- Mail chew; pleased to see the latest beautiful LibreOffice infographic from Pedro; (actually now an odg file), cf. some raw data.
Ahmed ElShreif
Andreas Kainz
Björn Michaelsen
Collabora Community
Eric Bright
LibreOffice QA Blog
Marius Popa Adrian
Michael Meeks
Miklos Vajna
Muhammet Kara
Official TDF Blog
Roman Kuznetsov
Sarper Akdemir
Yusuf Keten
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Collabora, SUSE and The Document Foundation are Diamond Sponsors for openSUSE + LibreOffice Conference 2020. The joint openSUSE + LibreOffice Conference 2020 will run from October 15 – 17, and will be fully virtual. LibreOffice and openSUSE advocates, supporters and contributors are invited to register now and take part! Although different from past conferences, the event will be rich in contents and will also provide the opportunity of open discussions in specific virtual spaces.
Collabora is one of the major contributors to the LibreOffice project: 37% of commits to the LibreOffice source code in the last two years were made by the company, which provides different products based on the LibreOffice Technology and targeted to enterprises such as a desktop and an online version with Long Term Support, plus mobile applications for Android and iOS.
Other conference sponsors are .riessapplications, datto, fedora and Tuxedo Computers, plus Admin and Linux Magazine as media partners.
Do not forget to register. We look forward to meeting you at the openSUSE + LibreOffice Conference 2020.
Today is LibreOffice 10th Anniversary: it is a significant achievement for the project, and a date to remember for all community members.
We have created a video based on pictures of community members and a few events, in two versions: a long one, for blogs and websites, and a short version for social media.
Video LibreOffice Community 10th Anniversary (7 minutes): YouTube – PeerTube
Video LibreOffice 10th Anniversary Social Media (2 minutes): YouTube – PeerTube
For Twitter, there is a MP4 version of the short video available on Nextcloud: Video x Twitter.
Joining a free and open source software project, such as LibreOffice, is a great way to build your skills, gain experience for future career options, meet new people – and have fun!
But sometimes, joining a large and well-established project can be a bit daunting at the start. So here we’ll introduce you to the small team at The Document Foundation, the non-profit entity behind LibreOffice. Most team members oversee certain sub-projects in the LibreOffice community – click on their names to learn more in interviews…
(Also, thanks to Stephan Ficht who recently joined TDF as our Administrative Assistant.)
Note that this is just the team at The Document Foundation; the LibreOffice community is made up of hundreds of people! Most of the new features are implemented by developers in our ecosystem and volunteers.
By Dave Barton
In recent times, the very small LibreOffice Documentation Team has been making real progress in revising and updating the user guides:
Release 6.4 |
Release 7.0 |
|
| Calc Guide | Published | Work in progress |
| Base Guide | Published | Work in progress |
| Draw Guide | Published | Work in progress |
| Impress Guide | Skipped | Work in progress |
| Math Guide | Published | Awaiting volunteer contributors |
| Writer Guide | Published | Awaiting volunteer contributors |
| Getting Started Guide | Published | Awaiting volunteer contributors |
While this progress in shortened documentation development time is fairly good, it can be substantially improved by having more contributors on the team.
It would be terrific if all contributors were a skilled technical writers, but in reality anyone with a reasonable command of the English language and an eye for detail can make a valuable contribution. No contributor is expected to rewrite entire guide books, although some of our most experienced, long term contributors do exactly that. In fact nothing is expected or demanded of any contributor, other than to let other members of the team know what they what they have chosen to work on.
In some cases, that might be to update a chapter of an existing guide, or reviewing the work of another team member. Reviewing can take the form of proof reading, or researching the accuracy of the guide information in relation to the software’s actual operation. By identifying yourself as a Docs Team contributor does not mean you are making any permanent or long term commitment – many contributors come and go over long periods according to the demands of their “real” life.
It can be seen in the documentation status above there are at least three guides where the input of new contributors would be very welcome. If you are interested in contributing these guides you can see the team guidelines here:
https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Documentation/DocumentationTeamInfo/JoinDocTeam
Or to get a wider view of the Documentation Team activities visit this page:
https://documentation.libreoffice.org/en/join-the-documentation-team/ where you will also find information about maintaining the LibreOffice Help pages and the documentation wiki.
If you have any questions you are welcome to post them to: documentation@global.libreoffice.org or you can also join our Telegram group for documentation at https://t.me/joinchat/ALeRuUFCxyZY0wzoddldWQ
The team also gather together in our open to all bi-weekly on-line meeting: https://jitsi.documentfoundation.org/tdfdocteam see: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Documentation/Meetings for dates and times.
Join us! Happy documenting!
by Popa Adrian Marius (noreply@blogger.com) at September 22, 2020 06:54 AM
by Popa Adrian Marius (noreply@blogger.com) at September 21, 2020 06:58 PM
This is how you make yourself vanish into nothing
— 24 frames, Something More Than Free, Jason Isbell and the 400 unit
So, with the recent layoffs at Mozilla — among other things — a bit of discussion on the sustainability of open source projects has been reignited. There was a wide range of takes: from “FOSS is dead” (no) to “we need to re-decentralize the internet” (yes). I could not quite help putting forth opinions on the matter myself and did so on a short twitter thread. Fundamentally though, the opinions expressed on this matter seem to almost talk past each other — and I think the reasons for this might be found in history of open source(1).
