution for their needs would be to look for the enterprise optimized versions of the software (with Long Term Support for security and Service Level Agreements to protect their investment) at www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-in-business/.

[1] Fixes in RC1: wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/24.8.4/RC1. Fixes in RC2: wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/24.8.4/RC2.

by Italo Vignoli at December 19, 2024 12:10 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 17, 2024

Official TDF Blog

24 more videos from the LibreOffice Conference 2024!

We’ve finished editing and uploading another batch of videos from our recent conference in Luxembourg. Now the playlist has a total of 51 videos and is almost entirely complete! (There are a couple more that we’re chasing up.)

So, enjoy watching and learning about the technology and community behind the suite. Use the icon in the top-right to choose videos from the playlist:

Please confirm that you want to play a YouTube video. By accepting, you will be accessing content from YouTube, a service provided by an external third party.

YouTube privacy policy

If you accept this notice, your choice will be saved and the page will refresh.

by Mike Saunders at December 17, 2024 01:17 PM

December 16, 2024

Official TDF Blog

Season’s Greetings! Three new LibreOffice Guides released

Our team member Peter Schofield just updated the Impress, Draw and Math guides to the latest LibreOffice 24.8 release.

Three Guides released

 

The Impress, Draw and Math guides are the authoritative guides for the end user. They cover presentation, drawings and equation documents. These guides are part of the LibreOffice community offering for the public in general that needs to close the knowledge gap in using LibreOffice.

Peter Schofield

The guides can be downloaded from the LibreOffice Bookshelf as well as from the Documentation website.

A big thank you to dear Peter!

 

by Olivier Hallot at December 16, 2024 09:03 PM

December 12, 2024

LibreOffice QA Blog

LibreOffice 25.2 Beta1 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 Beta1 the second pre-release since the development of version 25.2 started in mid Juny, 2024. Since the previous release, LibreOffice 25.2 Alpha1, 450 commits have been submitted to the code repository and 105 issues got fixed. Check the release notes to find the new features included in this version of LibreOffice.

LibreOffice 25.2 Beta1 can be downloaded for Linux, macOS and Windows, and it can be installed alongside the standard version.

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 December 12, 2024 04:00 PM

December 06, 2024

Official TDF Blog

LibreOffice at LinuxDays 2024 in Prague

LibreOffice booth at LinuxDays 2024 in Prague

Our Czech community provides insights from the LinuxDays 2024 conference, which took place over the weekend of 12 – 13 October in Prague:

At the LibreOffice booth, there was a very large group of people (with a few exceptions) of satisfied LibreOffice users, of which young people (primary and secondary school students) were represented in surprisingly large numbers. This means that even the youngest generation, who prefer a different approach to data processing than office software, can be reached by LibreOffice.

This year we had a special treat for conference visitors: printed manuals for LibreOffice Base and Writer. The printing of these manuals was provided by Zdeněk Crhonek. They are printed in colour on high quality paper and probably attracted the most interest – they caught the eye at first sight.

The look of LibreOffice

Users overwhelmingly expressed satisfaction with LibreOffice. The features are sufficient, the user interface is easy to get used to, and so is the way of working. For some users, the interface is seen as “old school” – but one such good thing is the implementation of alternative layours. It’s fair to say that few users know about the option to change the user interface layout, despite the fact that this option is offered in the very first dialog after installing the package.

This means that users don’t read these tips (which is a big mistake – they contain very useful and practical advice), and furthermore that LibreOffice lacks a wizard to guide the user through the various setup options. There are a lot of them, but they are hidden, so “nobody” knows about them. Such a guide would be a very useful addition indeed.

LibreOffice booth at LinuxDays 2024 in Prague

Using LibreOffice modules

Most users use LibreOffice to write text, create spreadsheets, and some even make presentations. In this regard, it should be noted that LibreOffice is a really extensive package; it is not a better typewriter. A word processor is not Notepad. So it is a pity that LibreOffice’s features remain unused. Users often create texts that require formatting in, for example, TeX, Markdown and so on. This is also a possible way to go, but they can equally (and better) take advantage of Writer’s extensive range of features. The same applies to Calc: this application is not just for creating spreadsheets, but also for computational operations and visualizations.

Insights on individual modules:

  • Of particular interest was the discovery that you can add content as automatic text in Writer.
  • One user would appreciate a significant improvement in the usability of bulk correspondence by allowing the source data used for this purpose to be imported into Writer, but then independent of the source database (as is reportedly the case in Microsoft Word).
  • Writer supports LaTeX via the TexMaths add-on, which converts the content to PNG or SVG but preserves the source syntax.
  • Users confirmed a known fact, that there is no video compatibility between Impress and PowerPoint. However, exporting from Impress to PDF works – then the videos are preserved.
  • Users are not familiar with Impress Remote. This allows you to control the presentation remotely using your mobile phone. The phone needs to be paired with the computer on which the presentation is running (communication is via Bluetooth or Wi-Fi). One person was very interested in this possibility, but unfortunately we had a problem with pairing devices – so the process could be simplified more.
  • One booth visitor uses Impress very often, but not always on her own laptop. The advantage is to use a portable version of LibreOffice (or the AppImage on Linux).

LibreOffice online or on mobile is no longer a secret

A surprisingly large number of users know and even use the mobile version of LibreOffice from Collabora. When we presented this application three years ago, at the InstallFest 2020 conference, it attracted a lot of interest. Now it seems that awareness is much better, although it is still surprising how few people know about the online version of LibreOffice.

However, there is even more interest in Collabora’s online LibreOffice solution, which is already quite widely used, or at least of interest, by conference visitors. Some users have problems with installation, so they would welcome more easily accessible tutorials on how to install (in different ways).

LibreOffice booth at LinuxDays 2024 in Prague

Microsoft Office/365 in education

The necessity or obligation to use Microsoft Office/365 for school purposes is a major frustration, especially for young users (school children). This applies both to school work itself and to the creation of homework. We think this practice is totally unacceptable: schools are not supposed to function as Microsoft training facilities (the worst in this case is the combination of a teacher and a certified Microsoft Insider).

Teachers should be aware of the negative impact they are having on children by requiring Microsoft Office; they are creating more users of one commercial company’s products, regardless of the existing and available open source alternatives. Even primary school students can be more aware than their teachers in this respect, as they demonstrated at this event. Yet the number of schools using and subscribing to LibreOffice is not small.

The fact that Microsoft 365 has been found to violate EU data regulations also speaks against the use of the cloud version; for this reason, its use in education is banned in the German state of Hesse, and the state of Schleswig-Holstein will switch to LibreOffice in 2025.

At the conference, the use of LibreOffice in public administration resonated more than ever. It seems that users are really interested in this topic. This is a good sign, subjectively it seemed that this topic is already outdated, but this is not the case.

by Mike Saunders at December 06, 2024 08:32 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

December 02, 2024

Michael Meeks

2024-12-02 Monday

  • Mail chew, 1:1's with Miklos & Lily, lunch. Set off to Paris via the Eurostar.

December 02, 2024 02:14 PM

December 01, 2024

Michael Meeks

2024-12-01 Sunday

  • All Saints, family service + Baptism in the morning, caught up with wider church family; home for Pizza lunch with E.
  • Put up Christmas decorations left & right. Slugged variously, watched Night Action some Fallout - gratuitous gore, but interesting effects & characters.

December 01, 2024 09:00 PM

November 30, 2024

Michael Meeks

2024-11-30 Saturday

  • Got up very late; wrote another four abstracts for various conference talks, and submitted them. Got a number of presents and fixes done.
  • Managed to get permanent marker off the fridge white-board with isopropyl alcohol. Pottered about a bit. J. home for dinner - watched Night Action with E.

