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by Popa Adrian Marius (noreply@blogger.com) at November 25, 2022 02:52 PM
by caolan (noreply@blogger.com) at November 24, 2022 03:39 PM
Berlin, November 24, 2022 – LibreOffice 7.4.3 Community, the third maintenance release of LibreOffice 7.4, the volunteer-supported office suite for personal productivity on the desktop, is immediately available from https://www.libreoffice.org/download for Windows (Intel and Arm processors), macOS (Apple M1 and Intel processors), and Linux.
LibreOffice offers the highest level of compatibility in the office suite market segment, with native support for the OpenDocument Format (ODF) – beating proprietary formats for security and robustness – to superior support for MS Office files, to filters for a large number of legacy document formats, to return ownership and control to users.
A description of all new features of the LibreOffice 7.4.x releases is available in the Release Notes: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleaseNotes/7.4
A video summarizing the top new features in LibreOffice 7.4 Community is available on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PC8M4UzqpqE and PeerTube: https://peertube.opencloud.lu/w/myZUTCytN28kuxDa5VXNgh.
LibreOffice Technology Platform
Products based on the LibreOffice Technology platform – the transactional engine shared by all LibreOffice based products, which provides a rock solid solution with a high level of coherence and interoperability – are available for major desktop operating systems (Windows, macOS, Linux and Chrome OS), for mobile platforms (Android and iOS), and for the cloud.
For enterprise-class deployments, TDF strongly recommends the LibreOffice Enterprise family of applications from ecosystem partners – for desktop, mobile and cloud – with a large number of dedicated value-added features and other benefits such as SLA (Service Level Agreements): https://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-in-business/. All code developed by ecosystem companies for enterprise customers is shared with the community and improves the LibreOffice Technology platform.
LibreOffice – thanks to its mature codebase, rich feature set, strong support for open standards, excellent compatibility and LTS options from certified partners – is the ideal solution for businesses that want to regain control of their data and free themselves from vendor lock-in.
Availability of LibreOffice 7.4.3 Community
LibreOffice 7.4.3 Community is available from: https://www.libreoffice.org/download/. Minimum requirements for proprietary operating systems are Microsoft Windows 7 SP1 and Apple macOS 10.12. LibreOffice Technology-based products for Android and iOS are listed here: https://www.libreoffice.org/download/android-and-ios/
Users still deploying the LibreOffice 7.3 family because of the additional testing and bug fixing, should switch immediately to LibreOffice 7.4.3, which has been extensively tested by millions of users worldwide, as the older version will reach the end of life and will not be maintained after November 30, 2022.
The Document Foundation does not provide technical support for users, although they can get it from volunteers on user mailing lists and the Ask LibreOffice website: https://ask.libreoffice.org
LibreOffice users, free software advocates and community members can support The Document Foundation with a donation at https://www.libreoffice.org/donate
Earlier in 2022, together with more than 100 European organisations and companies, The Document Foundation has signed the #OpenLetter about the universal right to install any software on any device. Join us and sign the letter today.
To: Legislators in the European Union
In copy: Citizens of the European Union
The universal right to freely choose operating systems, software and services
Software design is crucial for the ecodesign and sustainability of products and hardware. Free Software systems and services enable reuse, repurposing and interoperability of devices. The universal right to freely choose operating systems, software and services is crucial for a more sustainable digital society.
The ongoing digitization of infrastructures and services comes along with a continuously growing number of electronic devices that are connected to the Internet – be it in private, public or business environments. Many of these devices need more energy and natural resources to be produced than the energy they consume during their entire lifespan. And way too many of these devices are being wasted and not reparable simply because the software stops working or is not being updated anymore.
Once the pre-installed software stops users from continuing to use their hardware, restrictive ownership models prevent users from helping themselves to enjoy longer use of their devices. Restrictions span from physically locking down hardware, to technical obscurity by using proprietary software, to legal restrictions via software licenses and end user license agreements. This way, manufacturers often prohibit repairability, access and reuse of their devices. Even after purchase, customers often do not really own their devices. They are not able to do what they want with their very own devices. If you cannot install the software you want on your own device – you don’t own it.
