Congratulations! Next release will be LibreOffice 7 instead LibreOffice 6.5. Look at that message in marketing mail list.
by Roman Kuznetsov (noreply@blogger.com) at January 19, 2020 05:42 PM
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by Roman Kuznetsov (noreply@blogger.com) at January 19, 2020 05:42 PM
In December, members of The Document Foundation voted for a new Board of Directors. The Board is the main administration of the Foundation’s projects and teams – including LibreOffice and The Document Foundation. The new Board will begin work after FOSDEM in February – and there are some new faces to welcome! Let’s hear from them…
I have been working voluntarily with TDF since January 2011 and I am a member since 2013. Whenever possible I try to evangelize regarding the advantages of adopting the ODF standard and LibreOffice as an office suite.
Considering the number of people living in this region of the world, I consider the need to add more volunteers to the community and, eventually, more members to the foundation to be a continuous effort. A significant weakness has to do with the language barrier as the number of English speakers in this part of the continent is relatively low. For this reason, I translate and publish on the Hispanic blog press releases, interviews and articles that help raise awareness of the strategic importance of adopting free tools and open standards. I work in a high school with technical orientation all day. I live in Misiones, Argentina (northeast of the country), an small province between Paraguay and Brazil.
I’m averaging the 40’s, father of two, a boy and a girl, and live and I’ve been living in a couple for almost 20 years.
I am a senior system administrator, employed in a small company based in Bergamo, in the North of Italy, with its core business in providing ICT services for SMB companies. In my job, I’m mostly without any relation to LibreOffice – we install it on some customer’s PCs, but at least for the moment we don‘t have any migration process/anything bigger planned.
My operating system of choice is GNU/Linux since 2001 and from the same days I advocate FOSS and openness whenever possible, both in public events and in the business. Lately I was convinced that also open formats should have their own share of advocating so I am trying to do that as well. I am actually in the Board of both BgLUG (Bergamo Linux Users Group) and LibreItalia (Italian local “chapter” of TDF), but I am/was involved in a lot of other organizations, mostly with goals in FOSS advocacy.
In the last few years, I was involved in FOSS advocacy also inside schools, founding and leading the LibreSchool Project (www.libreschool.org) with a group of friends and colleagues from my LUG. I hope my experience would be of help inside TDF Board of Directors; I am pretty sure that I will also learn a lot.
As soon as I have been involved with TDF, I have been greeted by a full lot of passionate and welcoming people who worked hard to make yourself feel at home inside TDF and, sharing the same spirit, I would like to drive the efforts on the next two years within the BoD to make LibreOffice and The Document Liberation Project shine even more. My goals inside the Board will be mostly facilitating community interactions and activities, community inclusion and lowering the initial barriers to becoming a community member and contributor, which I can feel is still pretty high.
I would like to provide my direct help inside the TDF Board of Directors dealing with infrastructure (as it may seem legitimate by my job), marketing, event organization and native language projects.
This is a logical consequence – I think – of my long-term contributions to the project. A lot of you know me as owner of .riess applications, which was the first partner of Sun for doing migration business with StarOffice/OpenOffice nearly 20 years ago.
You might also know me from my contributions with activities for the national and international ecosystem, developing the certification process for LibreOffice professionals with others, where I nowadays serve as volunteer co-chair of the certification committee.
This gives me the chance to give something back for a lot of things I got out of this project. It‘s not just in the sense of making business, but in the sense of experiencing a healthy and powerful community of an open source project. As I’m also engaged in the German-based Open Source Business Alliance as speaker of the working group of public affairs and co-speaker of the working group for interoperability, there are a lot of topics where I can leverage each engagement through the other in the interest of all.
Helping and driving activities in the sense of growing local communities internationally (India, Africa, Asia, as well as European communities for recovering) and activating more exchange of ideas between the community and the board are some of the challenges I see for the next board period.
I’m Nicolas Christener, living in Switzerland, married, love skiing & music and I was born between RFC 812 and 813.
I currently work for Adfinis SyGroup which is a company delivering services (engineering, managed services, development) around F/OSS software. We partner with Collabora and together with them we brought LibreOffice to iOS.
I helped to organize LibreOffice Conference 2014 in Switzerland, the company I work for hosts some TDF servers and lately I was busy to help make the iOS app a reality. I contributed comment translations (de -> en) in the code, filed many bugs and convinced users and organizations to use LibreOffice.
I was also appointed by the current Board (which I’m not part of) to help start the The Document Collective (TDC). This transitional group only bootstraps the legal entity and I won’t automatically be involved in the future entity.
I believe that I have a good understanding of the enterprise requirements and am very community oriented which gives me a well balanced view where and how we could improve LibreOffice for the good of all of us.
I’m based in Luxemburg and my two organisations, Omnis Systems Ltd (UK) and Omnis Cloud Sarl (LU), are specialised in the promotion of Open Source and Free Software platforms. During the last years, I wrote many articles promoting Open Source, Free Software and naturally LibreOffice.
Many of you may know me also from FOSDEM and LibOCon. I’ve been a part of the working group that succeed in convincing the UK Government to adopt ODF as their standard file format, convinced the City Council of Reggio Emilia to upgrade to LibreOffice and contributed in writing the Manifesto for Technological Sovereignty with the City Council of Barcelona – just to mention some of the activities.
I’m contributing to the LibreOffice project by investing time and resources to work with the private and public sector organisations showing them the social, ethical and economical benefits of replacing proprietary products with Open Source platforms and open standards.