November 30, 2024 09:00 PM

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

Michael Meeks

2024-11-29 Friday

  • Up early, run with J. sync with Dave, partner meeting, cancelled TTT for another surreal TDF Town Hall.
  • Final review budget & other bits call with Tracie - handed over to Deirdre. More admin, and finally a bit of hacking - looked into getting my dpiscale patch finally in to communicate client per-view DPI for some pieces.
  • Poked at conference bits - OS-XP Panel on Why pay for Free Software for next week - pulled together and circulated some questions.

November 29, 2024 09:00 PM

LibreOffice QA Blog

LibreOffice 25.2 Alpha1 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 Alpha1 the first pre-release since the development of version 25.2 started in mid Juny, 2024. Since then, 5184 commits have been submitted to the code repository and 710 bugs were set to FIXED in Bugzilla. Check the release notes to find the new features included in this version of LibreOffice.

LibreOffice 25.2 Alpha1 can be downloaded for Linux, macOS and Windows, and it can be installed alongside the standard version.

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 November 29, 2024 05:06 PM

November 28, 2024

Michael Meeks

2024-11-28 Thursday

  • Tech planning call, customer project wrap-up call with Lily. sync with Karen, finally got to last stage annual review moderation.
  • Home group in the evening, interrupted by a more surreal TDF / Town Hall meeting.

November 28, 2024 09:00 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 10, 2024

LibreOffice QA Blog

QA/Dev Report: October 2024

General Activities

  1. LibreOffice 24.2.7 was released on October 31
  2. Olivier Hallot (TDF) continued with a massive Help bookmark cleanup effort and improved the help for BASIC’s Option Explicit statement
  3. Pierre F. reorganised some help pages for Calc functions
  4. Bogdan Buzea fixed nearly 70 issues pointed out by PVS-Studio static analyser
  5. Miklós Vajna (Collabora) made the Hide Whitespace feature in Writer more robust, fixed an issue with losing the character position of an anchor point when copying content and fixed an issue with frames becoming disconnected from their content after dragging
  6. Tomaž Vajngerl, Szymon Kłos, Skyler Grey, Vivek Javiya, Marco Cecchetti, Rashesh Padia, Jaume Pujantell and Henry Castro (Collabora) worked on LOKit used by Collabora Online
  7. Julien Nabet synchronised the API code with Java Database Connectivity version 4.3 and fixed several issues pointed out by static analysers
  8. Xisco Faulí (TDF) fixed nearly 80 issues pointed out by PVS-Studio static analyser, improved the support for context-fill and context-stroke in SVG files, converted many Java tests to CppUnit tests, added support for “greater than or equal” attribute in conditional formatting, added many automated tests while also simplifying code used across tests, upgraded many dependencies and fixed some crashes
  9. Michael Stahl (allotropia) did some fixes in Writer’s automated tests and made the zip package handling more robust
  10. Mike Kaganski (Collabora) made the breaking of Writer tables across pages more robust, improved the handling of time durations in ODS files, fixed an issue with in-document custom toolbar icons not showing in versions earlier than 6.4, made cycling from first to last tab in Calc configurable as an expert configuration option, improved grammar check popups from Duden and made assigning fixed-length strings in BASIC work. He also fixed crashes and did code cleanups
  11. Caolán McNamara (Collabora) made it possible to create rich content comments in Writer via the UNO API, improved the loading time of Impress/Draw documents with lots of master slides/pages, made presentations work on fractionally scaled displays on Linux with gtk3 UI, made it so an infobar will appear in case an opened Impress/Draw document has over a 100 master slides/pages, improved the saving speed of spreadsheets and added handling of div elements into Calc’s HTML cell content support. He also fixed many issues found by static analysers and fuzzers and did code cleanups
  12. Stephan Bergmann (allotropia) worked on WASM build. He also adapted the code to compiler changes
  13. Noel Grandin (Collabora) did a big Skia upgrade going from release m116 to m130 requiring a lot of patch rework, made it faster to open ODS files with large merged ranges and XLS files with lots of conditional formatting or query formulas, made PPTX chart importing more robust, made saving metafiles as images work, fixed lack of metadata in images or drawings exported as PNG, fixed an issue with opening RTF files with broken images and fixed an Impress/draw comment issue after a still-unreleased code rework. He also did many code cleanups and fixed many issues found by static analysers
  14. Justin Luth (Collabora) fixed unwanted content when importing DOCX files with IF fields, fixed an issue with 3D textbox form controls being imported with flat style, fixed presentations getting marked as modified when clicking into and away from an empty placeholder box, made it so keyboard shortcuts can be used for setting the font foreground and background colour based on the colour selection in the toolbar, fixed view options such as formatting characters being lost when exporting an image from Writer, improved handling of Excel’s bugs in text wrapping and improved a developer tool for diffing PDF files
  15. Michael Weghorn (TDF) worked around a Windows 11 bug affecting toolbar button backgrounds with dark themes, fixed a freeze when installing the same extension twice with kf5/kf6 UIs, made Microsoft Narrator and Microsoft Accessibility Insights for Windows work out of the box and fixed an issue with duplex printing on Linux with certain Brother printers. He also worked on using native widgets in Qt UIs
  16. Balázs Varga (allotropia) implemented support for all the “Resize shape to fit text” behaviours in PPTX files and implemented support for “Summary below data” option for Subtotals dialog in Calc
  17. Patrick Luby worked around an issue caused by Apple adding system fonts with a new and undocumented hvgl font table, fixed pasting issues with Dvorak – QWERTY keyboards on macOS, made it so child windows are no longer hidden when dragged to a different screen on macOS and fixed misleading unresponsive mouse moved events in Writer on macOS
  18. Jim Raykowski fixed issues with moving headings via the Content Navigation View in Navigator and fixed renaming a document macro library not removing the original library
  19. Armin Le Grand (allotropia/Collabora) worked on a renovation of graphics rendering on Linux with Cairo library
  20. Oliver Specht (CIB) fixed an issue with images being clipped with wrap contour applied, fixed list attributes not being overwritten by pasting in Writer, fixed cell fills being imported incorrectly from RTF files, made it so clicking into a text field in Writer selects the full field, if it still has the placeholder text and fixed print preview not updating after changing the option to print automatically inserted blank pages
  21. Heiko Tietze (TDF) added illustrations for Writer’s break options and decoupled boundary view options from non-printing characters
  22. László Németh continued polishing the support for smart justify and style separators in DOCX files
  23. Ilmari Lauhakangas (TDF) made Start Center pin icon highlighting work again, fixed Display Snap Guides toggle not working, fixed a regression that caused online Help to not be opened when trying to access Help with the option “Warn if local help is not installed” activated and aliased the obsolete .uno:InsertHyperlinkDlg command to HyperlinkDialog
  24. Christian Lohmaier (TDF) improved the WSL Windows build method and took the first steps into streamlining the dependency installation process on Windows using winget and Dev Home
  25. Eike Rathke (Red Hat) made support for Excel 3D references more robust and added support for Santali, Ol Chiki language
  26. Jonathan Clark (TDF) fixed RTL/LTR toolbar buttons not updating after direction change in Writer page style, improved the Microsoft Word compatibility of document grid layout when importing DOC/DOCX files and made kashida justification work with AAT fonts
  27. Tibor Nagy (allotropia) made it so the document opening process is hidden when opening a linked presentation
  28. Sahil Gautam improved the user experience of the new Duplicate Records dialog
  29. Mohit Marathe continued polishing the new Comments Sidebar deck
  30. Rafael Lima implemented Sensitivity Report in Calc’s LpSolve solver
  31. Jean-Pierre Ledure worked on the ScriptForge library
  32. Andreas Heinisch fixed an issue with pinned documents in the Start Center causing the scrollbar to disappear sometimes
  33. Bartosz Kosiorek did many improvements to libvisio which are now available in version 0.1.8. He also fixed a crash in libcdr and did build and documentation improvements to libetonyek
  34. Chris Sherlock did code cleanups in VCL
  35. Eloi Montañés fixed duplication of TSA URLs in the Signing tab of the Export as PDF dialog
  36. Hossein Nourikhah (TDF) fixed Additions Dialog not working in Start Center
  37. Đoàn Trần Công Danh implemented support for cross-compiling with KDE 6 and fixed a compatibility issue in the build configure script
  38. Marc Mondesir improved scrolling behaviour
  39. Thorsten Behrens (allotropia) fixed missing highlight colour for outline text during slideshow
  40. Pranam Lashkari (Collabora) improved the new easy Conditional Formatting dialog and the automatic assignment of font colour in Calc per the cell background colour
  41. Samuel Adesola added a couple of automated tests and made it possible to set the compatibility option for ignoring tabs and blanks for line calculation via the UI
  42. Gábor Kelemen (allotropia) improved the developer tool for finding unneeded includes
  43. David Gilbert implemented handling of clipToStrokePath in imported PDFs
  44. Xuan Chen improved the compatibility with riscv64 CPUs
  45. Vladislav Tarakanov did initial work on supporting tint/shade values for textboxes in DOCX files
  46. Vasily Melenchuk (CIB) fixed section break between tables not imported in RTF files

Kudos to Ilmari Lauhakangas for helping to elaborate this list.