We, the signees of this open letter,
That is why we ask legislators around Europe to make use of the historic chance and enable a more sustainable use of electronic products and devices with a universal right to install and run any software on any device. To this end, we demand that:
Users have the right to freely choose operating systems and software running on their devices
Our tablets, phones and other connected devices are general purpose computers. Replacing software and operating systems on these devices enables us to extend the initial lifespan of a device and to make full use of our hardware. For the ability to reuse and repurpose our resources in a creative and sustainable way we need the universal right to install and develop any operating system and software we want on any of our devices. Any legal, technical or other obstacles to reuse these devices for any purpose must not be allowed.
Users have the right to freely choose between service providers to connect their devices with
Users must have the free choice of providers offering software related services, meaning they can use the device from one manufacturer with the service provided by another. Many connected clients today go to waste simply because their online services go offline. Free choice of services allows these clients to be reused by connecting to another service.
Operating systems and embedded software determine possible interactions between generic sensors, modules and systems with their connected online services. For users to exercise free choice of services, they must be able to use the device from one manufacturer with any online service, which could be supplied by any other third party or by themselves. Connected services as well as the software on connected devices and applications must offer interoperability and full functionality of a device’s initial purpose with the use of Open Standards.
Devices are interoperable and compatible with open standards
Software designs and architectures determine accessibility and compatibility of hardware via standards, drivers, tools, and interfaces. Proprietary software and protocols hinder competition among manufacturers, undermine repairability of devices and create an artificial incompatibility of different devices within the same infrastructure. Interoperability of single devices however is crucial for the creation of sufficient, sustainable and long-lasting IT infrastructures. To enable interoperability, manufacturers must ensure that any data necessary to run a device’s primary function is compatible with and possible to import/export in open standards.
Source code of drivers, tools, and interfaces are published under a free license
Smaller components of a device often require specific drivers, tools, and interfaces to operate. Users need full access and free reusability of the source code of those drivers, tools, and interfaces to analyse and integrate a device within a set of interconnected devices from different manufacturers. Source code reusability is also key to exercise the full right to repair for any third-parties from professional repair shops to repair cafés to end users.
A free license is any license that gives everyone the four freedoms to use, study, share and improve the software, including Free Software and Open Source Software licenses. The obligation to publish drivers, tools, and interfaces under such a free license after market entry is key for full access to our devices and exercising the universal right to repair.
To sign the open letter, you can click on the following link: Open Letter about the universal right to install any software on any device
We have a new team member at The Document Foundation, the non-profit entity behind LibreOffice! (That means we’re now 13 people.) Stéphane Guillou joins us as a Quality Assurance Analyst – so let’s get to know him better:
I am from France, with roots also in Peru, but lived for the last 10 years in Australia with my awesome little family before coming back to France. We now live in Alsace, close to the forest in the Vosges mountains.
I studied plants, ecology and sustainability before working in agricultural research. I am still very passionate about plants and the environment, but my focus has moved towards supporting researchers in their data analysis, promoting Open Science principles and offering training about FLOSS research software, which I was able to do for the last 4 years at the University of Queensland’s Library, and before that as a certified instructor of the Carpentries organisation.
I am passionate about sharing information about Open Science, and contributing data to the Commons. You can for example find me on other wonderful projects like OpenStreetMap, iNaturalist and MusicBrainz.
When I am not parenting or working, I like spending time on electronic music, amateur radio and cycling.
I am the new Quality Assurance (QA) Analyst, and a lot of my time will be spent on triaging the issues users report on Bugzilla – our bug-reporting platform. There is a lot of activity on Bugzilla, and classifying and testing the reports is fundamental for us to focus on the most pressing issues, help the work developers are doing, and keep improving the software for everyone! Part of the work will also be to analyse and summarise the wealth of data available to help us see the bigger picture and make better decisions when allocating resources.
I have used LibreOffice since it was first released in 2011, and have always liked reporting problems and helping out with the QA process in little bursts, just like I like doing with any FLOSS tool I use. I feel it’s a great way to give back to the community.
Everyone can help our QA project by first using the software, and reporting problems when you encounter them. Have a look if the issue has been reported before, and if not, you might have found a new one! It’s important to not assume that someone has reported the issue before you. LibreOffice is a very customisable and rich office suite, so people use it in vastly different ways.
If you want to help some more, feel free to install development versions to test them, look at reports on Bugzilla to confirm issues and classify them, identify exactly when an issue arose (it’s called “bibisecting“), and share your learnings and processes with others! There is a wealth of tasks you can start on on our Wiki.
Thank you for your help building an office suite for all!