With my new venture in Luxembourg I decided to lead by example, so I’ve setup a new “Sovereign Cloud”, providing resources and a set of free services to individuals and local non-profits. I want to show to local institutions that with Open Source platforms it’s possible to compete directly against the big players and that this change is not as difficult and expensive as they want us to believe. The services I’m providing will also be used to further promote LibreOffice, both desktop and On-Line.
I want to share my expertise with the board and bring in my passion for Open Source and Free Software.
Elected as member of the Board of Directors, in this order are:
And elected as deputies of the Board of Directors are:
Want to become a member and vote in future elections? Check out this video…
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Finally LibreOffice image compression did what you expect. Shrink your image or the impress presentation and don’t destroy your pictures.
Old default settings were 90 for JPEG Quality and reduce image resolution to 96 DPI.
New settings are 80 for JPEG Quality and reduce image resolution to 300 DPI. It frustrate me for long time that with 96 DPI all images that will be compressed with LibreOffice are blurred and didn’t fit in any case. After write Bug 128658 and nobody fixed the bug for me, I fixed it myself with 7 lines of code 
The best bug report are the reports you can fix yourself. Be proud of yourself fill bug reports and fix them yourself.
by Popa Adrian Marius (noreply@blogger.com) at January 14, 2020 09:32 AM
The LibreOffice Quality Assurance ( QA ) Team is happy to announce LibreOffice 6.4 RC2 is ready for testing!
LibreOffice 6.4 will be released as final at the end of January, 2020, being LibreOffice 6.4 RC2 the forth pre-release since the development of version 6.4 started in the beginning of June, 2019 ( See the release plan ). Since LibreOffice 6.4 RC1 ( the previous pre-release ), 90 commits have been submitted to the code repository and 58 bugs have been fixed. Check the release notes to find the new features included in this version of LibreOffice.
LibreOffice 6.4 RC2 can be downloaded from here, it’s available for Linux, MacOS and Windows. ( Note that it will replace your actual installation )
In case you find any problem in this pre-release, please report it in Bugzilla ( You just need a legit email address in order to create a new account ) so it can get fixed before LibreOffice 6.4 final is released.
For help, you can contact the QA Team directly in the IRC channel.
Happy testing!!
…
There has been some progress in LibreOffice related to custom labels on charts. Let’s take a look at the following example document:
The above picture is extracted from a .docx document created by Word. When importing the document using LibreOffice, the diagram looks like this:
LibreOffice is now able to import custom text extracted from an OOXML document and store it in the ODF format. In order to do this, there was no need for extending the ODF structure, because it can already be accomplished using the <chart:data-label> tag. Multiple paragraphs are supported in one label. Apparently, style elements are not yet imported correctly, but the good news is it can be further developed without modifying the ODF format.
In addition, support for inserting percentage into the custom field is added:
The diagram above contains custom labels for each of its slices. Percentage fields have been added as new paragraphs into the labels. The text of these fields will dynamically change when changing the underlying data.
Thanks for SUSE for sponsoring this development.
by Roman Kuznetsov (noreply@blogger.com) at January 12, 2020 03:10 PM
580 bugs, 83 of which are enhancements, have been reported by 320 people.
Top 10 Reporters
595 bugs have been triaged by 81 people.
Top 10 Triagers
578 bugs have been set to RESOLVED.
Check the following sections for more information about bugs resolved as FIXED, WORKSFORME and DUPLICATE.
183 bugs have been fixed by 43 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
111 bugs have been retested by 49 people.
Top 10 testers
150 bugs have been duplicated by 38 people.
Top 10 testers
170 bugs have been verified by 17 people.
Top 10 Verifiers
304 bugs have been categorized with a metabug by 36 people.
Top 10 Categorizers
106 bugs have been set as regressions by 23 people.
Top 10
84 bugs have been bisected by 12 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 January 10, 2020 09:47 AM
by Popa Adrian Marius (noreply@blogger.com) at January 10, 2020 09:36 AM
by Roman Kuznetsov (noreply@blogger.com) at January 09, 2020 01:33 PM
by Popa Adrian Marius (noreply@blogger.com) at January 06, 2020 03:56 PM
by Roman Kuznetsov (noreply@blogger.com) at January 04, 2020 08:56 PM
2020 is going to be a milestone year for the LibreOffice community, as we are going to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the LibreOffice project on September 28 – the date of the official announcement, with a press release distributed to FOSS media – and the 20th anniversary of the free office suite on July 19 – the date of the announcement issued by Sun for the release of StarOffice source code to the open source community.
It will be a year long celebration. To start it in the right way, four images which can be reused by LibreOffice community members to share their commitment to FOSS and to the best free office suite ever (background images are from Pixabay, and can be used without attribution). By right clicking on the images, it will be possible to download a larger version (2500 pixel wide).
Happy New Year 2020 to all LibreOffice community members and users worldwide.
Check out this short video of activities throughout the year:
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It’s been a long time coming, but an updated version of the LibreOffice Calc Guide has finally been completed by the Documentation Team.
Free PDFs are here: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Documentation/Publications#LibreOffice_Calc_Guide and will be linked from the main LibreOffice website in the new year.
A printed copy can be purchased here: http://www.lulu.com/content/paperback-book/libreoffice-62-calc-guide/26019667
The LibreOffice Quality Assurance ( QA ) Team is happy to announce LibreOffice 6.4 RC1 is ready for testing!