In the beginning, pretty much all open source projects had an almost complete overlap of users and contributors. Or at least potential contributors. E.g. the original GNU projects pretty much solved the problems of their own contributors and even most of those that where not contributors (yet) where non the less in the majority able to contribute to all parts of them. You can also see it in the original announcement of Linux as
and while Linux grew way beyond that, there are still indications of this being true today when the main (and only) collaboration tool of the project, the LKML, was down for an extended time in 2018, because a mail server in a cabinet at someones home was not booting through after an power outage and the person to kick it was on vacation. The Linux kernel project was still self-hosting its infrastructure in 2018.
Another — later — project, that I am assuming to have been quite resilient and which I am assuming will continue to be quite resilient is gentoo linux: By requiring users to compile all software themselves, this distribution makes their users either give up on their installs or gets them at least halfway to be packagers (and for a distribution, packagers are contributors) themselves. Also, by not having to deal with binaries, gentoo reduces its infrastructure needs to a minimum. And even while there are some signs of downsizing at gentoo, I am hopeful that the flexibility mentioned above makes gentoo more sustainable and self-reliant than others for quite some time to come.
In the 2000-2010 decade, especially in the second half, a lot of open source projects joined the choir were only a minority of users were contributors too. For many, the majority of users were not even possible contributors across the project. For a few, contribution was even implicitly limited to a closed circle. This gave rise to the perception that something like an “open source product” exists — especially by users. Here are some examples:
| project | complement | contributors goal |
| Mozilla | web | prevent Microsoft from monopolizing the web, later generalized |
| OpenOffice.org | enterprise productivity | |
| Android | web/apps | prevent Apple from monopolizing the web, app and smartphone market |
| Chrome | web | protect a cloud, an advertising business and a search engine |
| Ubuntu desktop | many | changed over time, my guesses: initially, make launchpad what github is today, then complement the Ubuntu phone, then cloud offerings, but now something new maybe up |
Of course, no such thing as an “open source product” exists and all of the above are variations of Strategy Letter V, which — being from 2002 — was already old by the time most of those were started:
Smart companies try to commoditize their products’ complements.
All of the above projects, commoditized their complements and this allowed users, who were not contributors to still benefit from the work of those who were as these contributors were interested in protecting the complement. With technology moving to the web and the cloud you can see this pattern repeating there in a few examples:
| project | complement | contributors goal |
| react | ensure all browser stay compatible with own use by making the framework widely used | |
| istio | cloud hosting | raising the barrier to entry for microservice hosting (embrace and extend style) |
So, what does this have to do with the layoffs at Mozilla and the current struggles at other open source projects? Well, the complements from strategy letter V that might motivate contributors to work on projects beyond their own needs exist at a given point in time, but … panta rhei, and this gives different outlooks for projects depending on how broad the complements are that it is serving:
Ultimately, open source projects provide a commodity. If their infrastructure needs are limited and their users also contributing they should be quite resilient (see e.g. gentoo). If they have many non-contributing users but have multiple complementing products, they will likely do well too.
However, having non-contributing users and only one complement might just be the Great Filter for open source projects: Once this complement is vanishing, so will the project — at least for non-contributing users. The remaining contributors — those that work without the need for a product, a complement, a business or users — will not feel that too much. But the non-contributing users will, as they wont be relevant at all anymore when the project downsizes itself to serving its contributing hobbyists alone.
So, at least for Mozilla and LibreOffice, I have some opinions and unrequested advice. In general, I see an urgent need for open source projects to establish a shared understanding among contributors what currently is a commodity — and thus is governed by the project and its institutions — and what are the complements of the commodity. For Mozilla and LibreOffice this might mean:
Maybe not all of the dream is lost.
(1) Note that I am no expert on the history of open source nor do I know the internal workings and politics of all the open source projects, so there is unfortunately a lot of conjecture over the limited body of my own experience.
(2) This is where I might disagree with Michael Meeks’ take on that.
(3) The Document Foundation receives significant donations from individuals compared to other open source projects. Michael Meeks has some numbers on the value of developer contributions in kind to compare them to and put them in perspective.
Paul Kepinski made a new nice LibreOffice icon theme. Its name is Yaru. He wanted include it into LibreOffice source code, but then he made an extension and now you can download it by the link. Just enjoy!
by Roman Kuznetsov (noreply@blogger.com) at September 18, 2020 05:18 PM
Love LibreOffice? Want to let more people know about it? An effective (and easy) way is to add a mention of the software to your email signature. This is the piece of text that’s automatically added to emails that you send, and typically includes some information about your job, or other contact details.
Many people also use their email signatures (aka “sigs”) to spread the word about causes they support – such as free and open source software projects. So, you could use your signature to raise awareness about LibreOffice, for instance! When people read your emails, if they also check out the signature, they’ll learn something. For instance, you could add:
LibreOffice – free and open source office suite: https://www.libreoffice.org
Respects your privacy, and gives you back control over your data
What exactly you add is up to you, and depends on what you want to focus on. For instance, if you exchange emails with a lot of Microsoft Office users, you may want to mention that LibreOffice can work with .doc(x), .xls(x) files etc. Or perhaps you’re more focused on the ethics of free (as in freedom) software – and want to talk about the benefits to society it brings.
In any case, it’s best to keep it short (a couple of lines), and include a link so that readers can get more information. If the main LibreOffice website is too long for your sig, you can use https://tdf.io/lo as an alternative.
So, good luck, and if you have suggestions/ideas for signatures, post them in the comments below! Here are also some quick instructions for changing signatures in a few email clients and services…
Go to Tools > Account Settings in the menu, then choose your account, and scroll down to the “Signature text” box.
Click the Settings cog in the top-right, then “See all settings”. Under the General tab, scroll down to Signature, then click “Create new”. Give it a name and text, and underneath assign it to new emails in the “Signature defaults” option. Finally, scroll down and click “Save Changes” at the bottom of the page.