We’re really happy to have Stéphane on board! Donations from LibreOffice users help us to grow our team, maintain our infrastructure and support the communities working on LibreOffice. Support us here!
Did you know? You can dock colour palettes in many places in LibreOffice Draw. Here’s a quick video from Harald Berger, from the German LibreOffice community:
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Here’s a new batch of talks from the recent LibreOffice Conference 2022! Watch the individual videos below, or click here to view the playlist.
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Do you want to submit a patch to LibreOffice Gerrit, and you’re wondering if your code will be accepted or not? Other than providing a good solution to resolve a problem (fix a bug, implement a feature or enhancement), you should care about the code conventions, and in particular, code formatting. Suitable code formatting for LibreOffice is what we discuss here.
LibreOffice is based on the old code base of OpenOffice. Because of that, LibreOffice uses the coding conventions of OpenOffice in most places. There is a list of rules that you can refer to when needed, in the OpenOffice Wiki:
Here is a comprehensive list of C++ coding rules:
You can see many rules and standards there – beyond code formatting – from design to the way you should declare and implement classes, and their functions and variables. You will also find topics about how to create header files, how to document code and how to achieve type safety.
But, focusing only on C++ code formatting, you should make sure that:
These rules have their own name in the OpenOffice code formatting conventions.
Let’s look at this code snippet from a C++ file: chart2/qa/extras/charttest.hxx.
uno::Sequence < OUString > ChartTest::getImpressChartColumnDescriptions( std::u16string_view pDir, const char* pName )
{
uno::Reference< chart::XChartDocument > xChartDoc = getChartDocFromImpress( pDir, pName );
uno::Reference< chart::XChartDataArray > xChartData ( xChartDoc->getData(), uno::UNO_QUERY_THROW);
uno::Sequence < OUString > seriesList = xChartData->getColumnDescriptions();
return seriesList;
}
As you can see, in the old OpenOffice style, there is a space after the starting parenthesis (, and also before the ending parenthesis ). Also, before and after <>. This might look old fashioned, but this is the way old code is written, and you are supposed to avoid changing the old code only for making it look better! I am going to describe why.
There is a very good reason to keep the old style code formatting. To understand the code, and possible problems, developers usually refer to the code, and its history. Thus, it is important to keep the history of the code clean.
To achieve this, experienced developers suggest that you should avoid changing the formatting of the code, even if you are tempted to do so! Changing spacing, curly braces and other things in order to look nicer will pollute the git history.
The nice tool git blame can show who to blame for each line of code! If you change the code format randomly, you may prevent other developers to understand the root cause of the change, and thus fixing the problems more difficult.
For the newer files, the story is different! You are not only encouraged to use the nice looking new coding style, but git hooks also prevents you from submitting a code that does not conform with the new code formatting conventions! If your code does not conform to the new code conventions, you will see this error message:
ERROR: The above differences were found between the code to commit
and the clang-format rules. Tips:
- You may run '/opt/lo/bin/clang-format -i <problematic file>' to fix up style automatically.
- See solenv/clang-format/README on where to get the required version of clang-format binaries.
- If you renamed an excluded file, update solenv/clang-format/excludelist accordingly to keep it excluded.
solenv/clang-format/check-last-commit: KO
Makefile:485: recipe for target 'clang-format-check' failed
make: *** [clang-format-check] Error 1As the tip suggests, there is a tool named clang-format that does the formatting automatically for you. You only need to invoke:
/opt/lo/bin/clang-format -i <your-new-source-file.cxx>
You can read more about how to set up and use clang-format here:
One nice thing about thing about clang-format binary is that you can instruct your IDE to use this binary to do the formatting for you with a simple shortcut.
LibreOffice source code in Visual Studio Code
Each new file should have appropriate header and footer. You can look at TEMPLATE.SOURCECODE.HEADER and find an appropriate header and footer for you source code.
If you had problems with code formatting, try to read the above instructions and clean up your code. If you have tried but you couldn’t, that’s not a problem! Just ask me for help. I will try to help you format your code according to the LibreOffice coding conventions. Be bold and try to have your code merged in the LibreOffice code! You can learn more about how to get started with LibreOffice development here:
Bruce Byfield and Jean Hollis Weber announce the second edition of Designing with LibreOffice. The book is available as an .ODT or .PDF file under the Creative Commons Attribution/Sharealike License version 4.0 or later from https://designingwithlibreoffice.com/
The first edition was published in 2016, and was downloaded over thirty-five thousand times. Michael Meeks, one of the co-founders of LibreOffice, described the first edition as “an outstanding contribution to help people bring the full power of LibreOffice into their document.” Similarly, free software author and journalist Carla Schroder wrote, “Designing With LibreOffice teaches everything you need to know about document production…. suitable for beginners to wizened old pros, who will probably discover things about LibreOffice that they didn’t know.”