LibreOffice 6.4 will be released as final at the end of January, 2020, being LibreOffice 6.4 RC1 the third pre-release since the development of version 6.4 started in the beginning of June, 2019 ( See the release plan ). Since LibreOffice 6.4 Beta1 ( the previous pre-release ), 410 commits have been submitted to the code repository and 195 bugs have been fixed. Check the release notes to find the new features included in this version of LibreOffice.
LibreOffice 6.4 RC1 can be downloaded from here, it’s available for Linux, MacOS and Windows. ( Note that it will replace your actual installation )
In case you find any problem in this pre-release, please report it in Bugzilla ( You just need a legit email address in order to create a new account ) so it can get fixed before LibreOffice 6.4 final is released.
For help, you can contact us directly in our IRC channel.
Happy testing!!
…
For our final Community Member Monday of 2019, we talk to Saikeo Kavhanxay, who is helping with the Lao language localisation of LibreOffice…
I live in Vientiane, Laos. I am working as a full-time network engineer. My hobbys are reading books, surfing the internet and learning how to code. I also dedicate my free time to the open source community and I have contributed to other open source projects as well.
You can find me on social media – Twitter and my blog.
Currently I am contributing to LibreOffice localization for my locale. In the future I also plan to contribute to other parts of the project as well, like filing bugs, development and assisting people in my community who have questions about using LibreOffice.
I’ve been using LibreOffice for a long time, and then I realised that I want to contribute something back, so I decided to contact my locale and the LibreOffice localization community. After that, I got an opportunity to contribute to LibreOffice. I think is quite easy to get involved in the project – you can reach to your locale or the LibreOffice localization team and then they will get back to you shortly.
To avoid license issues, and due to limited budgets, some organisations in my country use LibreOffice. So, I think the LibreOffice community in Southeast Asia needs to expand more, and work on LibreOffice Online.
Thanks to Saikeo and the Lao localisation team for their great work! Everyone is welcome to join our friendly community and give us a hand with design, documentation, QA, and many other aspects of the software. It’s a great way to build up experience, meet new people and have fun!
LibreOffice was announced on September 28, 2010, with a positive feedback from tech and business media all over the world (above, two significant titles from eWeek and Linux Gizmos). To celebrate the event, The Document Foundation has organized a year long anniversary project, starting at FOSDEM in Brussels on February 1/2 and ending at POSS in Paris in early December 2020.
LibreOffice community members will attend as many FOSS events as possible, carrying stickers and swag with the anniversary logo. The author is Rania Amina from Indonesia, a member of the LibreOffice community who has already contributed with logos and 2D animations to the success of LibreOffice Indonesia Conference in 2018.
Rania Amina will attend FOSDEM in Brussels, and will also talk about the LibreOffice Theme Changer at the Open Document Editors DevRoom.
So far, in addition to FOSDEM and POSS, events have been confirmed in Nigeria (Open Source Africa), Kosovo (FLOSSK), Croatia (DORS/CLUC), Albania (OSCAL), France (Libre Graphics Meeting and OW2con), Taiwan (COSCUP and LibreOffice Asia Conference), India (Open Source India), Germany (Chemnitzer Linux-Tage, FrOSCon and the LibreOffice Conference), US (All Things Open) and Serbia (PSSOH), but several other are being currently discussed and will be announced as soon as possible.
Stay tuned !!! 2020 will be an exciting time for the LibreOffice community !!!
Draw/Impress now has support for semi-transparent shape text, next to the existing transparency support in the context of shape fill colors and shape border colors.
Here is how it looks:
What you can see is that next to the existing character color, now you can also set a transparency percentage to decide if the text should be entirely transparent, entirely opaque or something between the two.
The primary focus was Draw in this case, but this also helps PPTX support, as the importer/exporter now handles this for Impress documents as well.
All this is available in LibreOffice master (towards 6.5), so you can try it out right now, if interested.
by Popa Adrian Marius (noreply@blogger.com) at December 19, 2019 04:02 PM
Developing in C++ is not easiest thing you can do in ICT. But if you have some C++ knowledge and skills, it brings you great possibilities. What to think of building LibreOffice and working somewhere in the million lines of code? In Ankara, at the Hacettepe University’s Beytepe Campus, 40 students joining the LibreOffice Developer Bootcamp, just arrived at that point.
Muhammet Kara, Collabora Productivity developer, who gives the courses, tells:
“We have finished the 5th session/week of the Bootcamp. So far, we did the following. The first four weeks we did C++ basics, and covered topics such as syntax, operators, data types, arrays, pointers, exceptions.. You name it. On week 2, 3, and 4 the students had to do three home works /assignments. In week 5 we looked at LibreOffice development: how it is organized, who are involved, tooling, habits. And of course: what is good about contributing to LibreOffice. The next week the students should have a complete building environment. So we’ll start the real development: working on easy hacks. More on that in the next report! “
Collabora is really glad about the enthusiasm for LibreOffice development and happy to sponsor the Ankara Bootcamp.
The training program attracted much interest from the students side. In the first weeks, which were mainly about the basics of C++, were attended by 120 to 140 students were attending the course. The weekly plans for week 3 and week 4 (in Turkish), published on Muhammet Kara’s blog, show the ambitious amount of content they have been introduced to. The LibreOffice Development Bootcamp was also widely noticed beyond the sphere of the Hacettepe University. The tweets posted on the topic generated many hundreds of interactions and over ten thousand views in the social network.
In week five the specific work on LibreOffice moved more into focus. It was discussed why it makes sense to contribute to it. 40 students took part in this phase of the bootcamp, a great number if you consider that it is not a mandatory course and the demands on the participants were very challenging. The weekly sessions will be given until the end of the semester, January 2020. We will keep you updated here and report about the next weeks of the LibreOffice Developer Camp in Ankara.