Tap the three-line “hamburger” menu in the top-left and go to Settings. Tap your account, then scroll down to “Mobile signature”.
Click Settings at the top, and go to Account in the left-hand menu. Under Identity, you’ll see a box to enter signature text.
At the top of the browser window there is a “gear wheel” icon to access the settings. Click on this and a panel opens on the right-hand side. At the bottom of this panel is a link labelled “View All Outlook settings” – click on this. A new panel consisting of three columns appears. Click on the second item in the second column, labelled “Compose and reply”. This opens one further panel including the option to set the signature text, the font attributes and to insert a graphic if required.
Go to Mail > Settings, then click the “Signatures” tab. In the middle row, choose the signature text to edit, and edit the text shown in the right row. You may also add a new signature text using the “+” button at the bottom of the middle row. If you did so then choose the mail account at the left row and select the new signature texts name at the bottom of the window. So you may toggle easily between different signatures.
Got instructions for other email clients/services? Let us know in the comments – thanks!
Users create new documents in various ways. When they do so in Online or via Windows Explorer’s context menu (New → …) then actual templates are not involved in the process, technically. What happens instead is that there is a plain empty Writer (or Calc, Impress) document that gets copied. The reason for this is that by the time the document gets created, the WOPI-like protocol or Windows Explorer doesn’t have a running soffice process to create a document instance from a template: it’ll just copy a file.
With that aside, users expect that when they create new documents, the language of their new document matches the locale of Writer itself. This conflicts with the idea that languages in the documents are explicit, so if a German users writes a piece of German text, the spellcheck passes and the next user is English, then the text should remain German, not introducing new spellcheck errors.
The solution to this problem is what Mike and Ezinne implemented: make these "templates" minimal, so they don’t refer to any language. Then Calc or Impress will fill the language from the locale of the soffice process and it’ll be part of the document on the first save. This solves the problem of multi-language templates while it does not break the spellcheck use-case.
Andras copied the same templates to various Online integrations to have the same problem solved in that use-case as well.
Writer was still problematic, though. sw: default to UI locale when language is missing now fixes this. You can see on the above screenshot that the stock soffice.odt was opened with a Hungarian locale and the status bar shows that the document language is Hungarian, not the confusing "multiple languages", as before.
You can get a snapshot / demo of Collabora Office and try it out yourself right now: try unstable snapshot. Collabora is a major contributor to LibreOffice and all of this work will be available in TDF’s next release too (7.1).
978 bugs, 83 of which are enhancements, have been reported by 458 people.
Top 10 Reporters
772 bugs have been triaged by 108 people.
Top 10 Triagers
630 bugs have been set to RESOLVED.
Check the following sections for more information about bugs resolved as FIXED, WORKSFORME and DUPLICATE.
221 bugs have been fixed by 44 people.
Top 10 Fixers
List of critical bugs fixed
List of high severity bugs fixed
List of crashes fixed
List of performance issues fixed
List of old bugs ( more than 4 years old ) fixed
91 bugs have been retested by 27 people.
Top 10 testers
136 bugs have been duplicated by 36 people.
Top 10 testers
80 bugs have been verified by 18 people.
Top 10 Verifiers
759 bugs have been categorized with a metabug by 39 people.
Top 10 Categorizers
150 bugs have been set as regressions by 19 people.
Top 10
86 bugs have been bisected by 10 people.
Top 10 Bisecters
Check the current list of unconfirmed bugs here
Check the current list of open regressions here
Check the current list of open bibisectrequests here
Check the current list of highest priority bugs here
Check the current list of high priority bugs here
Thank you all for making Libreoffice rock!
Join us and help to keep LibreOffice super reliable!
Check the Get Involved page out now!…
by Popa Adrian Marius (noreply@blogger.com) at September 09, 2020 03:54 PM
by Popa Adrian Marius (noreply@blogger.com) at September 05, 2020 10:44 AM
Possibly you know that you can insert a QR-code in your LibreOffice document using a main menu Insert->Object->QR-code. But, unfortunately, you still can't insert a barcode.
And there is a solution for you now! This is a Barcode extension.
You should download it by link above and install it into your LibreOffice using Tools->Extension manager. Then you can use it using a main menu Insert->Object->Barcode. There are many options in the dialog. So, enjoy!
by Roman Kuznetsov (noreply@blogger.com) at September 04, 2020 02:15 PM
Document compatibility between office suites is a common concern for LibreOffice users. People take sample documents, expecting a pixel-perfect similarity with other office applications and rightly so. While we cover most aspects of formats outside the OpenDocument Format specification, LibreOffice’s native format, there are pieces that have not been implemented yet (for example smooth shadows, which have been implemented recently and will be available in LibreOffice 7.1). Of course we sometimes fail as well, like any other software producer. Microsoft’s “transitional” formats often include undocumented or obscure content that is hard for other office suites to parse.
One enormous advantage of open source software is that you can talk more or less directly to the developers. All bug reports and enhancement requests are taken seriously and will receive immediate response unlike what happens when you complain about issues to companies without open development models. Unfortunately not everyone knows about this advantage so we thought it’s time to recall.
The people doing quality assurance for LibreOffice is an ever-changing group of around 30 contributors. They analyse user reports tirelessly and always appreciate problem descriptions delivered in a clear and understandable way. In a recent article about LibreOffice appearing on dedoimedo.com, several bugs were reported, but in a rather incomplete way. It is understandable, if a journalist does not want to create proper reports in our bug tracker on top of writing an article. Maybe there is a middle-ground, though.