The second edition updates the original, removing outdated information and adding updated screenshots and new information about topics such as Harfbuzz font shaping codes, export to EPUB formats for ereaders, the Zotero extension for bibliographies, and Angry Reviewer, a Grammarly-like extension for editing diction. In the future, the writers plan to release other editions as necessary to keep Designing with LibreOffice current.
For more information or interviews, contact Bruce Byfield at bbyfield@axion.net.
Kudos to Ilmari Lauhakangas for helping to elaborate this list.
528 bugs, 61 of which are enhancements, have been reported by 322 people.
Top 10 Reporters
437 bugs have been triaged by 85 people.
Top 10 Triagers
464 bugs have been set to RESOLVED.
Check the following sections for more information about bugs resolved as FIXED, WORKSFORME and DUPLICATE.
190 bugs have been fixed by 35 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
58 bugs have been retested by 31 people.
Top 10 testers
The LibreOffice Conference 2022 (LibOCon) took place from September 28 to October 1 in Milan. It was the first LibreOffice Conference since the outbreak of the COVID-19 Pandemic that took place as an in-person event. Collabora was one of the sponsors, and a significant number of our developers contributed talks on various aspects of LibreOffice technology. Did you miss any of those? Don’t worry! All our talks are available for you on YouTube inside our LibOCon playlist. Please also feel free to download the slides we included in this blog post.
Michael Meeks, Managing Director of Collabora Productivity, takes a look at the latest developments in LibreOffice from an organisational and ecosystem perspective. See details 
Hear Michael Meeks tell the history of LibreOffice in the browser. From it’s pre-historic past as StarPortal, through gtk-broadway prototypes, to Collabora Online as we know it today. See details
During the Quality Assurance track, Sarper Akdemir explained how to fix an interoperability bug by showcasing the whole process of understanding, fixing, and implementing tests. See details
Sparklines are mini charts, that are drawn into a cell. In his talk, senior software engineer Tomaž Vajngerl presented the features and the challenges during the development. See details
While LibreOffice and Collabora Office were already capable of filling forms via form controls or form fields, they can now also fully represent content controls. In this talk by Senior Software Engineer Miklos Vajna, see how this work was implemented! See details
Collabora Productivity created Collabora Online, a powerful online office suite, which you can integrate into your own infrastructure. It prioritises your digital sovereignty and provides you with all the tools to keep your data secure, without compromising on features. Collabora provides a wide range of products, as well as consulting services for enterprises and governments. Powered by the largest team of certified LibreOffice engineers in the world, Collabora is a leading contributor to the LibreOffice Technology codebase and community. Collabora Office for Desktop and Collabora Online provide a business-hardened office suite with long-term support. Collabora’s multi-platform policy is completed with Collabora Office for iOS, Android, and Chrome OS. Collabora Productivity is a division of Collabora, the global software consultancy dedicated to providing the benefits Open Source to the commercial world, specializing in mobile, automotive and consumer electronics industries. For more information, follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube.
The post Collabora’s Contributions to the LibreOffice Conference 2022 in Milan appeared first on Collabora Office and Collabora Online.
One category of the bugs that we see in computer programs including LibreOffice is the unexpected crashes. You’re working with the application, and it is suddenly closed! In the previous part, I have discussed crashes that are caused by segmentation fault. In this article, I discuss the crashes from invoking abort() function. Please note that not an abort is not always a bad thing, or a bug.
In C/C++ sometimes we have to check the validity of certain conditions, and avoid certain bad situations. We do that to avoid data corruption or other problems that leads us to terminate the application instead of trying to continue.
This is different from normal error handling routines, because in error handling, we usually try to find errors, find ways out of the problem automatically, or ask user to fix the problem by changing the input and things like that. But, this is not always the case.