The post Enthusiast students building LibreOffice – Report from Bootcamp in Ankara appeared first on Collabora Productivity.
Cambridge, United Kingdom, December 16, 2019 – Collabora Productivity, the driving force behind bringing LibreOffice to the cloud, is excited to announce a new, major release of our product CODE (Collabora Online Development Edition) 4.2.0 This release includes a fresh look, mobile improvements, improved inter-operability, new dialogs and functionality as well as a raft of bug fixes and polish. The release gives you an insight into our soon-to-be released enterprise version Collabora Online 4.2.0. CODE and Collabora Online offer privacy as well as the only truly open-source solution for working with and collaborating on rich documents in the cloud.
This major update of Collabora Online Development Edition (CODE) comes with a rich new user interface and is built onto of the stability and performance of our LTS version of LibreOffice: Collabora Office 6.2. It includes many improvements in functionality and user-friendliness. The most obvious new feature is the powerful sidebar on the right. Many settings for text and all kind of properties of objects in the documents can be easily updated here. The sidebar makes it much easier to change tables, colour settings and charts elements in the browser, with close to the same feature richness that is available in Collabora Office on the desktop. The status bar has been redesigned and our powerful function wizard is now available in Calc online. Copy and paste of rich text and content is added for online, and our responsive user interface adapts nicely to mobile phones and tablets.
When charts are selected, the sidebar now gives access to a wide range of features. For example, you can easily choose chart types from bars, lines and points, pies and more, or whether the diagram should be displayed in 3D.
Other elements of charts can now also be adjusted from the sidebar. You can now determine how and where titles and legends are displayed. Furthermore, many of the visual elements of the diagram can be adjusted here. The sidebar also allows you to define the surface colour, transparency, line types and grid lines.
Click to see that in action:
Working with formulas is important and especially for the more complex types, having help with the tenth optional parameter is good. The new function wizard does that and it is new available in Calc from now on. The function wizard grants easy access to all elements of also the most complex formulas. It shows the structure and meaning of different parts of a formula, and more.
Conditional formatting is a powerful feature in Calc. It is enables you to quickly visualize data in a spreadsheet by setting various useful rules on your sheet to adapt the cells formatting, colour, or even add icons when certain criteria are met. While a simplified set of conditional formats was previously available via an icon in the toolbar, you can now also make use of the full dialogs, to be found in the Format menu, to define and manage conditions fully.
The scaling of spreadsheets has been significantly improved in CODE 4.2.0. While in Calc you could previously only choose between two zoom factors of 100% and 200%, now fine adjustment is are possible to suit. Using the convenient (and redesigned) quick selector in the lower right corner, you can now choose your favourite zoom percentage between 33% and 200%.
The new sidebar adds many useful functions to Impress. For shapes and outlines, the size, position, colours, transparency, wrapping and so on are easy to change.
The possibilities to alter the slide master and lay out, from the sidebar, are also completely new in CODE 4.2. You can now access extensive layout functionality for slides such selecting masters, layouts and even editing your own master pages. Needless to say, that character settings, fonts types, sizes, colours and spacing can also be easily adjusted from the sidebar.
Working with images in all document types is easier, more convenient and more precise. The sidebar allows to adjust colour options, such as brightness, contrast or transparency or the red, blue and green portion of the image. Another handy feature is the adjustment of the layer settings of the images. Bring them to the foreground or arrange them in the background – all via the sidebar.
People that work online, often have many documents open simultaneously, and want to mash them together into bigger, better documents. So you’ll be glad to learn the CODE 4.2.0 introduces copying of rich formatted content along with images, charts, and other complex elements, between your online spreadsheets, documents and presentations.
For certain elements there is not only the usual colour selector, offering a palette, but also the colour picker to chose any custom colours needed. Use it with text and background in presentations, lines in spreadsheets and presentations, text and background for floating frames in text documents.
CODE 4.2.0 brings very nice enhancements when working with hyperlinks. Whenever the mouse cursor is located next to a link or on it, you will be kindly notified by a pop-up dialogue allowing the real target to be inspected and launched conveniently with a single click.
The new design of the icons embellishes the upper toolbar. The new theme is tidier has more generous spacing, and is clearer in general. It should increase productivity and reduce friction. Buttons that are selected have a clearer and more distinct highlight too.
The status bar also benefits from our visual redesign. Not only does it look cleaner, it also improves quick access to the functions located there. The language of documents can now also be set via a popup.
In Writer it is now possible to manipulate tables extensively from the sidebar and we also added easy to use in-document selection handles, choose either or both. Previously the table dialog had to be used, which was far less convenient. These handles make adjusting row height and column width very user-friendly.
You want to insert rows or columns from here? Of course! Or delete some or all of them? a click! Furthermore, the sidebar also allows you to set the background colour of the cells or to fine-tune their height and width of rows and columns. It becomes even more interesting if you select several cells. Then you can also merge them from the sidebar or distribute them evenly.
In text documents, the full table of contents can now be configured with the new dialogs. So even online, you can customize your complex table of contents in a few clicks according to your wishes. For example edit the entries and change style, background or columns.