Reported Bugs

468 bugs, 83 of which are enhancements, have been reported by 301 people.

Top 10 Reporters

  1. Eyal Rozenberg ( 50 )
  2. Gabor Kelemen (allotropia) ( 24 )
  3. Mike Kaganski ( 9 )
  4. Jeff Fortin Tam ( 9 )
  5. Michael Otto ( 7 )
  6. peter josvai ( 7 )
  7. Xisco Faulí ( 6 )
  8. Hossein ( 4 )
  9. Rafael Lima ( 4 )
  10. Buovjaga ( 4 )

Triaged Bugs

356 bugs have been triaged by 65 people.

Top 10 Triagers

  1. Buovjaga ( 56 )
  2. m_a_riosv ( 44 )
  3. Heiko Tietze ( 33 )
  4. Julien Nabet ( 25 )
  5. V Stuart Foote ( 20 )
  6. Dieter ( 17 )
  7. Mike Kaganski ( 17 )
  8. Michael Weghorn ( 12 )
  9. Xisco Faulí ( 11 )
  10. raal ( 10 )

Resolution of resolved bugs

349 bugs have been set to RESOLVED.

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

Fixed Bugs

126 bugs have been fixed by 32 people.

Top 10 Fixers

  1. Noel Grandin ( 11 )
  2. Mike Kaganski ( 10 )
  3. Michael Weghorn ( 8 )
  4. Justin Luth ( 6 )
  5. Heiko Tietze ( 5 )
  6. László Németh ( 5 )
  7. Xisco Fauli ( 5 )
  8. Jim Raykowski ( 4 )
  9. Jonathan Clark ( 3 )
  10. Miklos Vajna ( 3 )

List of critical bugs fixed

  1. tdf#163019 Calc 24.8.1 crashes if Copy Paste Paste special are executed (steps in comment 6) ( Thanks to Andreas Heinisch )
  2. tdf#163543 File crash in LibreOffice Writer when selecting and copying content ( Thanks to Xisco Fauli )

List of high severity bugs fixed

  1. tdf#100894 FILEOPEN FILESAVE IMPORT Conditional formatting: xls file with a lot of Conditional formatting freeze Calc when opening Styles sidebar ( Thanks to Noel Grandin )
  2. tdf#152534 Win11 dark theme support–Active selections have light blue background which makes white icons and text almost invisible ( Thanks to Michael Weghorn )
  3. tdf#159690 Manual line break forces automatic Wrap Text – comment 17 ( Thanks to Justin Luth )
  4. tdf#161919 Two programatically composed UI strings, not suitable for localization – “Delete All” %s and “Delete %s” ( Thanks to Jim Raykowski )
  5. tdf#161986 ODS fileopen got much slower in 7.4 ( Thanks to Noel Grandin )
  6. tdf#163231 Correttore ortografico italiano non funziona ( Thanks to Julien Nabet )
  7. tdf#163275 Typing “-(!1)” into a spreadsheet cell and then clicking no in the dialog about formula error crashes libreoffice ( Thanks to Caolán McNamara )
  8. tdf#163375 Calc crash when type-in a range in Formula Wizard ( Thanks to Balazs Varga )

List of crashes fixed

  1. tdf#161968 UI Assign macro to shape crashes CALC ( Thanks to Noel Grandin )
  2. tdf#163019 Calc 24.8.1 crashes if Copy Paste Paste special are executed (steps in comment 6) ( Thanks to Andreas Heinisch )
  3. tdf#163191 Dragging headings in Writer navigator crashes LO Writer ( Thanks to Jim Raykowski )
  4. tdf#163219 ScriptForge library crash ( Thanks to Jean-Pierre Ledure )
  5. tdf#163275 Typing “-(!1)” into a spreadsheet cell and then clicking no in the dialog about formula error crashes libreoffice ( Thanks to Caolán McNamara )
  6. tdf#163295 LibreOffice crashes when processing XML files containing the string “pwi”. ( Thanks to Mike Kaganski )
  7. tdf#163375 Calc crash when type-in a range in Formula Wizard ( Thanks to Balazs Varga )
  8. tdf#163543 File crash in LibreOffice Writer when selecting and copying content ( Thanks to Xisco Fauli )
  9. tdf#163575 sw smart justify: crash/assert during odt conversion of an Arabic DOCX document ( Thanks to László Németh )
  10. tdf#163697 Inserting new lines in Basic IDE causes crash/triggers assert when assistive technology is active on Windows ( Thanks to Mike Kaganski )
  11. tdf#163699 LO crashes when double-clicking an image in the navigator. ( Thanks to László Németh )

List of performance issues fixed

  1. tdf#100894 FILEOPEN FILESAVE IMPORT Conditional formatting: xls file with a lot of Conditional formatting freeze Calc when opening Styles sidebar ( Thanks to Noel Grandin )
  2. tdf#161986 ODS fileopen got much slower in 7.4 ( Thanks to Noel Grandin )

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

  1. tdf#100894 FILEOPEN FILESAVE IMPORT Conditional

by x1sc0 at November 10, 2024 12:31 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 24, 2024

LibreOffice Dev Blog

Crash fix part 5: crash report tool

In previous blog posts about crashes in LibreOffice, I have discussed how to debug and fix some of crashes. Now I discuss a nice tool to keep track of the crash reports from volunteers: Crash report tool.

Crash Report Statistics

Crash report is available via this LibreOffice website:

You can see that different versions of LibreOffice listed there, and for each and every tracked version, number of crashes during the previous 1, 3, 7, 14 and 28 days can be seen. This is possible using the appropriate buttons on the top.

This data is gathered from those to volunteer to submit reports to make LibreOffice better.

This statistic is very helpful to understand the robustness of the builds in different versions.

Crash Signatures

If you choose a specific version, you may see signatures of the crashes. This is helpful when trying to fix crashes. For example, this is one of the crash signatures found in LibreOffice 24.8.0.3:

This shows that the crash happens in GetCharFormat() function. One may use this information to track and fix the problem.

Looking into one of the crashes, one may see the details of the crash, including the stack trace in the crashing thread, and link to the exact place of the source code that leads to the crash.

As an example, you can see this crash report.

Sometimes, experienced developers may be able to reproduce the bug using crash signatures while knowing some background. Otherwise, in most cases, filing a bug with documents and instructions to reproduce the bug is essential. Adding a link to the crash report can be helpful.

by Hossein Nourikhah at October 24, 2024 02:05 PM

October 17, 2024

LibreOffice Dev Blog

WSL for building LibreOffice

Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) is a mechanism to use complete Linux distributions on Windows. Here I discuss how to use it to build LibreOffice for both Linux and Windows binaries.

What is WSL?

WSL is the relatively new mechanism in Windows that lets you use a complete Linux distribution alongside your Windows. Interoperability between WSL and Windows lets you to share files and utilities between Windows and Linux. That is where it becomes helpful for LibreOffice, as LibreOffice make depends heavily on GNU tools, which are available in Linux.