If you search for abort in the .cxx files, you will find a lot abort() usages:
git grep "abort(" *.cxx
Let’s look at some example. When writing tests, one of the problems that may occur while testing font rendering is the font fallback because of using fonts that are not available via LibreOffice. In this situation, it is better to stop the test application, so that the developers understand that they should use fonts that are available via LibreOffice. You can look vcl/unx/generic/fontmanager/fontconfig.cxx for more information.
Another example is the problem with the GPU. If you look at vcl/skia/gdiimpl.cxx, you can see this code. The comments explain the situation. When we run out of memory, the error is “unrecoverable without possible data loss”. So, the best thing that we can do, is to abort the program.
// If there's a problem with the GPU context, abort.
if (GrDirectContext* context = GrAsDirectContext(mSurface->getCanvas()->recordingContext()))
{
// Running out of memory on the GPU technically could be possibly recoverable,
// but we don't know the exact status of the surface (and what has or has not been drawn to it),
// so in practice this is unrecoverable without possible data loss.
if (context->oomed())
{
SAL_WARN("vcl.skia", "GPU context has run out of memory, aborting.");
abort();
}
// Unrecoverable problem.
if (context->abandoned())
{
SAL_WARN("vcl.skia", "GPU context has been abandoned, aborting.");
abort();
}
}
Generally speaking, the developer should try to recover from the errors, but in the end, some unrecoverable errors may remain, and the developer might decide to do an abort().
On the other hand, sometimes it is possible to avoid doing an abort(), and recover from an error. In such a case, fixing the crash would involve finding a way out of the problem, and continuing the normal execution of the program.
For example, take a look at tdf#138022 – LibreOffice exits/crashes when minimizing start center after closing a document (SKIA). This issue is fixed in this patch:
commit 42e30c24615402c49351f80cc8a47d61d47267c6
Author: Jan-Marek Glogowski Date: Mon Nov 16 22:43:51 2020 +0100 tdf#138022 Skia don't recreate empty surfaces Skia can't create empty surfaces, so the recreation will hit the std::abort() in SkiaSalGraphicsImpl::createWindowSurface. Origin of the backtrace is some queued Resize event, which will hit this a few times via SkiaSalGraphicsImpl::checkSurface. This feels a bit like tdf#130831, where VCL tried to track damange for an empty Qt image...
The idea of the fix is that Skia can not re-create empty surfaces, so when resizing events are queued, recreation of the surface will lead to an std::abort. To avoid this, Jan-Marek changed the code. Now LibreOffice does not re-create the surface in the case that both width and height of the surface are zero. Other than that, instead of using recreateSurface(), it uses two commands destroySurface() and then createSurface().
We have a meta tag dedicated to the crash bugs in Bugzilla. All the bugs related to the crashes are listed there:
tdf#133092 (Crash) – [META] Crash bugs
Other than that, we have EasyHacks related to the crashes. Some of them are discussed in our previous post, “Crashes that you can fix! – EasyHack“. You can try fixing them!
Writer now supports titles and tags for content controls, which helps providing context for the filled in text even if the placeholder text is replaced already.
This work is primarily for Collabora Online, see the previous post for background.
Once several content controls are added to a document, it's easy to forget what was the exact purpose of what content control. Think of a press release for example – those regularly start with a location and a date, but once this information is provided, one no longer knows which content control was for which content.
Titles solve this problem for the user: similar to Writer's header/footer buttons, this button appears when you enter the content control and reminds you what content is expected there, even if the placeholder is already replaced.
Tags serve a similar purpose, but they are unique, machine-readable keys or identifiers, so once the form is filled in, an external consumer can easily extract the information from the document, given a specific tag.
Titles (also known as aliases) and tags are now not only preserved, but also we have a UI to create, show, edit and delete them. This is available in the desktop rendering and also in the LOK API.
Somewhat related, in case a content control breaks into multiple lines or has formatting to break into multiple text portions, we now only emit one PDF widget for it, taking the description of the widget from the content control's title.
The last related improvement is that now we handle data binding for date content controls, which means that you can specify a timestamp, a language and a date format, and we'll format that timestamp and update the content control's string value at import time from DOCX.
If you would like to know a bit more about how this works, continue reading... :-)
As usual, the high-level problem was addressed by a series of small changes:
You can get a snapshot / demo of Collabora Office 22.05 and try it out yourself right now: try the unstable snapshot. Collabora intends to continue supporting and contributing to LibreOffice, the code is merged so we expect all of this work will be available in TDF's next release too (7.5).