Simply linking to the problematic Microsoft Office templates would have made the work of the quality assurance team much easier. Now the templates shown in the screenshots had to be discovered through detective work on the MSO template site. Particularly unfortunate was the case of a template, which refused to open properly. There is no way of figuring out the identity of the document and the author never replied to an email requesting for more information. On the other hand, it might be time for the QA team to again methodically go through every single template on the MSO site – such work has been done before, resulting in many solved incompatibilities.
Detailed comments on the document template issues described in the Dedoimedo article
Fashion newsletter template: Some obstacles need to be considered regarding cross-application and probably also cross-platform compatibility questions. Documents written on one system might use a font that is not available on another. The article mentioned above talks about the word FASHION breaking into two lines in the MSO Fashion newsletter template. The reason for this wrapping is that the author did not notice they were missing the Century Gothic font. This can be seen in the Formatting toolbar, where the font name appears in italics and hovering over it shows a tooltip saying that the font is not available and has been substituted.
The author refers to an image border missing on the first page. Probably they meant the whole page margin on the right. This issue was not seen on Windows or Linux by testers.
The image stretching issue had not been reported before. The newly-created report contains an analysis on a level that is typical to the QA team. However, the QA team will gladly conduct further analysis on reports with less details. The image stretching issue is the same that is seen in the restaurant newsletter template
An issue not mentioned in the article is the incorrect lengths of the fuchsia-coloured lines on the first page. This was analysed through binary bisecting and found to have been reported before. This issue is an unfortunate side effect of a complex internal improvement in the handling of shapes.
Restaurant newsletter template: Testers did not see the issue with the placement of the restaurant logo.
Based on data in our bug tracker, LibreOffice saw over 330 fixes or feature implementations for MSO and RTF document issues in 2019. The number for 2020 is already over 330 at this point. The real numbers are likely higher as not every code change is connected with a report. These statistics clearly indicate that document compatibility is seeing significant investments from the commercial ecosystem and volunteers alike.
LibreOffice quality assurance is aided by many automated systems. One of these is called “Office interoperability tools”. It compares the output of Microsoft Office and LibreOffice over a huge corpus of documents in order to find regressions. Manual testing and problem discovery is still needed – we can’t automate the testing of issues we don’t know about.
As mentioned, while Microsoft’s “transitional” formats continue to use undocumented or cryptic content, which makes life difficult for other office suites, there’s a limit to what we can do. Ultimately, it would be better if everyone used the OpenDocument Format, to ensure maximum interoperability.
If you want to learn how to create high quality bug reports, please read our dedicated guide in The Document Foundation wiki.…
by Popa Adrian Marius (noreply@blogger.com) at August 31, 2020 08:14 AM
The project’s main goal was to create at least three new animation effects on LibreOffice Impress that are simulated using 2D physics engine Box2D. Which would use the 2D physics engine’s capabilities to create some exciting animations that bounce around interact with each other and hopefully look cool.
First thing to do was bundling Box2D with the build system of LO.
After that, worked on a wrapper that was going to be the backbone of the project and abstract all Box2D related stuff. This wrapper didn’t take it’s final shape until the end of the project since it is the main place where the magic happened – throughout the project it always changed.
Building it from the start was useful though, since it gave me a solid vision on how would the animation engine interact with it (or what kind of information from LO would the wrapper need to function properly).
Later, I’ve connected up the animation engine creating a new animation node for physics animation by following the implementation of path motion animation. And worked on making them saveable through SMIL hierarchies on content.xml.
Up till this point all shapes in the slide were approximated by their bounding box in the simulations, which was not ideal. Therefore, I’ve worked on representing the shapes as closely as possible to their original shape. Got that to work by getting the shape’s bezier/polygon representation (simplifying it as much as i can without losing the resemblance of the original shape), triangulating it and adding the collection of triangles to a single physics body.
In the hope of spicing things up a little, added some options that can be used on xml hierarchies that make it possible to create more exciting physics based animation effects that specify the bounciness, density, and the starting velocity of the physics body.
To finish up, created a total of 4 animation effect presets that use the physics based animation effects.
The Box2D wrapper lives in:
It manages the Box2D World and the Box2D Bodies. When a physics animation starts (if not initiated before by another physics animation) the Box2D World gets initiated and a physics body with an edge loop shaped fixture that represents the slide frame is created with it. This slide frame always has 100 meters width or height depending on which is actually greater in the current slide properties, and a scale factor is calculated depending on the slide size which is used in mapping the Box2D coordinates to LO coordinates and vice versa. Later, all the shapes in the current slide that are in the foreground (which are shapes that do not belong to the master slide and not a background shape) created as a static Box2D Body.
During this creation process if the shape is filled & closed it is created by triangulating the shape and adding the resulting triangles to the Box2D Body, this is necessary since a Box2D physics body can only have convex shaped fixtures.
If the shape isn’t a filled & closed one or is just an edge shape, it’s divided up into it’s edge segments and each edge segment is represented by a quadrilateral shaped fixture.
Here’s a visualization showing how a shape is represented in the Box2D world:
When a physics animation starts, it makes the corresponding physics body to it’s shape a dynamic one, and applies the density, bounciness, starting velocity parameters specified in the xml to it. On each update cycle physics animation steps through the simulation using box2DWorld::stepAmount.
If there are other type of animation effects going in parallel with a physics animation, those animation effects queue up updates on what property they have manipulated (position, rotation etc.) and to which value. And then when a physics animation calls box2DWorld::stepAmount, box2DWorld::processUpdateQueue is called and these updates are processed in a way that produce convincing simulations. For instance if it is a change in position, instead of just setting the corresponding physics body’s position, a linear velocity is calculated which will make the body travel to the given position in the time box2DWorld::stepAmount will step through and applied to the body.