Linux or Windows?

You can use WSL for 2 different scenarios:

1. Building for Linux: this is the full Linux build, in which Linux compilers, libraries and utilities will be used to create a Linux binary. You can then run or package the Linux build. You can find more information here:

Using WSL2 is recommended, as it is supposed to be faster, and also you can simply use the graphical interface of LibreOffice.

LibreOffice build on WSL with Linux binaries, displayed on Windows

LibreOffice build on WSL with Linux binaries, displayed on Windows

When you run the resulting binary, the graphical interface is usable, and it will use GTK fronted by default.

2. Building for Windows: this is the WSL as helper mode, where it uses only a few Linux utilities like pkg-config, make, automake and a few other utilities to configure the project.  Then, GNU Make for Windows will be the tool to build the project. More information is available here:

The results are Windows .exe files, and you can simply run them on Windows as native programs.

Build Options on Windows

You can build LibreOffice on different platforms. On Windows, it is possible to use Cygwin, but using WSL can be faster, and considering some issues with recent Cygwin versions, WSL is an alternative.

One can imagine of other ways to build LibreOffice on Windows, including MinGW. But, at the moment, MinGW, both as a helper to use Visual Studio, and also as an independent distribution to build LibreOffice, is not usable due to various reasons.

And last note: if you do not have prior experience with LibreOffice development but you are interested, you can start from our video tutorial for getting started with LibreOffice development.

by Hossein Nourikhah at October 17, 2024 02:01 PM

October 15, 2024

LibreOffice QA Blog

QA/Dev Report: September 2024

General Activities

  1. LibreOffice 24.2.6 was released on September 5
  2. LibreOffice 24.8.1 was released on September 12
  3. LibreOffice 24.8.2 was released on September 27
  4. Olivier Hallot (TDF) continued with a massive Help bookmark cleanup effort, updated help for BASIC Now() function, improved the help for regular expressions by including a description of \w and \W patterns and extended the Document Type Definition of Help XML
  5. Pierre F. improved readability and maintainability of the Document Type Definition of Help XML and updated help for Navigator in Calc after the addition of comment deletion functionality
  6. Dione Maddern added help pages for Properties Sidebar decks, updated help for Styles Sidebar deck and added a help page for database table references
  7. Adolfo Jayme Barrientos improved UI strings in Calc and updated Help pages accordingly
  8. Bogdan Buzea improved UI strings and updated Help pages accordingly
  9. Laurent Balland did many updates and cleanups to Impress templates, for example replacing images with vector graphics for better quality
  10. Miklós Vajna (Collabora) implemented per-paragraph semi-transparent shape text in Impress and added digital signing support to LOKit
  11. Michael Meeks, Tomaž Vajngerl, Bayram Çiçek, Rashesh Padia, Gülşah Köse and Marco Cecchetti (Collabora) worked on LOKit used by Collabora Online
  12. Jaume Pujantell (Collabora) added a command to promote a Writer reply comment to a new main one and fixed an issue with comment threads breaking when exporting ODT files as DOCX
  13. Julien Nabet fixed database queries being saved corrupted, fixed incorrectly included values with BETWEEN and NOT BETWEEN statements in dBASE file connections, fixed an issue preventing the use of Report Builder Wizard and added the new Histogram chart type to Sidebar’s Chart deck
  14. Xisco Faulí (TDF) added the schema for ODF 1.4 while doing several fixes and adaptations related to it, converted many Java tests to CppUnit tests, fixed an issue with Position and Size dialog showing dimensions in incorrect measurement units, upgraded many dependencies and fixed some crashes
  15. Michael Stahl (allotropia) fixed issues with hiding of FlyFrames in hidden sections, made zip file handling more robust, made the display of hidden text with a non-hidden paragraph marker in Microsoft document formats match that of MS Word and fixed an issue related to widow paragraphs in sections
  16. Mike Kaganski (Collabora) made BASIC’s CStr() and Format() functions produce localized output for currency values, fixed a DOCX table layout issue, fixed an issue with undo history being populated simply by opening a certain Impress presentation, implemented a fallback for inline formulas in imported PPTX files, implemented handling of Exit Property for Property Set in BASIC, improved the performance of Writer table row height calculation while also making it correct and fixed an issue resulting in broken OLE objects when re-exporting some PPTX files. He also fixed many crashes and did code cleanups
  17. Caolán McNamara (Collabora) improved the layout of Start Center and made Impress/Draw Navigator focus handling more robust. He also fixed many issues found by static analysers and fuzzers, this time tackling a particularly massive batch of Coverity findings, including lots of Java issues
  18. Stephan Bergmann (allotropia) worked on WASM build. He also adapted the code to compiler changes
  19. Noel Grandin (Collabora) made it faster to import PDFs with lots of pages and optimised Writer code after the big item handling rework. He also did many code cleanups and fixed many issues found by static analysers
  20. Justin Luth (Collabora) fixed an issue with localised footnote style, implemented support for ToCs with no page numbers in DOCX import, continued improving the handling of OOXML layoutInCell property, adapted the DOCX shape handling code to strange new inconsistencies from Microsoft and fixed crashes
  21. Michael Weghorn (TDF) worked on the accessibility features of Windows, GTK4 and Qt UIs in areas such as switching sheets in Calc, selecting elements in Writer tables and toolbar positions. He also worked on using native widgets in Qt UIs
  22. Balázs Varga (allotropia) continued polishing support for uniform Glow effect for text in shapes, fixed missing table borders in PPTX files and worked on the accessibility checker
  23. Patrick Luby improved the look of the active cell indicator in Calc on macOS, adapted the code to changes in restorable state handling in macOS Sonoma and made colorspace handling more robust on macOS
  24. Jim Raykowski made the Quick Find Sidebar deck inherit the search string from the Quick Find toolbar, fixed an issue with importing macro libraries as read-only, fixed an undo issue affecting style manipulation via the Sidebar, got rid of annoying page jumping behaviour when switching between page view modes in Writer, enriched the Quick Find Sidebar deck by adding match numbers and made comment tracking in Writer Navigator work also when focusing into comment boxes
  25. Armin Le Grand (allotropia/Collabora) worked on a renovation of graphics rendering on Linux with Cairo library
  26. Oliver Specht (CIB) added the ability to define default zoom values in global options, fixed an RTF issue with incorrect frame positioning and made it so character formatting and styles are cleared, if a paragraph or a character style is applied by holding down Ctrl while double-clicking in the Sidebar
  27. Heiko Tietze (TDF) improved the user experience of the direct SQL dialog, added an option to disable the warning that only the active sheet will be saved when exporting to CSV (based on work by Martin van Zijl), improved the layout of document properties dialog, made it so double-clicking on document information fields in Writer opens the Properties dialog when relevant, made text in Calc cells with line breaks respect application colour setting, differentiated the context menu labels per the various index types and changed certain default bullet characters
  28. László Németh improved the support for smart justify in DOCX files and added support for style separators in DOCX files
  29. Ilmari Lauhakangas (TDF) updated Help after UI changes and did many fixes and optimisations to icon themes
  30. Christian Lohmaier (TDF) did build-related cleanups
  31. Eike Rathke (Red Hat) continued polishing the handling of custom Add-In function names
  32. Jonathan Clark (TDF) further improved large paragraph layout performance, especially affecting languages such as Tibetan, fixed several issues related to kashida characters, fixed an issue with incorrect textbox positions when anchored As character inside RTL text, added base text group and mono features to Asian Phonetic Guide, implemented missing support for RTL text in EMF graphics, implemented Syriac justification and fixed issues with text grid spacing in DOC import
  33. Regina Henschel implemented support for exporting the database range property TotalsRow to ODF
  34. Tibor Nagy (allotropia) fixed issues with exporting comments as PDF annotations and made it so a linked presentation opens in slideshow or editing mode depending on what the mode is in the source presentation
  35. Adam Seskunas worked on the GSoC project to port Java tests to C++
  36. Ritobroto Mukherjee worked on the GSoC project to implement cross platform .NET bindings for UNO API
  37. Ahmed Hamed worked on the GSoC project for improving the Functions Sidebar deck in Calc
  38. Sahil Gautam worked on the GSoC project to implement themes and added a “Handle Duplicate Records” command to Calc while creating a Help page for it
  39. Mohit Marathe worked on the GSoC project for adding a Comments Sidebar deck
  40. Rafael Lima made it so Solver Options dialog accepts parameters of TypeClass BYTE and SHORT, made it possible to set solver settings at the sheet level via the UNO API and improved the stability of the solver and fixed issues with resizing the Comments Sidebar deck
  41. Kira Tubo removed redundant Open and Save buttons from Notebookbar and updated Help accordingly, moved “Protect” section to “Position and Size” tab in Properties dialogs of document elements while updating the layout of the dialogs, defined some default Comment style attributes and made Hanging Indent command create a hanging indent when used on a paragraph without one
  42. Jean-Pierre Ledure worked on the ScriptForge library
  43. Andreas Heinisch added a check for missing parameters to BASIC
  44. Arnaud Versini did some code cleanups
  45. Bartosz Kosiorek added support for MS Visio Template format with .vstx extension
  46. Sohrab Kazak added a checkbox to toggle the title in a ToC/Index
  47. Chris Sherlock did code cleanups in VCL
  48. Eloi Montañés fixed an issue with unverifiable timestamps in signatures when using the NSS backend
  49. Rico Tzschichholz (Ubuntu) made some build fixes
  50. DaeHyun Sung improved the Korean UI font priority
  51. Henry Castro (Collabora) fixed an issue with currency format previews in Calc