CODE is the Collabora Online Development Edition. It contains the latest developments and is perfect for home users that want to start to run their own online office suite. It enables them to regain control of their own online documents and host them themselves in their own controlled and private environment. For them and also for tech-enthusiast, it is a low-threshold way to get involved and familiar with our online office solution. CODE gives the possibility to be the first to use new features. It will be improved continuously and our next enterprise Collabora Online product will be built from it. Note that we recommend our supported and maintained enterprise release: Collabora Online for business and production environments. CODE warns users that they might want support after 10 concurrent documents or 20 concurrent users. Find out how about the different ways to install CODE on our product page.
The post CODE 4.2.0 Released with fresh User Interface appeared first on Collabora Productivity.
In this post, I’m going to share the results of some benchmark testing I have done on multi_type_vector, which is included in the mdds library. The benchmark was done to measure the impact of the change I made recently to improve the performance on block searches, which will affect a major part of its functionality.
One of the data structures included in mdds, called multi_type_vector, stores values of different types in a single logical vector. LibreOffice Calc is one primary user of this. Calc uses this structure as its cell value store, and each instance of this value store represents a single column instance.
Internally, multi_type_vector creates multiple element blocks which are in turn stored in its parent array (primary array) as block structures. This primary array maps a logical position of a value to the actual block structure that stores it. Up to version 1.5.0, this mapping process involved a linear search that always starts from the first block of the primary array. This was because each block structure, though it stores the size of the element block, does not store its logical position. So the only way to find the right element block that intersects the logical position of a value is to scan from the first block and keep accumulating the sizes of the encountered blocks. The following diagram depicts the structure of multi_type_vector’s internal store as of 1.5.0:
The reason for not storing the logical positions of the blocks was to avoid having to update them after shifting the blocks after value insertion, which is quite common when editing spreadsheet documents.
Of course, sometimes one has to perform repeated searches to access a number of element values across a number of element blocks, in which case, always starting the search from the first block, or block 0, in every single search can be prohibitively expensive, especially when the vector is heavily fragmented.
To alleviate this, multi_type_vector provides the concept of position hints, which allows the caller to start the search from block N where N > 0. Most of multi_type_vector’s methods return a position hint which can be used for the next search operation. A position hint object stores the last position of the block that was either accessed or modified by the call. This allows the caller to chain all necessary search operations in such a way to scan the primary array no more than once for the entire sequence of search operations. It was largely inspired by std::map’s insert method which provides a very similar mechanism. The only prerequisite is that access to the elements occur in perfect ascending order. For the most part, this approach worked quite well.
The downside of this is that there are times you need to access multiple element positions and you cannot always arrange your access pattern to take advantage of the position hints. This is the case especially during multi-threaded formula cell execution routine, which Calc introduced some versions ago. This has motivated us to switch to an alternative lookup algorithm, and binary search was the obvious replacement.
Binary search is an algorithm well suited to find a target value in an array where the values are stored in sorted order. Compared to linear search, binary search performs much faster except for very small arrays. People often confuse this with binary search tree, but binary search as an algorithm does not limit its applicability to just tree structure; it can be used on arrays as well, as long as the stored values are sorted.
While it’s not very hard to implement binary search manually, the C++ standard library already provides several binary search implementations such as std::lower_bound and std::upper_bound.
The challenge for switching from linear search to binary search was to refactor multi_type_vector’s implementation to store the logical positions of the element blocks and update them real-time, as the vector gets modified. The good news is that, as of this writing, all necessary changes have been done, and the current master branch fully implements binary-search-based block position lookup in all of its operations.
To get a better idea on how this change will affect the performance profile of multi_type_vector, I ran some benchmarks, using both mdds version 1.5.0 – the latest stable release that still uses linear search, and mdds version 1.5.99 – the current development branch which will eventually become the stable 1.6.0 release. The benchmark tested the following three scenarios:
set() that modifies the block layout of the primary array. This test sets a new value to an empty vector at positions that monotonically increase by 2, until it reaches the end of the vector.set() that updates the value of the last logical element of the vector. The update happens without modifying the block layout of the primary array. Like the first test, this one also measures the performance of the block position lookup, but since the block count does not change, it is expected that the block position lookup comprises the bulk of its operation.insert() that inserts a new element block at the logical mid-point of the vector and shifts all the elements that occur below the point of insertion. The primary array of the vector is made to be already heavily fragmented prior to the insertion. This test involves both block position lookup as well as shifting of the element blocks. Since the new multi_type_vector implementation will update the positions of element blocks whose logical positions have changed, this test is designed to measure the cost of this extra operation that was previously not performed as in 1.5.0.In each of these scenarios, the code executed the target method N number of times where N was specified to be 10,000, 50,000, or 100,000. Each test was run twice, once with position hints and once without them. Each individual run was then repeated five times and the average duration was computed. In this post, I will only include the results for N = 100,000 in the interest of space.
All binaries used in this benchmark were built with a release configuration i.e. on Linux, gcc with -O3 -DNDEBUG flags was used to build the binaries, and on Windows, MSVC (Visual Studio 2017) with /MD /O2 /Ob2 /DNDEBUG flags was used.
All of the source code used in this benchmark is available in the mdds perf-test repository hosted on GitLab.
The benchmarks were performed on machines running either Linux (Ubuntu LTS 1804) or Windows with a variety of CPU’s with varying number of native threads. The following table summarizes all test environments used in this benchmark:
It is very important to note that, because of the disparity in OS environments, compilers and compiler flags, one should NOT compare the absolute values of the timing data to draw any conclusions about CPU’s relative performance with each other.