When there are two physics animations going on in parallel, only one of them steps through the simulation. This is achieved using a simple lock mechanism. If the physics animation that was stepping the simulation ends, it unlocks and if there’s another one still going on it takes the lock.
Overall, working on this project was really fun! I’m pretty proud with the outcome, and hoping it is some nice eye candy that the community and the users of LibreOffice will like :). If you’d like the check out and play around with the physics based animations you can build from master or grab a nightly build!
I’m really thankful for Google and LibreOffice for providing me with such a great opportunity which helped me grow quite a bit! Thanks to everyone in the LibreOffice community for giving me a helping hand :). And most importantly, greatly thankful to Thorsten Behrens which was my mentor throughout the GSoC period, he has literally guided me everyday on what to do, what not to do and how to do, on top of it answered each of my silly newbie questions. You were the greatest mentor I could’ve asked for!
Since working with the LibreOffice community was great and now that I’m kind of warmed up working on LibreOffice, my plan is to keep hacking on LibreOffice and especially Impress from now on!
All of the commits I’ve sent at the GSoC period can be found at:
https://gerrit.libreoffice.org/q/owner:q.sarperakdemir%2540gmail.com+after:2020-05-15+before:2020-09-01+-status:abandoned
They are also listed below:
by Yusuf Keten (ketenyusuf@gmail.com) at August 31, 2020 12:00 AM
The Support is already merged for all these types of objects and also I added a test case for each object in this list and Also the uiLogger and DSL support is added for all items in this list.
LO_COLLECT_UIINFO="test.log" SAL_USE_VCLPLUGIN=gen instdir/program/sofficecd uitest/ui_logger_dsl/python dsl_core.py <path_to_log_file> <path_to_a_new_python_file>
by Ahmed ElShreif (noreply@blogger.com) at August 29, 2020 06:26 AM
by Yusuf Keten (ketenyusuf@gmail.com) at August 28, 2020 12:00 AM
A GSoC 2020 student Ahmad Ganzouri have added into LibreOffice 7.1 a new nice feature - soft blurred shadows for shapes.
It looks so:
So it looks awesome! Thanks Ahmad for your great work for our project!
by Roman Kuznetsov (noreply@blogger.com) at August 27, 2020 07:23 PM
LibreOffice has a very useful sidebar so it’s time to make them shiny even more. I made an proposal for an sidebar upgrade.
LibreOffice use two different Sidebar layouts
I’m happy with both layouts, but I would prefer to have for one specific task only one Layout.
I already start to write bug report’s for so that everybody can give transparent feedback.
So I hope to get some feedback the global [META] bug to see the improvement will be BUG 103459
Past week, all of the changes in my private experimental branch got merged to master \o/.
Since it is the last week of GSoC, I will be finalizing the project this week by creating some animation effect presets, documenting the code, fixing bugs and preparing a work product submission.
If you’re interested in creating some animation effects that use Physics Animation Effects, see the mail about it to the design list and hit me up 
by Yusuf Keten (ketenyusuf@gmail.com) at August 24, 2020 12:00 AM
As part of FATIH project, run by Turkih Ministery of Education, and supported by National Academic Network and Information Centre (ULAKBİM); Pardus GNU/Linux (and LibreOffice as part of it) has been installed on more than 53,000 smart boards at classrooms in Turkey! :)
This number represents the smart boards which are connected to the Internet, and registered on the central management system. It keeps counting as we speak, and the status can be seen on the stats page of ETAP (Interactive Board Interface Project): http://tahta.etap.org.tr/
Pardus is a GNU/Linux distribution jointly developed by the Scientific & Technological Research Council of Turkey (TÜBİTAK) and National Academic Network and Information Centre (ULAKBİM). It started its life as a Gentoo-based project before developing its own unique identity. Since late 2012, the distribution is based on Debian.
Pardus has open-source subprojects that meet institutional needs for easy dissemination in public institutions and organizations and SMEs. Leader Ahenk Central Management System, Viper Identity Management System, Octopus Integrated Cyber Security System, Interactive Board Interface Project (ETAP), ULAKBÜS Integrated University System are the main ones.
ETAP is aimed at developing a solution for the interactive smart boards at schools, based on Pardus. It is designed and developed to achieve easier and more effective usage of the devices with a touchscreen in the classrooms.
During its development, several schools were chosen as part of the pilot phase, and needs and requests of the teachers were taken into account. Its features include:
by Muhammet Kara (muhammetk@gmail.com) at August 21, 2020 10:00 AM
This work by Collabora Productivity was possible thanks to AMD.
LibreOffice 7.0, just released, includes a new drawing backend based on the Skia library, which allows LibreOffice to use the modern Vulkan API to graphics operations. This Visual Class Library (VCL) backend is the default on the Windows platform, superseding the OpenGL-based backend.
Having multiple VCL backends has its benefit to integrate with different operating systems, but each backend performing its own rendering implementation is far from optimal, since we cannot add new rendering functionality and assume that it will work cross-platform. Many backends across different platforms and toolkits miss optimized paths for various rendering tasks. This adds complexity and makes it hard to ensure that rendering objects happens in an accelerated way everywhere.
Another problem is that multiple backends regularly perform the same type of mapping from VCL’s APIs to what a modern toolkit provides these days. This duplication means not only maintenance cost, but also can lead to having to fix the same bug at multiple places.