What comes to your mind, when you ask yourself why people use LibreOffice? A “stunning user experience” is likely not in the top list. And unfortunately we share this problem with a lot of user facing Free Software.
And there is a common reason: We value the privacy of our users.…
Collabora recruits interns to work over the summer alongside our team, and to build experience to help them assess whether they want to pursue a career in Software Engineering, but how does that work out? Meet Abi, mentored by Mert and Pedro, and intern behind the new SDK example in .NET¹. Lets hear from her:
I’m Abi, I’m studying Maths, Physics, Computer Studies and Media Studies at sixth form. I’ve been involved with the Army Cadets since 2017 and hope to join the Army Cyber Warfare Division after university.
I’ve grown up in a household that’s centralised around technology and found a passion for coding when studying Maths – I found I was quite good at it! I really enjoy the theory side of Computer Science, learning algorithms and how things are put together. I realised this more through the work I did at Collabora.
I love to start new projects but often find I don’t quite finish them! I either get stuck or I just don’t have time to finish them before I’ve started a new one. Working at Collabora, I actually managed to finish my projects which is a big achievement I hope to continue with.
It’s been a mixture of school work, camping holidays along the Norfolk coast and doing the Collabora Internship.
I’ve been creating an SDK example with .NET.
It’s a basic version of the Collabora Online space using a different framework. If someone wanted to start building on COOL in a certain language, they can start to understand how the communication happens between the server and the computer it’s run on. Then they can build what they need on top of it in a multitude of languages.
I mainly wanted to gain experience so I could make sure I was going into the right career path. I also wanted to do it because it would look good on my university application and personal statement.
How to learn by myself but also when to ask for help when needed. I really learnt a lot about what I need to work on as both a Software Engineer and as a person so I can grow in both areas. It’s also the first time I’ve felt I’ve fully understood a (programming) language, which has given me more confidence.
Definitely! I think it was a good learning experience – it taught me personally what I want, and gave me a good insight into what a professional setting is like compared to an academic environment.
It’s great to see Abi’s work merged as a fresh new SDK example and to see how she has grown over the Summer.
Why not get involved? We love to work alongside the next generation to help them discover what a career in Software Engineering might look like. If you’ve ever considered it for yourself, get in touch today!
The post Meet Abi – Collabora Software Engineering Intern appeared first on Collabora Office and Collabora Online.
LibreOffice is now available for download from the Microsoft Store, for those users who choose or are required to get their desktop software from that channel. A small fee is charged. Here is the link.
This follows the recent release of LibreOffice through Apple’s App Store.
LibreOffice for Windows, macOS, and Linux continues to be free of charge from the LibreOffice website.
Blog post is here.
As discussed in the “crash fixes for LibreOffice, part 1: segfaults“, bugs that lead to crash in LibreOffice or other native applications can have different causes, and therefore need completely different fixes. Some of these bugs are hard to fix: you have to change the behavior of the application in order to avoid crashes.
On the other hand, there are some cases that a fix can be simple checking for a pointer to make sure that it is not NULL/nullptr before actually using it. Or, making sure that a variable has properly initialization before its use. In these cases, fixing the bug is not too hard, and a fix can be provided very quickly.
Thanks to Mike, this week we have 2 new EasyHacks of this kind:
When accessing uninitialized a TextInputStream, an exception should be thrown, in which leads to Basic run-time error. Instead, because of lack of appropriate checks, it leads to a crash.
You can debug and see the crash point by executing this LibreOffice BASIC code snippet:
Sub crash
stream = CreateUnoService("com.sun.star.io.TextInputStream")
stream.available()
End Sub
To fix this bug, one should take a look at OTextInputStream code inside core/io/source/TextInputStream/TextInputStream.cxx:53 and make sure to check and throw runtime exception where appropriate.
This second issue is a crash that happens when parsing an XML with undeclared namespace. To catch and debug such a crash, you should create a tiny xml file as described in the bug report:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <a:xml/>
Then, try to parse it with this LibreOffice BASIC script:
Sub Parse
source = CreateUnoStruct("com.sun.star.xml.sax.InputSource")
source.aInputStream = CreateUnoService("com.sun.star.ucb.SimpleFileAccess").openFileRead(ConvertToURL("path/to/file.xml"))
parser = CreateUnoService("com.sun.star.xml.sax.FastParser")
parser.ParseStream(source)
End Sub
Then, you will see that the crash happens in this part of the code in core/sax/source/fastparser/fastparser.cxx:1281:
if ( !m_bIgnoreMissingNSDecl || URI != nullptr )
sNamespace = OUString( XML_CAST( URI ), strlen( XML_CAST( URI )), RTL_TEXTENCODING_UTF8 );
If you look closely, you will understand that if m_bIgnoreMissingNSDecl is false, then the URI check to make sure that it not nullptr is not happening. And dereferencing nullptr leads to crash.