Kudos to Ilmari Lauhakangas for helping to elaborate this list.

Reported Bugs

479 bugs, 69 of which are enhancements, have been reported by 297 people.

Top 10 Reporters

  1. Mike Kaganski ( 15 )
  2. Eyal Rozenberg ( 15 )
  3. yoylasfpgas ( 13 )
  4. Gabor Kelemen (allotropia) ( 10 )
  5. peter josvai ( 10 )
  6. Buovjaga ( 9 )
  7. nobu ( 8 )
  8. Hossein ( 8 )
  9. Rafael Lima ( 8 )
  10. Regina Henschel ( 7 )

Triaged Bugs

464 bugs have been triaged by 66 people.

Top 10 Triagers

  1. Buovjaga ( 115 )
  2. m_a_riosv ( 65 )
  3. Xisco Faulí ( 41 )
  4. V Stuart Foote ( 35 )
  5. Heiko Tietze ( 24 )
  6. Mike Kaganski ( 22 )
  7. Julien Nabet ( 21 )
  8. Dieter ( 14 )
  9. raal ( 11 )
  10. ady ( 11 )

Resolution of resolved bugs

446 bugs have been set to RESOLVED.

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

Fixed Bugs

161 bugs have been fixed by 36 people.

Top 10 Fixers

  1. Mike Kaganski ( 14 )
  2. Heiko Tietze ( 13 )
  3. Jonathan Clark ( 10 )
  4. Xisco Fauli ( 9 )
  5. Caolán McNamara ( 7 )
  6. Julien Nabet ( 7 )
  7. Justin Luth ( 6 )
  8. Rafael Lima ( 6 )
  9. Patrick Luby ( 6 )
  10. László Németh ( 5 )

List of critical bugs fixed

  1. tdf#162911 Inserting multiple Hyperlinks and undoing an insertion (Ctrl-Z) crashes Writer ( Thanks to Michael Stahl )

List of high severity bugs fixed

  1. tdf#160937 Document Properties pages in all modules do not fit screen and cannot be resized (gtk3/gtk4) ( Thanks to Heiko Tietze )
  2. tdf#161724 FILEOPEN PPTX: image completely disappears, other quite off (zoomed in?) ( Thanks to Xisco Fauli )
  3. tdf#162507 Page layout reflow after pressing delete causes hang (involving tables) ( Thanks to Miklos Vajna )
  4. tdf#162728 Crash on saving in Math Formula editor ( Thanks to Noel Grandin )
  5. tdf#162746 Cannot open DOCX file from 24.8 ( Thanks to Mike Kaganski )
  6. tdf#162829 CRASH: Editing Formula Bar with two views ( Thanks to Xisco Fauli )

List of crashes fixed

  1. tdf#158323 CRASH when switch back from HTML View to Normal View after edit in HTML source code ( Thanks to Julien Nabet )
  2. tdf#160945 LibreOffice crashes in vtableCall at startup (Windows ARM) ( Thanks to Stephan Bergmann )
  3. tdf#161256 Libreoffice crashes using gtk4 VCL on kde plasma wayland ( Thanks to Michael Weghorn )
  4. tdf#162405 Multiple password dialogs + crash in file save dialog with configured OpenPGP key signing key ( Thanks to Sarper Akdemir )
  5. tdf#162728 Crash on saving in Math Formula editor ( Thanks to Noel Grandin )
  6. tdf#162760 Calc solver crashes on large spreadsheet but runs in LO 7.6.7 ( Thanks to Rafael Lima )
  7. tdf#162764 CRASH: closing LibreOffice while TextControlParagraphPropertiesDialog/TextControlCharacterPropertiesDialog are open (gen) ( Thanks to Xisco Fauli )
  8. tdf#162772 Crash in “Target in Document” in Hyperlink dialog, if path is not suitable ( Thanks to Noel Grandin )
  9. tdf#162782 FILESAVE SVG: semi-transparent shape text in a bullet list crashes ( Thanks to Miklos Vajna )
  10. tdf#162829 CRASH: Editing Formula Bar with two views ( Thanks to Xisco Fauli )
  11. tdf#162887 CRASH: xpdfimport crash on textual tiling pattern ( Thanks to Dr. David Alan Gilbert )
  12. tdf#162911 Inserting multiple Hyperlinks and undoing an insertion (Ctrl-Z) crashes Writer ( Thanks to Michael Stahl )
  13. tdf#162987 Executing .uno:DataFilterAutoFilter on a hidden spreadsheet crashes ( Thanks to Mike Kaganski )
  14. tdf#163091 crash the file with macro ( Thanks to Mike Kaganski )

List of performance issues fixed

  1. tdf#152298 FILEOPEN DOCX Copying and pasting between table cells is slow (steps in comment 7) ( Thanks to Mike Kaganski )
  2. tdf#161562 Sluggish scrolling after saving and

by x1sc0 at October 15, 2024 11:25 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

October 03, 2024

LibreOffice Dev Blog

Setting dialogs that are available via UNO Commands

LibreOffice options page provides rich set of settings for everyone who wants to tune LibreOffice to match their needs. But, what if you as a developer, need setting dialogs that are needed elsewhere in the LibreOffice application? Here I discuss some of such use cases, which are handled by defining UNO commands.

Options Page

The code for providing “Tools > Options” is not in a single module, but main part resides in cui module, which contains code which is used across different modules. Looking into cui/source/options/ folder from LibreOffice core source code, you can see various different source files related to the options. The biggest file there is cui/source/options/treeopt.cxx, which is the actual implementation of the tree-based dialog that you see when you open Tools > Options dialog. There are other C++ files that handle .ui files related to options. You can find those UI files in cui/uiconfig/ui/ folder with a name like opt*.ui:

$ ls cui/uiconfig/ui/opt*.ui

These files can be edited and they are used as described in the LibreOffice design blog:

UNO Dispatch Commands

Only some of the dialogs can be opened available via UNO dispatch commands. As an example, you may see “.uno:AdditionsDialog” is used both in cui/source/options/optgdlg.cxx for creating a dialog in Tools > Options (when you click for “more icons”), and also in sfx2/source/appl/appserv.cxx.