The VCL library is responsible for widgets (buttons, controls, etc.) and basic rendering. It does not implement the drawing directly, but it provides an internal API, which is implemented by various backends that implement the actual graphics operations. These backends usually adapt LibreOffice to each platform , for example the ‘win’ backend is used on Windows, the ‘kf5’ and ‘gtk3’ backends are for Unix-like platforms using the KDE Frameworks and the Gtk3 graphics toolkit respectively and there is a ‘headless’ backend used by tests that does not render to the screen.
Each VCL backend uses an underlying graphics API available on the platform to perform the graphics operations. The Cairo library is used by some Unix-like and ‘headless’ backends, the ‘osx’ backend uses the macOS Quartz. On Windows, the ‘win’ backend has several plugable drawing implementations:
The Skia library is not shipped in a binary form, not even by 3rd-party providers such as Linux distributions. It is provided only as source and the usual way to use it in a project is to ship it with that project. LibreOffice includes Skia as a 3rd-party library and fortunately building it using the LibreOffice gbuild system is reasonably simple. An additional complication is that Skia provides a new release roughly every 6 weeks, and generally only the latest release receives any fixes, requiring repeated updates. Since Skia is continually evolving, each update may also require adjustments (although so far it seems they are generally small).
The Skia API is generally well documented, but it appears to be mostly aimed at developers already working on a project using Skia, such as Chrome. Important classes have their API well described, but it can be difficult to find tutorials for them and some classes are harder to understand at the beginning (for example, SkPixmap, SkBitmap, SkImage and SkSurface are all classes representing a drawable, but it was unclear at the beginning what the suitable use cases would be for each for them).
Similarly, it is not obvious how to use Skia in a new project. There does not seem to be any actual developer introduction to Skia in the documentation, nor does thereseem to be any documentation on how to setup a new or standalone project using Skia. There is a Hello-World example in the examples/ directory that is based on platform integration code that is not part of the Skia library itself but is inside a sk_app/ directory in the tools/ directory. That code was usable for LibreOffice, but required patching to cover LibreOffice needs (for example, the code created a new graphics context for each toplevel window, and Skia requires proper graphic context to be used in drawing operations, but LibreOffice code sometimes does not know which toplevel window will use the result of a drawing).
LibreOffice is a fairly old codebase, and still uses relatively old concepts such as paletted bitmaps, low-resolution bitmaps (such as 4bpp) or drawing that uses the XOR operation on pixels. Skia, being a relatively new library, has features that assume modern concepts are used (for example, RGB bitmaps are required to be 32bpp with unused alpha channel, 24bpp RGB bitmaps are not supported).
Once the initial learning period is over, Skia is consistent in its API and reasonable flexible to use allowing progress to be relatively fast. Code using Skia is very readable, and using Skia makes future maintainance tasks easier to perform. Even some old concepts, such as LibreOffice using a separate bitmap for alpha channel, sometimes interpreted as 8bpp and sometimes as alpha, later blended with data bitmap to get the actual result, could be mostly implemented using Skia API, making them GPU-accelerated.
While there were some concerns about how performance would be affected by moving to Skia compared to OpenGL driver and and hardware implementations that have been heavily optimized over the past several decades, it turns out that performance within LibreOffice is at least equivalent to the OpenGL version and synthetic benchmarks show that there is room for improvement.
While somewhat complicated at the beginning, using Skia in LibreOffice has been in general a rather pleasant experience. In the future LibreOffice’s use of Skia could be extended to other platforms, reducing the number of platform rendering APIs used, eliminating duplicated code, reducing bug count and generally improving quality.
For comparison, LibreOffice OpenGL drawing code is roughly 12k lines of code, while Skia drawing code is only 4k.
Apart from the immediate benefits, moving to Skia and Vulkan on Windows paves the way for a single, powerful, hardware-accelerated rendering API cross-platform.
Moving to Skia on Windows required about 7 person-months ol, which lets us use Vulkan acceleration without large implementation costs. It will be interesting to see how much time is saved in the next few years from the reduced maintenance cost. The resulting work is mature enough that there is no real negative change in performance, and we have not started heavily optimizing yet.
The post Implementing Vulkan-capable LibreOffice user interface using the Skia library appeared first on Collabora Productivity.
Impress now has support for considering rules next to constraints when it comes to lay out SmartArt graphics from PPTX files. This builds on top of the previous improvements around SmartArt support.
SmartArt allows declaring your content and requirements for a graphic, then the layout will take care of arranging that in a suitable way. It is allowed to declare conflicting requirements, and rules can specify how to resolve those conflicts. The below example document has shape widths defined in a way that multiple child shapes wants to have a width of 100%, but simply scaling down all child shapes does not give a correct result. Rules define what to scale down and what to leave unchanged.
Here is how this works in practice:
If you would like to know a bit more about how this works, continue reading… :-)
The initial heavy-lifting is done in this commit, which parses the rules from the XML input.
Then once we had rule info around, the linear algorithm was improved to scale down child shapes based on rules (and not just all of them, equally).
Then it was necessary to scale spacings (between child shapes) based on rules as well.
It was also needed to limit the height request of a shape, since they should not leave the canvas of the SmartArt.
Finally it was necessary to support the "top" child order. This can be declared using the following markup:
<dgm:layoutNode ... chOrder="t">
This declares that an earlier shape in a linear layout is on top of a later shapes, not the opposite. The default is that newer shapes are on top of older shapes. This is not a visible problem usually, but once you start using negative widths in a linear layout, you can have overlapping shapes. The above example has 3 text shapes, which are overlapping with the "background" arrow shape. This is expressed by having 100% width for child shapes (OK to scale down), then a -100% width for a dummy shape (not scaling) and finally a 100% width for the background arrow (not scaling).