The above two EasyHacks are good for the newcomers. So, if you have some knowledge on C++ and you are able to build LibreOffice, you can work on these issues. If so, first try to gain a basic understanding of the problem. Then assign the bug to yourself and try to fix it.
Writing tests for the crash is also not a very hard task. Either a CppUnitTest, or a UITest can do the exact things that leads to crash without a fix. Then, the test will fail if a crash occurs preventing the same problem in the future.
If you search for “crash” in the LibreOffice commit titles, you can find many good examples of fixing the crashes. As an example that uses CppUnitTest, you can look at this patch:
And for a crash fix with a UITest, you can look at this patch:
EasyHacks are good starting points for the newcomers. If you want to contribute to LibreOffice code by working on this improvement, but you need to know how to get started with LibreOffice development, you can see our video tutorial:
Thank you to all who attended our COOL Days meet up in Berlin on 3rd-5th October. We had a great time organising this for our Partners, Collabora team and open source community. It was a great success and we can’t wait to do it again!
If you didn’t manage to make it this time, check out our first YouTube short which shows a 2 minute overview of our amazing time in Berlin.
On the Monday 3rd October we had our Collabora Productivity Community Team Building Day. This was a great chance to meet some of our Partners, and for the Collabora team to meet up after 3 years of travel restrictions. Many met in person for the first time and bonded over their love for retro computer games, competitive table football and the thrill of indoor skydiving!
Tuesday 4th October was our Partner Day, hosted at the Alexander Plaza Hotel. What a privilege it was to have Peter Ganten from Univention talk with us about his work to promote Digital Sovereignty, as well as hearing from members of the Collabora team about what we have been working on over the last year to build Collabora Online. We discussed the development road map for 2023 and had open discussions with our Partners about how we can support them and build closer relationships so we can work together even more successfully.
Meanwhile, the development community were taking part in a Hackfest at the bUm thanks to Nextcloud.
We all met at the bUm for our Technical Day on Wednesday 5th October. Some of our engineers, Partners and contributors presented lightning talks to show the latest developments happening at Collabora Online. It was a key chance for the community to speak directly with the engineers behind CODE and COOL, ask questions and input into the roadmap.
If you interested in seeing the slides from our lightning talks we’ve made them available on github:
UX and Community Manager, Pedro, also blogged about our time there:
You may have seen some of our team live tweeting from the event – follow us on Twitter to see updates from events and conferences throughout the year.
We hope to see you at our next COOLDays event…
November 8 - 9, 2022 – Paris, France
November 11 - 12, 2022 – Bolzano, Italy
January 17 - 18, 2023 – Bremen, Germany
The post It’s a Wrap! COOL Days 2022 was a Sky High Success! appeared first on Collabora Office and Collabora Online.
Collabora recruits interns to work over the summer alongside our team, and to build experience to help them assess whether they want to pursue a career in Software Engineering, but how does that work out? Let’s hear from Christopher:
My name is Christopher and I am currently studying Physics, Maths and Computer Science. I’ve been doing a fair amount of programming for around 4 or 5 years at home, mainly self-taught. I’ve also learnt a lot from my Dad who works as a Software and Hardware Engineer and my Grandad who is a Physicist. Outside of coding, I’ve been teaching myself to play guitar for the last year.
It was Christmas 2018 – I’d been given a coding task from my Computer Science teacher at school to make a simple game (Battleships) and I found it really interesting. As I was working on it, I got thinking how I could make it better, so I added databasing and networking functionality to it.
The most enjoyable things for me are the functionality improvements I’ve been working on over the Summer with Collabora. I’ve made small UI changes that have made a meaningful difference to the end users.
I solved an existing bug with toggling elements in the notebook bar and also worked on the ability to toggle Dark Mode. I started the template for the Admin Console, creating a foundation for clustered diagnosis.