You can try running this UNO command in LibreOffice BASIC editor with this code snippet:

Sub Main()
    Set oDispatch = CreateUnoService("com.sun.star.frame.DispatchHelper")
    Dim args(0) As New com.sun.star.beans.PropertyValue
    Set oFrame = StarDesktop.Frames.getByIndex(0)
    oDispatch.executeDispatch(oFrame, ".uno:AdditionsDialog", "", 0, args)
End Sub

The above command is defined specifically to help developers use the “Extensions” dialog, anywhere in LibreOffice UI, from top menus to context menus and toolbars and also in code, in a simple way.

"Extensions

There is another dialog titled “Security Options and Warnings”, which is opened through .uno:OptionsSecurityDialog UNO command. In this way, it can be used easily in other modules of LibreOffice.

SecurityOptionsDialog

SecurityOptionsDialog

Implementing UNO Command

Adding a new UNO command was discussed before, in a separate blog post:

Adding a new UNO command

Adding a new UNO command for an options dialog is basically the same. There can be differences regarding the configurations and the data that is passed between the dialog and the caller.

When you create a dialog box directly like the code snippet below, you have access to the member functions defined for that specific dialog:

IMPL_LINK_NOARG( SwGlossaryDlg, PathHdl, weld::Button&, void )
{
    SvxAbstractDialogFactory* pFact = SvxAbstractDialogFactory::Create();
    ScopedVclPtr<AbstractSvxMultiPathDialog> pDlg(pFact->CreateSvxPathSelectDialog(m_xDialog.get()));
    SvtPathOptions aPathOpt;
    const OUString sGlosPath( aPathOpt.GetAutoTextPath() );
    pDlg->SetPath(sGlosPath);
    if(RET_OK == pDlg->Execute())
    {
        const OUString sTmp(pDlg->GetPath());
        if(sTmp != sGlosPath)
        {
            aPathOpt.SetAutoTextPath( sTmp );
            ::GetGlossaries()->UpdateGlosPath( true );
            Init();
        }
    }
}

As you can see, pDlg->GetPath() is accessible here, and you can use it to pass data. But when you are using UNO commands, those functions will not be available directly. Instead, you may pass values that denote the data that will be read from somewhere else, like the configuration.

For example, consider there are multiple paths that you may want to edit using this UNO command with the same dialog. In this case, you can pass a value that shows the associated path that you are changing. It can be passed as an enumeration, and then you set and/or get the value directly from the configuration.

In this way, the callers in the C++ code will have much easier task to do, as it is only calling the UNO command, and the rest is done in the implementation of the UNO command.

For AdditionsDialog, the calling code is as simple as this in cui/source/options/optgdlg.cxx:

IMPL_STATIC_LINK_NOARG(OfaViewTabPage, OnMoreIconsClick, weld::Button&, void)
{
    css::uno::Sequence<css::beans::PropertyValue> aArgs{ comphelper::makePropertyValue(
u"AdditionsTag"_ustr, u"Icons"_ustr) };
    comphelper::dispatchCommand(u".uno:AdditionsDialog"_ustr, aArgs);
}

Passing Parameters to UNO Commands

UNO dispatch commands can take parameters. As an example, take a look at .uno:NewDoc defined in sfx2/sdi/sfx.sdi:

SfxStringItem NewDoc SID_NEWDOC
(SfxStringItem Region SID_TEMPLATE_REGIONNAME,SfxStringItem Name SID_TEMPLATE_NAME)
[
...
]

As you can see, there are two parameters:

SfxStringItem Region SID_TEMPLATE_REGIONNAME SfxStringItem Name SID_TEMPLATE_NAME

The SfxStringItem is the type, Region and Name are the names of the parameters, SID_TEMPLATE_REGIONNAME and SID_TEMPLATE_NAME are the constants used for passing parameters. The parameter type is not limited to numbers and strings, and it can be any defined class.

To set and get data for this parameters, you may use appropriate Set and Put functions. For example, this gets the parameter if set:

const SfxStringItem *pItem = rSet.GetItemIfSet( SID_TEMPLATE_REGIONNAME, false)

Or, this sets the data:

OUString sVal = u"test"_ustr;

rSet.Put( SfxStringItem( SID_TEMPLATE_REGIONNAME, sVal ) );

Final Notes

To get to know better how to implement more complex UNO dispatch commands, you can refer to the implementation of the existing UNO commands to get idea about how they are implemented. You can see a comprehensive list of UNO commands here:

by Hossein Nourikhah at October 03, 2024 02:01 PM

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

August 07, 2024

Miklos Vajna

Improved font fallback in the DOCX import of Writer

Writer now has improved support for font fallback when you open a DOCX file that refers to fonts which are not available currently.

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

Motivation

Font embedding is meant to solve the problems around missing fonts, but you can also find documents with stub embedded fonts that are to be ignored and our code didn't have any sanity check on such fonts, leading to unexpected glyph-level fallbacks. Additionally, once font-level fallback happened, we didn't take the font style (e.g. sans vs serif) into account, which is expected to work when finding a good replacement for the missing font.

Results so far

Here is how to the original rendering looked like:

Bugdoc, before: ugly glyph-level fallback

Once the handler for the embedded fonts in ODT/DOCX was improved to ignore stub fonts where even basic glyphs were not available, the result was a bit more consistent, but still bad. Here is a different document to show the problem:

Bugdoc, first improvement: no glyph fallback but the result is sans

Note how now we used the same font, but the glyphs are always sans, not serif. So the final step was to import the font type from DOCX and consider that while deciding font fallback:

Bugdoc, second improvement: no glyph fallback and the result is sans / serif

With this, we ignore stub embedded fonts from DOCX, we import the font type and in general font fallback on Linux takes the font type into account while deciding font fallback.

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 (24.8).

by Miklos Vajna at August 07, 2024 07:05 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

June 19, 2024

Collabora Community

Hacking LibreOffice in Budapest

Earlier this month, we were pleased to sponsor the Libreoffice Technology Hackfest in Budapest, Hungary, and enjoyed meeting up with some of our fellow LibreOffice Technology hackers. Over two days, a dozen developers from Collabora Productivity and the wider community met up in the Eco Community Space to work on the LibreOffice codebase, and reap the benefits of spending time together.

 

A hackfest is an event where developers from multiple organisations meet each other, work on what they want and also more freely exchange ideas while being together in person. While having an international community working remotely on the codebase is excellent, there are still many benefits to more directly seeing what problems are being tackled by other developer sitting next to you; and this friendly environment allows building relationships that can then help even more in the future (even remotely).

As one attendee Miklos Vajna shared with us after the event, “It was really great to spend a couple of days with the other developers. I found it very helpful seeing what other people are working on, sharing ideas about the future feature possibilities, and especially enjoyed going out for a dinner with everyone in Budapest after a hard day’s work!

For this reason, we were very pleased to sponsor this most recent meet up. Many thanks to all who joined us in Budapest, we look forward to seeing you soon at the next meeting!

If you would like to find out more about joining the Collabora Online or LibreOffice community, we would encourage you to join the Collabora Online Community Forum or have a look at the Collabora Online Github to learn about how to get started.

For more information about our upcoming events, and to learn where you could meet us next, do have a look at our events page.

by Richard Brock at June 19, 2024 11:00 AM

June 05, 2024

LibreOffice Design Blog

Convenient handling of shortcuts

Shortcuts are a major topic for user experience. Novices are advised to learn basic shortcuts beyond the famous Ctrl+C/X/V like Ctrl+1/2/3.. to quickly change the paragraph style to heading 1/2/3… in Writer. Once you have learned those combinations you never want to unlearn and to change the muscle memory.…

by Heiko Tietze at June 05, 2024 01:35 PM

May 27, 2024

Björn Michaelsen

Writer Again!

Writer Again!