This scenario tests a set of operations that consists of first seeking the position of a block that intersects with the logical position, then setting a new value to that block which causes that block to split and a new value block inserted at the point of split. The test repeats this process 100,000 times, and in each iteration the block search distance progressively increases as the total number of blocks increases. In Calc’s context, scenarios like this are very common especially during file load.
Without further ado, here are the results:
You can easily see that the binary search (1.5.99) achieves nearly the same performance as the linear search with position hints in 1.5.0. Although not very visible in these figures due to the scale of the y-axes, position hints are still beneficial and do provide small but consistent timing reduction in 1.5.99.
The nature of what this scenario tests is very similar to that of the previous scenario, but the cost of the block position lookup is much more emphasized while the cost of the block creation is eliminated. Although the average durations in 1.5.0 without position hints are consistently higher than their equivalent values from the previous scenario across all environments, the overall trends do remain similar.
This last scenario was included primarily to test the cost of updating the stored block positions after the blocks get shifted, as well as to quantify how much increase this overhead would cause relative to 1.5.0. In terms of Calc use case, this operation roughly corresponds with inserting new rows and shifting of existing non-empty rows downward after the insertion.
Without further ado, here are the results:
These results do indicate that, when compared to the average performance of 1.5.0 with position hints, the same operation can be 4 to 6 times more expensive in 1.5.99. Without position hints, the new implementation is more expensive to a much lesser degree. Since the scenario tested herein is largely bottlenecked by the block position updates, use of position hints seems to only provide marginal benefit.
Faced with this dilemma of increased overhead, I did some research to see if there is a way to reduce the overhead. The suspect code in question is in fact a very simple loop, and all its does is to add a constant value to a known number of blocks:
template
void multi_type_vector<_CellBlockFunc, _EventFunc>::adjust_block_positions(size_type block_index, size_type delta)
{
size_type n = m_blocks.size();
if (block_index >= n)
return;
for (; block_index < n; ++block_index)
m_blocks[block_index].m_position += delta;
}
Since the individual block positions can be updated entirely independent of each other, I decided it would be worthwhile to experiment with the following two types of parallelization techniques. One is loop unrolling, the other is OpenMP. I found these two techniques attractive for this particular case, for they both require very minimal code change.
Adding support for OpenMP was rather easy, since all one has to do is to add a #pragma line immediately above the loop you intend to parallelize, and add an appropriate OpenMP flag to the compiler when building the code.
Adding support for loop unrolling took a little fiddling around, but eventually I was able to make the necessary change without breaking any existing unit test cases. After some quick experimentation, I settled with updating 8 elements per iteration.
After these changes were done, the above original code turned into this:
template
void multi_type_vector<_CellBlockFunc, _EventFunc>::adjust_block_positions(int64_t start_block_index, size_type delta)
{
int64_t n = m_blocks.size();
if (start_block_index >= n)
return;
#ifdef MDDS_LOOP_UNROLLING
// Ensure that the section length is divisible by 8.
int64_t len = n - start_block_index;
int64_t rem = len % 8;
len -= rem;
len += start_block_index;
#pragma omp parallel for
for (int64_t i = start_block_index; i < len; i += 8)
{
m_blocks[i].m_position += delta;
m_blocks[i+1].m_position += delta;
m_blocks[i+2].m_position += delta;
m_blocks[i+3].m_position += delta;
m_blocks[i+4].m_position += delta;
m_blocks[i+5].m_position += delta;
m_blocks[i+6].m_position += delta;
m_blocks[i+7].m_position += delta;
}
rem += len;
for (int64_t i = len; i < rem; ++i)
m_blocks[i].m_position += delta;
#else
#pragma omp parallel for
for (int64_t i = start_block_index; i < n; ++i)
m_blocks[i].m_position += delta;
#endif
}
I have made the loop-unrolling variant of this method a compile-time option and kept the original method intact to allow on-going comparison. The OpenMP part didn’t need any special pre-processing since it can be turned on and off via compiler flag with no impact to the code itself. I needed to switch the loop counter from the original size_type (which is a typedef to size_t) to int64_t so that the code can be built with OpenMP enabled on Windows, using MSVC. Apparently the Microsoft Visual C++ compiler requires the loop counter to be a signed integer for the code to even build with OpenMP enabled.
With these changes in, I wrote a separate test code just to benchmark the insert-and-shift scenario with all permutations of loop-unrolling and OpenMP. The number of threads to use for OpenMP was not specified during the test, which would cause OpenMP to automatically use all available native threads.
With all of this out of the way, let’s look at the results:
Here, LU and OMP stand for loop unrolling and OpenMP, respectively. The results from each machine consist of four groups each having two timing values, one with 1.5.0 and one with 1.5.99. Since 1.5.0 does not use neither loop unrolling nor OpenMP, its results show no variance between the groups, which is expected. The numbers for 1.5.99 are generally much higher than those of 1.5.0, but the use of OpenMP brings the numbers down considerably. Although how much OpenMP reduced the average duration varies from machine to machine, the number of available native threads likely plays some role. The reduction by OpenMP on Core i5 6300U (which comes with 4 native threads) is approximately 30%, the number on Ryzen 7 1700X (with 16 native threads) is about 70%, and the number on Core i7 4790 (with 8 native threads) is about 50%. The relationship between the native thread count and the rate of reduction somewhat follows a linear trend, though the numbers on Xeon E5-2697 v4, which comes with 32 native threads, deviate from this trend.
The effect of loop unrolling, on the other hand, is visible only to a much lesser degree; in all but two cases it has resulted in a reduction of 1 to 7 percent. The only exceptions are the Ryzen 7 without OpenMP which denoted an increase of nearly 16%, and the Xeon E5630 with OpenMP which denoted a slight increase of 0.1%.