All in all, now the background arrow shape has a good position and size, and the text on the arrow is readable.
You can get a snapshot / demo of Collabora Office and try it out yourself right now: try unstable snapshot. Collabora is a major contributor to LibreOffice and all of this work will be available in TDF’s next release too (7.1).
Hello LO Community,
by Ahmed ElShreif (noreply@blogger.com) at August 18, 2020 09:11 PM
Past week, I’ve mainly cleaned up some bugs in physics animations and added new options only available in xml that control starting velocity, bounciness, and density of the box2d body.
There are two velocity options velocity-x and velocity-y that control x and y starting velocity respectively for the box2d body.
Bounciness option takes values between [0,1]. 1 meaning no energy loss on collisions and has a default value of 0.1.
Density option specifies the box2d body density in kg/m².
All of the new xml options are imported/exported in the LO extension (loext) namespace.
Hopefully, these new xml options will make it possible to craft better & more exciting physics animation presets.
I’ve tried to come up with some animation effect presets which illustrate what’s possible that mix in these new options.
One animation effect each for entrance, emphasis and exit.
Here’s the odp file and content.xml excerpt which only contain the animation hierarchies if you’re interested in giving a look:
<!-- emphasis example -->
<anim:par presentation:node-type="timing-root">
<anim:seq presentation:node-type="main-sequence">
<anim:par smil:begin="next">
<anim:par smil:begin="0s">
<anim:par smil:begin="0s" smil:fill="hold" presentation:node-type="on-click" presentation:preset-class="emphasis" presentation:preset-id="tumble-and-linear-glide">
<loext:animatePhysics smil:dur="4s" smil:fill="hold" smil:targetElement="id1" loext:velocity-x="10000" loext:bounciness="0.9"/>
<anim:animate smil:begin="4s" smil:dur="2s" smil:fill="hold" smil:decelerate="0.5" smil:targetElement="id1" smil:attributeName="x" smil:to="(x)"/>
<anim:animate smil:begin="4s" smil:dur="2s" smil:fill="hold" smil:decelerate="0.5" smil:targetElement="id1" smil:attributeName="y" smil:to="(y)"/>
<anim:animate smil:begin="4s" smil:dur="2s" smil:fill="hold" smil:decelerate="0.5" smil:targetElement="id1" smil:attributeName="rotate" smil:to="0"/>
</anim:par>
</anim:par>
</anim:par>
</anim:seq>
</anim:par>
<!-- entrance example -->
<anim:par presentation:node-type="timing-root">
<anim:seq presentation:node-type="main-sequence">
<anim:par smil:begin="next">
<anim:par smil:begin="0s">
<anim:par smil:begin="0s" smil:fill="hold" presentation:node-type="on-click" presentation:preset-class="entrance" presentation:preset-id="shoot-in-from-top-left">
<anim:seq>
<anim:set smil:begin="0s" smil:dur="0.001s" smil:fill="hold" smil:targetElement="id2" smil:attributeName="visibility" smil:to="visible"/>
<anim:animate smil:dur="0.001s" smil:fill="hold" smil:targetElement="id2" smil:attributeName="x" smil:to="width*.5"/>
<anim:animate smil:dur="0.001s" smil:fill="hold" smil:targetElement="id2" smil:attributeName="y" smil:to="height*.5"/>
<loext:animatePhysics smil:dur="4s" smil:fill="hold" smil:targetElement="id2" loext:velocity-x="10000" loext:velocity-y="10000" loext:bounciness="0.6"/>
</anim:seq>
<anim:transitionFilter smil:dur="1s" smil:targetElement="id2" smil:type="fade" smil:subtype="crossfade"/>
<anim:animate smil:begin="4s" smil:dur="2s" smil:fill="hold" smil:decelerate="0.5" smil:targetElement="id2" smil:attributeName="x" smil:to="(x)"/>
<anim:animate smil:begin="4s" smil:dur="2s" smil:fill="hold" smil:decelerate="0.5" smil:targetElement="id2" smil:attributeName="y" smil:to="(y)"/>
<anim:animate smil:begin="4s" smil:dur="2s" smil:fill="hold" smil:decelerate="0.5" smil:targetElement="id2" smil:attributeName="rotate" smil:to="0"/>
</anim:par>
</anim:par>
</anim:par>
</anim:seq>
</anim:par>
<!-- exit example -->
<anim:par presentation:node-type="timing-root">
<anim:seq presentation:node-type="main-sequence">
<anim:par smil:begin="next">
<anim:par smil:begin="0s">
<anim:par smil:begin="0s" smil:fill="hold" presentation:node-type="on-click" presentation:preset-class="exit" presentation:preset-id="tumble-and-disappear">
<loext:animatePhysics smil:dur="4s" smil:fill="hold" smil:targetElement="id3" loext:bounciness="0.8"/>
<anim:transitionFilter smil:begin="3s" smil:dur="1s" smil:targetElement="id3" smil:type="fade" smil:subtype="crossfade" smil:mode="out"/>
<anim:set smil:begin="4s" smil:dur="0.001s" smil:fill="hold" smil:targetElement="id3" smil:attributeName="visibility" smil:to="hidden"/>
</anim:par>
</anim:par>
</anim:par>
</anim:seq>
</anim:par>
<!-- emphasis example in a fuller slide -->
<anim:par presentation:node-type="timing-root">
<anim:seq presentation:node-type="main-sequence">
<anim:par smil:begin="next">
<anim:par smil:begin="0s">
<anim:par smil:begin="0s" smil:fill="hold" presentation:node-type="on-click" presentation:preset-class="emphasis" presentation:preset-id="tumble-and-linear-glide">
<loext:animatePhysics smil:dur="4s" smil:fill="hold" smil:targetElement="id4" loext:velocity-x="10000" loext:bounciness="0.7"/>
<anim:animate smil:begin="4s" smil:dur="2s" smil:fill="hold" smil:decelerate="0.5" smil:targetElement="id4" smil:attributeName="x" smil:to="(x)"/>
<anim:animate smil:begin="4s" smil:dur="2s" smil:fill="hold" smil:decelerate="0.5" smil:targetElement="id4" smil:attributeName="y" smil:to="(y)"/>
<anim:animate smil:begin="4s" smil:dur="2s" smil:fill="hold" smil:decelerate="0.5" smil:targetElement="id4" smil:attributeName="rotate" smil:to="0"/>
</anim:par>
</anim:par>
</anim:par>
</anim:seq>
</anim:par>by Yusuf Keten (ketenyusuf@gmail.com) at August 17, 2020 12:00 AM
Hello all,
>>obj_name.executeAction("SELECT",mkPropertyValues({"POS":"4"}))
You can use these lines to check on your selection:
>> get_state_as_dict(obj_name)["SelectedItemPos"]
>> get_state_as_dict(obj_name)["SelectedItemId"]
>> get_state_as_dict(obj_name)["ItemsCount"]
by Ahmed ElShreif (noreply@blogger.com) at August 13, 2020 04:26 AM
This week, I was mainly working on cleaning up and migrating the patches from my experimental branch to LO master.