After resigning from the Board of Directors of TDF over the weekend, I hope I will again find more time to look into the technical details of LibreOffice Writer. I will also try to do my best to write some good article here about the depth of that application. While a text processor in itself is not that interesting anymore these days, the challenges of migrating that big old legacy code might be fascinating quite often. Hope to have you as a reader for that soon!

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

May 27, 2024 12:14 PM

April 30, 2024

allotropia

LibreOffice, JavaScript’ed

LOWA is LibreOffice built with Emscripten as a Wasm executable that runs in the browser. Controlling that LibreOffice through UNO with JavaScript looks like a natural fit. Enter Embind, a mechanism to generate the binding glue between JavaScript and Wasm/C++.

As we will see, the Embind vs. UNO match is not perfect, but it kind-of gets the job done, at least for a first iteration.

Mappings

To dive straight into technical matters, the UNO type system is mapped to JavaScript as follows. (If you would like to see some example code first, jump ahead to the Starting Points and come back here later for reference.)

  • UNO BOOLEAN, depending on context and somewhat inconsistently maps to JavaScript Boolean and to JavaScript Number values 0 and 1. (The C/C++ representation of UNO BOOLEAN is sal_Bool, which is an alias for unsigned char, which Embind maps to JavaScript Number. So in places where we directly rely on Embind, like for the return value of a UNO interface method invocation, we get the Embind mapping to Number. But in places where we have more control, like for the JavaScript get method for a UNO ANY, we can be a bit more fancy and use a mapping to Boolean.)
  • UNO BYTE, SHORT, UNSIGNED SHORT, LONG, UNSIGNED LONG, FLOAT, and DOUBLE all map to JavaScript Number (with restricted value ranges for everything but UNO DOUBLE).
  • UNO HYPER and UNSIGNED HYPER both map to JavaScript BigInt (with restricted value ranges).
  • UNO CHAR and STRING both map to JavaScript String (with single UTF-16 code unit strings for UNO CHAR).
  • UNO TYPE maps to JavaScript Module.uno_Type objects. There are construction functions Module.uno_Type.Void, Module.uno_Type.Boolean, Module.uno_Type.Byte, Module.uno_Type.Short, Module.uno_Type.UnsignedShort, Module.uno_Type.Long, Module.uno_Type.UnsignedLong, Module.uno_Type.Hyper, Module.uno_Type.UnsignedHyper, Module.uno_Type.Float, Module.uno_Type.Double, Module.uno_Type.Char, Module.uno_Type.String, Module.uno_Type.Type, Module.uno_Type.Any, Module.uno_Type.Sequence, Module.uno_Type.Enum, Module.uno_Type.Struct, Module.uno_Type.Exception, and Module.uno_Type.Interface for representations of all the UNO TYPE values. The Module.uno_Type.Sequence construction function recursively takes a UNO TYPE argument for the component type, while the Module.uno_Type.Enum, Module.uno_Type.Struct, Module.uno_Type.Exception, and Module.uno_Type.Interface construction functions each take a string argument denoting the given type’s name in dotted notation (e.g., Module.uno_Type.Interface('com.sun.star.uno.XInterface')). Those JavaScript objects implement toString, which is also used for equality checks (e.g., type === 'com.sun.star.uno.XInterface').
  • UNO ANY maps to JavaScript Module.uno_Any objects. There is a constructor taking a UNO TYPE argument and a corresponding value (using an undefined value for UNO type VOID). Those JavaScript objects implement a method get that returns the JavaScript representation of the contained UNO value.
  • UNO sequence types map to a pre-canned variety of JavaScript Module.uno_Sequence_... objects. The problem is that Embind does not let us have a generic mapping to the C++ com::sun::star::uno::Sequence<T> class template; we can only have individual Embind mappings to specific class template instantiations. As a hack, for every UNO sequence type that appears somewhere in the LibreOffice UNO API, we generate a specific JavaScript Module.uno_Sequence_.... The naming is Module.uno_Sequence_boolean, Module.uno_Sequence_byte, Module.uno_Sequence_short, Module.uno_Sequence_unsigned_short, Module.uno_Sequence_long, Module.uno_Sequence_unsigned_long, Module.uno_Sequence_hyper, Module.uno_Sequence_unsigned_hyper, Module.uno_Sequence_float, Module.uno_Sequence_double, Module.uno_Sequence_char, Module.uno_Sequence_string, Module.uno_Sequence_type, and Module.uno_Sequence_any for the simple UNO component types; Module.uno_Sequence_... followed by the UNO type name in dollar-separated notation (e.g., Module.uno_Sequence_com$sun$star$uno$XInterface) for enum, struct, and interface component types; and Module.uno_SequenceN_..., with N greater than 1, for sequence component types (e.g., Module.uno_Sequence2_long for the UNO type “sequence of sequence of LONG“). That means that there currently is just no way to come up with e.g. a JavaScript representation of the UNO type “sequence of interface com.sun.star.frame.XDesktop“, as that sequence type happens to not be mentioned anywhere in the LibreOffice UNO API. (But for those sequence types that are used as interface method parameter or return types, corresponding JavaScript representations are provided. That should hopefully cover all relevant use cases for now; a future overhaul of this part of the mapping is likely.) These JavaScript sequence objects have two constructors, one taking a JavaScript array of member values (e.g., new Module.uno_Sequence_long([1, 2, 3])) and one taking a size and a Module.FromSize marker (as Emind does not allow to have multiple constructors with the same number of arguments) whose members will have default values (e.g., new Module.uno_Sequence_long(3, Module.FromSize)). Additional methods are resize (taking the new length as argument), size (returning the current length), get (taking an index as argument and returning the member at that index), and set (taking an index and a new member value as arguments). (The naming of those resize, size, get, and set methods is modelled after Embind’s emscripten::register_vector.)
  • UNO enum types are mapped to Embind-provided enums named Module.uno_Type_... followed by the UNO type name in dollar-separated notation (e.g., Module.uno_Type_com$sun$star$uno$TypeClass).
  • Plain UNO struct types and UNO exception types are mapped to Embind-provided value objects named Module.uno_Type_... followed by the UNO type name in dollar-separated notation (e.g., Module.uno_Type_com$sun$star$beans$NamedValue, Module.uno_Type_com$sun$star$uno$Exception). Polymorphic UNO struct types face a similar issue to sequence types, in that Embind does not allow to directly map their corresponding C++ class templates. It would be possible to do a similar hack and add specific mappings for all instantiated polymorphic struct types that are mentioned anywhere in the LibreOffice UNO API, but that has not been implemented so far. (And, similar to sequence types, a future overhaul of this part of the mapping is likely.)
  • UNO interface types are mapped to Embind-provided classes named Module.uno_Type_... followed by the UNO type name in dollar-separated notation (e.g., Module.uno_Type_com$sun$star$uno$XInterface). Null references are mapped to JavaScript null. The special com.sun.star.uno.XInterface UNO interface methods queryInterface, acquire, and release are not exposed to JavaScript client code.
  • UNOIDL single-interface–based service constructors are mapped to JavaScript functions named Module.uno_Function_...$$... followed by the service’s name in dollar-separated notation, followed by the constructor’s name set of by two dollar signs (e.g., Module.uno_Function_com$sun$star$beans$Introspection$$create). Like with other UNO language bindings, those functions take the com.sun.star.uno.XComponentContext as an additional first argument.
  • UNOIDL service-based singletons are mapped to JavaScript functions named Module.uno_Function_... followed by the singleton’s name in dollar-separated notation (e.g., Module.uno_Function_com$sun$star$frame$theDesktop). Like with other UNO language bindings, those functions take the com.sun.star.uno.XComponentContext as their (sole) argument.

Starting Points

To make all this work, the Embind mapping of the LibreOffice UNO API needs to be set up first. This is done by a call to

const uno = init_unoembind_uno(Module);

which also returns a wrapper object uno that allows for more natural access to all the UNOIDL entities whose mappings use that dollar-separated notation: Instead of Module.uno_Type_com$sun$star$uno$XInterface one can write uno.com.sun.star.uno.XInterface, and a call to uno_Function_com$sun$star$beans$Introspection$$create(context) can be written as uno.com.sun.star.beans.Introspection.create(context). If you want to cut down on the common uno.com.sun.star prefix even further,

const css = uno.com.sun.star;

lets you reduce that to just css.uno.XInterface and css.beans.Introspection.create(context).