The 16% increase with the Ryzen 7 environment may well be an outlier, since the other test in the same environment (with OpenMP enabled) did result in a reduction of 7% – the highest of all tested groups.
Hopefully the results presented in this post are interesting and provide insight into the nature of the change in multi_type_vector in the upcoming 1.6.0 release. But what does this all mean, especially in the context of LibreOffice Calc? These are my personal thoughts.
I may invest some time looking into potential use of GPU offloading to see if that would further speed up the block position update operations. The benefit of loop unrolling was not as great as I had hoped, but this may be highly CPU and compiler dependent. I will likely continue to dig deeper into this and keep on experimenting.
In common with other Collabora Productivity products, this new Android release enables people to edit their documents without compromising on privacy. There is no longer a reason to hand over your data to get rich mobile editing.
The new release marks the end of a period of rewriting important parts of the application. We now share much of the code and user experience from Collabora Online’s collaborative editor as well as Collabora Office 6.2 for displaying the documents.
(minimal version Android 5.0)
The technology under the hood has changed almost completely, with only the LibreOffice core for rendering the documents remained. We removed the previous Fennec tiled renderer, and moved to re-use a our Collabora Online web view. This means our Android app can share the same features as our flagship product Collabora Online. The recently released Collabora Office for iOS uses the same approach. As a result, features and improvements and fixes made foor one solution (online, mobile, desktop) often enhance all the others. The Javascript and CSS base makes contributing to and developing and debugging the app much simpler for people to get involved with.
Once you have got Collabora Office (Google Play), your feedback is much appreciated. Report any problems you find to the bug tracker, and attach any documents related to the issue so developers can investigate. You can also checkout the Online code and build it yourself.
The road to the current version of the Android app was a long one, one with many companions and some detours. The first version that brought LibreOffice to the Android platform was released in 2011 after an intensive process of cross-compiling and a number of bug fixes. This version was rather a proof of concept and by no means suitable for productive work.
Two years later, in 2013, the application had developed into a document viewer rendering entire pages and including basic user interface to handle pages. During the years 2014 to 2015, the rendering was changed to split the pages into „tiles“, the same way as other applications like Mozilla Firefox were doing. We have extracted the Mozilla’s compositing from their code and reused it in our Android app – still only a viewer. Later in this period, editing was added as an experimental feature.
Between 2016 and 2018 further features and functions were implemented thanks to community involvement, however the vision of a full editor was not realized.
In 2019 we decided to do a complete rewrite of everything above the LibreOffice rendering core. Inspiration for this was the development of the new Collabora Office for iOS app, which Collabora is driving forward together with our Swiss partner Adfinis SyGroup. The current, newly developed Android app benefits greatly from the Collabora Online code base and work for the iOS version and includes also features implemented this year during the GSoC, mentored by our engineers.
This new Office app for Android obviously came by a huge investment from Collabora. As with all open source projects, it has also been made possible by the open source community as a whole, by many organizations and the personal dedication of many individuals that contributed. Specifically, for this Android app we want to mention the initial Android port funded by SUSE. The initial app used the tiled rendering funded by CloudOn, and was driven by Smoose, IceWarp and many customers of Collabora Productivity. The Document Foundation’s donors also funded the initial basic editing functionality.
Without ever doing justice to the entire crowd of supporters, we would like to thank a few people whose performance in this development has been outstanding. At this point, we would like to mention the pioneering work of our fellow two collaborators Tor Lillqvist and Michael Meeks and on the initial version of the App that among others included a first loader developed by Iain Billiet, during his GSoC ‘12 program and other components by Matúš Kukan.
Tomaž Vajngerl contributed to the already mentioned tiled rendering to the app in 2014/2105. Miklos Vajna’s efforts made editing possible at that stage. Christian Lohmaier, Ximeng Zu, and Mert Tumer have made important and substantial contributions by adding more features to the toolbar in the last few years.
Tor Lillquist was also responsible for the development of the Collabora Office for iOS app, which had a significant influence on the version for Android, and was made possible thanks to the great personal commitment of Nicolas Christener of Adfinis SyGroup. Thank you to Kaishu Sahu for his large amount of features programmed during the GSoC this summer, while our team member Jan Holesovsky has been the main developer of the current release.
Would you like to be part of the story ? get involved today.
Collabora Productivity is the driving force behind putting LibreOffice in the cloud, providing Collabora Online and a range of products and consulting to enterprise and government. Powered by the largest team of certified LibreOffice engineers in the world, it is a leading contributor to the LibreOffice codebase and community. Collabora Office for Desktop and Collabora Online provide a business-hardened office suite with long-term, multi-platform support. Collabora Productivity is a division of Collabora, the global software consultancy dedicated to providing the benefits of Open Source to the commercial world, specializing in mobile, automotive and consumer electronics industries. For more information, visit www.collaboraoffice.com or follow @CollaboraOffice on Twitter.
The post New: Collabora Office for Android appeared first on Collabora Productivity.
585 bugs, 67 of which are enhancements, have been reported by 365 people.
Top 10 Reporters
652 bugs have been triaged by 76 people.
Top 10 Triagers
610 bugs have been set to RESOLVED.
Check the following sections for more information about bugs resolved as FIXED, WORKSFORME and DUPLICATE.
236 bugs have been fixed by 43 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
106 bugs have been retested by 40 people.
Top 10 testers
131 bugs have been duplicated by 29 people.