merged patches were:
patches that are still in review are:
Here’s the file for last weeks demo but updated for this week (Simulated/Simulation was renamed to Physics across the whole implementation last week so it needed an update):
Here’s how the animation effect is expressed in the content.xml of the demo file:
<!-- excerpt from customshapesfalling.odp:content.xml -->
<anim:par smil:begin="0s" smil:fill="hold" presentation:node-type="on-click" presentation:preset-class="emphasis" presentation:preset-id="libo-physics-basic">
<loext:animatePhysics smil:dur="4s" smil:fill="hold" smil:targetElement="id1"/>
</anim:par>If you’d like to play around with animation effects and create new ones that combine physics based and existing ones. First you should pull the current implementation from my experimental branch. After that, you should create a dummy animation containing odp file and manually edit it’s content.xml creating an altered animation effect. Finally to see it in action use File -> Reload option.
Here is a file that has two example animations that I’ve created this way which combines physics animations with others:
Below I’ve tried to explain what’s going on in the smil hierarchies of two-example-animations-with-physics.odp:content.xml
<!-- excerpt from two-example-animations-with-physics.odp:content.xml that is padded with comments & prettified -->
<anim:par presentation:node-type="timing-root">
<anim:seq presentation:node-type="main-sequence">
<!-- start of the first animation effect -->
<anim:par smil:begin="next">
<anim:par smil:begin="0s">
<anim:par smil:begin="0s" smil:fill="hold" presentation:preset-property="Direction" presentation:node-type="on-click" presentation:preset-class="emphasis" presentation:preset-id="experimental-drop-and-wipe-out" presentation:preset-sub-type="horizontal">
<!-- animatePhysics: is the node for physics based animation effects.
there's no smil:begin so it'll start with the parent node without a delay -->
<loext:animatePhysics smil:dur="4s" smil:fill="hold" smil:targetElement="id1"/>
<!-- blindsWipe that is delayed for 3.5s since smil:begin="3.5s" -->
<anim:transitionFilter smil:begin="3.5s" smil:dur="0.5s" smil:targetElement="id1" smil:type="blindsWipe" smil:subtype="horizontal" smil:mode="out"/>
<!-- making the shape disappear proper way at the end -->
<anim:set smil:begin="4s" smil:dur="0.001s" smil:fill="hold" smil:targetElement="id1" smil:attributeName="visibility" smil:to="hidden"/>
</anim:par>
</anim:par>
</anim:par>
<!-- start of the second animation effect -->
<anim:par smil:begin="next">
<anim:par smil:begin="0s">
<anim:par smil:begin="0s" smil:fill="hold" presentation:preset-property="Direction;Accelerate;Decelerate" presentation:node-type="on-click" presentation:preset-class="entrance" presentation:preset-id="experimental-fly-in-and-drop" presentation:preset-sub-type="from-bottom">
<!-- fly in animation effect -->
<anim:set smil:begin="0s" smil:dur="0.001s" smil:fill="hold" smil:targetElement="id2" smil:attributeName="visibility" smil:to="visible"/>
<anim:animate smil:dur="0.5s" smil:fill="hold" smil:targetElement="id2" smil:attributeName="x" smil:values="x;x" smil:keyTimes="0;1"/>
<anim:animate smil:dur="0.5s" smil:fill="hold" smil:targetElement="id2" smil:attributeName="y" smil:values="1+height/2;y" smil:keyTimes="0;1"/>
<!-- animatePhysics that starts at the end of fly in since smil:begin="0.5s" -->
<loext:animatePhysics smil:begin="0.5s" smil:dur="4s" smil:fill="hold" smil:targetElement="id2"/>
</anim:par>
</anim:par>
</anim:par>
</anim:seq>
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The Document Foundation is not responsible for the content on planet.documentfoundation.org. However - if you have any concerns about content please contact Uwe Altmann for moderation. Copyright information: Unless otherwise specified in the author's blog, all text and images on this website are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. This does not include the source code of LibreOffice, which is licensed under the Mozilla Public License (MPLv2). |
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