The starting points to access the LibreOffice UNO API from JavaScript are Module.getUnoComponentContext() (returning the central css.uno.XComponentContext, through which all the services and singletons are reachable) and a Module.getCurrentModelFromViewSh() convenience function (returning the css.frame.XModel of the currently showing document). The gitlab.com/allotropia/lowa-demos repository is a growing site of example code showing all of this in action.

Summing this up, here is some example code that iterates over all the paragraphs of a Writer document and gives each of them a random foreground text color:

const uno = init_unoembind_uno(Module);
const css = uno.com.sun.star;
const model = Module.getCurrentModelFromViewSh();
const document = css.text.XTextDocument.query(model);
const text = document.getText();
const access = css.container.XEnumerationAccess.query(text);
const paragraphs = access.createEnumeration();
while (paragraphs.hasMoreElements()) {
  const paragraph = css.text.XTextRange.query(
    paragraphs.nextElement().get());
  const props = css.beans.XPropertySet.query(paragraph);
  const color = new Module.uno_Any(
    Module.uno_Type.Long(),
    Math.floor(Math.random() * 0xFFFFFF));
  props.setPropertyValue("CharColor", color);
  color.delete();
}

Cleanup

Embind is built on the concept that whatever C++ objects you reference from JavaScript, you manually and explicitly need to declare those references as no longer needed once you are done, by calling delete() methods on the corresponding JavaScript objects. (Or else, you risk memory leaks.) This can be quite cumbersome and would pollute the code with tons of such delete() calls. Luckily, JavaScript grew a FinalizationRegistry mechanism that allows code to be executed when the JavaScript garbage collector finds an objet to be unused and reclaims it. (And that code can thus transparently do the delete() call for us.) Embind implements such FinalizationRegistry-support for some types (those that are modelled based on some “smart poiner”) but not for others.

That means that (besides all the primitive types) JavaScript mappings of UNO string, type, enums, sequences, exceptions, and interfaces all do not need explicit delete() calls, while the mappings of UNO any and UNO sequences, and the various Module.uno_InOutParam_... all need explicit delete() calls.

Even though we expect that the JavaScript engines that we target do support the FinalizationRegistry mechanism, Embind is prepared to work with older engines that do not support it. Therefore, whenever an object is transparently cleaned up, Embind logs a somewhat unhelpful warning to the JavaScript console, stating that it “found a leaked C++ instance” (and that it will “free it automatically”).

Interfaces

For each UNO interface type there is a JavaScript class method query taking any JavaScript UNO object reference (in the form of the common com.sun.star.uno.XInterface base interface) as argument (and internally using UNO’s queryInterface to obtain either a correspondingly-typed reference to that object, or a null reference). There is also a JavaScript helper function Module.sameUnoObject, taking two interface references as arguments and returning whether both are references to the same UNO object.

UNO interface methods taking out or in-out parameters need special treatment. There are Module.uno_InOutParam_... wrappers (with a val property carrying the actual value) that need to be set up and passed into the UNO method. Such wrappers have a constructor taking no arguments (creating a dummy object, suitable for pure out parameters) and another constructor taking one argument of the wrapped type (suitable for in-out parameters). For example, to read data from a com.sun.star.io.XInputStream:

const stream = ...;
const input = css.io.XInputStream.query(stream);
if (input) {
  const data = new Module.uno_InOutParam_sequence_byte;
  input.readBytes(data, 100);
  for (let i = 0; i != data.val.size(); ++i) {
    console.log('read byte ' + data.val.get(i));
  }
  data.delete();
}

Exception Handling

Support for throwing and catching exceptions between JavaScript and C++ is rather rough: JavaScript code can use try ... catch (e) ... to catch a UNO exception thrown from C++, but all the information it can get about that exception is e.name stating the exception’s type. Also, for technical reasons, the catch block needs some increment– and decrementExceptionRefcount boilerplate,

try {
  ...
} catch (e) {
  incrementExceptionRefcount(e);
    //TODO, needed when building with JS-based -fexceptions,
    // see
    // <https://github.com/emscripten-core/emscripten/issues/17115>
    // "[EH] Fix inconsistency of refcounting in Emscripten
    // EH vs. Wasm EH"
  if (e.name === 'com::sun::star::uno::RuntimeException') {
    ...
  }
  decrementExceptionRefcount(e);
}

To throw UNO exceptions from JavaScript code, there is a helper function Module.throwUnoException that takes a UNO (exception) type and an instance of that type:

Module.throwUnoException(
  Module.uno_Type.Exception(
    'com.sun.star.lang.IllegalArgumentException'),
  {Message: 'bad argument', Context: null,
   ArgumentPosition: 0});

UNO Objects

The JavaSript-to-UNO binding is a full mapping, so you can even implement new UNO objects in JavaScript. This requires quite some boilerplate, though. For example, the below obj implements com.sun.star.lang.XTypeProvider and com.sun.star.task.XJob:

const obj = {
  // Implementation details:
  implRefcount: 0,
  implTypes: new Module.uno_Sequence_type([
    Module.uno_Type.Interface(
      'com.sun.star.lang.XTypeProvider'),
    Module.uno_Type.Interface(
      'com.sun.star.task.XJob')]),
  implImplementationId: new Module.uno_Sequence_byte([]),

  // The methods of XInterface:
  queryInterface(type) {
    if (type == 'com.sun.star.uno.XInterface') {
      return new Module.uno_Any(
        type,
        css.uno.XInterface.reference(
          this.implXTypeProvider));
    } else if (type == 'com.sun.star.lang.XTypeProvider') {
      return new Module.uno_Any(
        type,
        css.lang.XTypeProvider.reference(
          this.implXTypeProvider));
    } else if (type == 'com.sun.star.task.XJob') {
      return new Module.uno_Any(
        type,
        css.task.XJob.reference(
          this.implXJob));
    } else {
      return new Module.uno_Any(
        Module.uno_Type.Void(), undefined);
    }
  },
  acquire() { ++this.implRefcount; },
  release() {
    if (--this.implRefcount === 0) {
      this.implXTypeProvider.delete();
      this.implXJob.delete();
      this.implTypes.delete();
      this.implImplementationId.delete();
    }
  },

  // The methods of XTypeProvider:
  getTypes() { return this.implTypes; },
  getImplementationId() {
    return this.implImplementationId;
  },

  // The methods of XJob:
  execute(args) {
    if (args.size() !== 1 || args.get(0).Name !== 'name') {
      Module.throwUnoException(
        Module.uno_Type.Exception(
          'com.sun.star.lang.IllegalArgumentException'),
        {Message: 'bad args', Context: null,
         ArgumentPosition: 0});
    }
    console.log(
      'Hello, my name is ' + args.get(0).Value.get());
    return new Module.uno_Any(
      Module.uno_Type.Void(), undefined);
  },
};
obj.implXTypeProvider
  = css.lang.XTypeProvider.implement(obj);
obj.implXJob
  = css.task.XJob.implement(obj);

obj.acquire();
// ... pass obj to UNO here ...
obj.release();

by stbergmann at April 30, 2024 11:32 AM

March 12, 2024

Jean Hollis Weber

LibreOffice 24.2 Writer Guide published

LibreOffice Writer Guide 24.2LibreOffice 24.2 Writer Guide has been published. It is available for free download (PDF, ODT) from the Documentation page on the LibreOffice website.

Printed copies can be purchased from the Documentation Team’s store at Lulu.com.

The numbering system for LibreOffice releases has changed to year.month. LibreOffice will continue to be updated twice a year, but current plans are to update each user guide only once a year.

by Jean at March 12, 2024 01:34 AM