Top 10 testers
104 bugs have been verified by 20 people.
Top 10 Verifiers
241 bugs have been categorized with a metabug by 32 people.
Top 10 Categorizers
114 bugs have been set as regressions by 24 people.
Top 10
99 bugs have been bisected by 13 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 Roman Kuznetsov (noreply@blogger.com) at December 05, 2019 10:04 AM
Im deutschsprachigen LibreOffice-Projekt ist es bewährte Tradition, mindestens ein Projektwochenende im Jahr abzuhalten. Derzeit laufen die Planungen für das erste Treffen in 2020 – und du kannst dabei sein!
Neben den regelmäßigen Telefonkonferenzen sind persönliche Treffen durch nichts zu ersetzen, ermöglichen sie uns doch, gemeinsame Aktionen, Projekte und Veranstaltungen zu koordinieren, uns gegenseitig besser kennenzulernen – und natürlich auch neue Projektmitglieder und Interessierte herzlich willkommen zu heißen.
Für gewöhnlich treffen wir uns von Freitagnachmittag bis Sonntagmittag. Um die Terminplanung zu erleichtern, haben wir eine Umfrage aufgesetzt. Wenn du Lust hast, in eines der großen Open-Source-Projekte hineinzuschnuppern, die “Macher” hinter dem Programm kennen zu lernen und selbst bei uns mitzumachen, dann ist das die ideale Gelegenheit dazu!
| Render method | FPS |
|---|---|
| Linux gen (X11) | 86 |
| Linux gtk3 | 70-90 |
| Linux OpenGL | 45 |
| Linux Skia Vulkan (GPU) | 65-90 |
| Linux Skia raster (CPU) | 5 |
| Windows GDI | 64 |
| Windows OpenGL | 40-60 |
| Windows Skia Vulkan (GPU) | 175-185 |
| Windows Skia raster (CPU) | 75-85 |
by llunak (noreply@blogger.com) at November 28, 2019 10:48 AM
by caolan (noreply@blogger.com) at November 23, 2019 08:26 PM
Impress now has a much improved math handling in its importer from PPTX, eliminating annoying duplicated objects you had to delete after import, manually.
First, thanks TU Dresden who made this work by Collabora possible.
Here is how it looks:
What you can see is that the in the old case we managed to read both the actual math object and its replacement image from PPTX, which caused visible duplication due to working transparency handling. The new way just imports the math objects, and ignores the replacement graphic.
This new way (handling of the OOXML a14 feature flag) is enabled by default, except for Calc
documents, where more works is needed before it can be enabled.
All this is available in LibreOffice master (towards 6.4), so you can try it out right now, if interested.
On November 13 more than 120 students in Ankara Hacettepe University’s Beytepe Campus joined the first session of the LibreOffice Developer Bootcamp, a course for students with interest in C++. There is a session every week, until the end of the semester.
The announcement of the course was received with enthusiasm at Twitter!
The first sessions gave a broad introduction on the course, Free Software & Open Source, LibreOffice & Collabora and requirements for the course. And after that, really into development: installations & setup, different IDEs, git, gcc, clang and the basics of C++.
The instructor of this course, Muhammet Kara, recently also held a talk about Google Summer of Code. Starting from that point, then doing a project for LibreOffice, he grew to a developer working for Collabora.
People at Hacettepe University, Ankara, are exited by story of @muhamm3tkara
starting with joining #GSOC then volunteer for @libreoffice and now developer for @CollaboraOffice, major contributor in the #LibreOffice-ecosystem
Thanks for sharing & helping others, Muhammethttps://t.co/m10WCfPhx8
— Collabora Office (@CollaboraOffice) November 10, 2019
After the first session, Muhammet tells “There were many enthusiastic participants, even some from outside the town. I’m sure that at the end of the course, there will be many students with pretty good skills in C++ and LibreOffice development.”
This course in Ankara can be organized thanks to of course support of the Hacettepe University for the use of the amphitheater, Hacettepe ACM Student Chapter for the local/logistics organization, Collabora for sponsoring, and the enthusiasm and knowledge that Collabora developer Muhammet Kara is putting into it.
The weekly sessions will be given until the end of the semester, January next year. So if you’re motivated and love open source.. you may still be able to join 
!
The post Collabora sponsoring LibreOffice Developer Bootcamp in Ankara appeared first on Collabora Productivity.
The LibreOffice Quality Assurance ( QA ) Team is happy to announce LibreOffice 6.4 Beta1 is ready for testing!
LibreOffice 6.4 will be released as final at the beginning of February, 2020 ( Check the Release Plan ) being LibreOffice 6.4 Beta1 the second pre-release since the development of version 6.4 started in the beginning of June, 2019. Since then, 5677 commits have been submitted to the code repository and more than 850 bugs have been set to FIXED in Bugzilla. Check the release notes to find the new features included in this version of LibreOffice.
LibreOffice 6.4 Beta1 can be downloaded from here 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 Telegram.
Happy testing!!
…
With 18 editions, 318 talks and a total of 291 speakers, SFScon, the annual European Free Software conference for public administrations, citizens and private companies is scheduled from November 15 to the 16. CIB is proud to be once again at this year´s event. Several good reasons to attend the conference: • a list of … CIB attends the South Tyrol Free Software Conference – SFScon 2019 weiterlesen
Der Beitrag CIB attends the South Tyrol Free Software Conference – SFScon 2019 erschien zuerst auf CIB Blog.
by Chris Sherlock (noreply@blogger.com) at November 13, 2019 08:11 AM
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