I was told it would be valuable to get work experience in technology to help with my University application, and in the future it would look good on my CV. I originally heard about the Internship from the Computer Science department at my school – Michael Meeks came in to do a talk and I was inspired by his charisma. It made me excited to spend the Summer working on my skills through working at Collabora.
The most valuable thing for me was learning how to work as part of a team. It’s hard to get this experience at GCSE and A Level as you’re only really given small personal projects.
I don’t really know exactly what I want to work on yet! There’s so many different things you can do which is what attracted me to the industry. Having the skills is a real door opener and transferable across many industries.
Absolutely! It was challenging but stimulating – I’m very thankful for a great opportunity and to Pedro and Pranam for the skills they’ve taught me.
Christopher has been continuing to work on some projects for Collabora during his final year of college. We are excited to see what other UI improvements will be made over the coming months.
Why not get involved? We love to work alongside the next generation to help them discover what a career in Software Engineering might look like. If you’ve ever considered it for yourself, get in touch today!
The post Meet Christopher – Collabora Software Engineering Intern appeared first on Collabora Office and Collabora Online.
Kudos to Ilmari Lauhakangas for helping to elaborate this list.
491 bugs, 83 of which are enhancements, have been reported by 279 people.
Top 10 Reporters
533 bugs have been triaged by 73 people.
Top 10 Triagers
571 bugs have been set to RESOLVED.
Check the following sections for more information about bugs resolved as FIXED, WORKSFORME and DUPLICATE.
169 bugs have been fixed by 31 people.
Top 10 Fixers
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
Left is the sad original case of unreadable menubar and missing sidebar icons. Right is the newly fixed case with legible menubar and restored sidebar icons. Additionally the "default" buttons of dialogs ("insert" in this case) are now using the correct text color, preview is visible, and EditBoxes render with the correct border color for focus and mouse over. Normal themes also gain a more subtle border color in Edits to indicate focus.
by caolan (noreply@blogger.com) at October 08, 2022 07:52 PM
Writer now supports exporting content controls to PDF and a 7th content control type: it is possible to differentiate between drop-downs and combo boxes.
This work is primarily for Collabora Online, see the previous post for background.
Writer users can create fillable forms using content controls, but the PDF export only contained the plain text representation of them. PDF can also have fillable widgets for form filling, so it's logical to map content controls to PDF widgets.
A perfect mapping is not possible, since PDF widgets are always a single rectangle and Writer content controls is a list of rectangles (text portions), but this doesn't cause a problem in most cases. The size of the PDF rectangle is determined based on the placeholder's size from Writer.
Benefits includes not having to insert a control shape, manually positioned to look like it's in line with the surrounding text. An other benefit is that this way the widget's style (font name, size, etc) can be specified using Writer styles, not with shape properties. It's also interesting that Word itself doesn't seem to support content controls in its PDF export at the time of writing.
PDF export now automatically turns Writer content controls into fillable widgets for the rich text, plain text, checkbox, drop-down, combo box and date types.
Combo box itself is a new type: now combo box content can be either free-form or one of its list items, while drop-down can only be one of its list items.
If you would like to know a bit more about how this works, continue reading... :-)
As usual, the high-level problem was addressed by a series of small changes:
You can get a snapshot / demo of Collabora Office 22.05 and try it out yourself right now: try unstable snapshot. Collabora intends to continue supporting and contributing to LibreOffice, the code is merged so we expect all of this work will be available in TDF's next release too (7.5).
by Popa Adrian Marius (noreply@blogger.com) at September 29, 2022 07:48 AM
Collabora recruits interns to work over the summer alongside our team, and to build experience to help them assess whether they want to pursue a career in Software Engineering, but how does that work out? Lets hear from Skyler:
My name is Skyler and I’m currently studying Maths, Further Maths, Computer Science and Business Studies at college. I spent the summer holidays doing an internship at Collabora Productivity. I’m into software development and video games, especially Minecraft and Celeste. I have a huge Steam library!
When I was 11, my parents got me Raspberry Pi and I became fascinated with learning how to programme. Then in Secondary school I had an awesome Computer Science teacher who let us use old laptops to create a server where we built a small internal website. Since then I’ve been doing software development as a hobby.
Oh, there’s quite a few to choose from! I’ve made several Discord bots which are automated game bots, including one to play Cards Against Humanity which was installed on over 2000 servers. I also made a version of Ultimate Tic Tac Toe – you can access it at https://uttt.crawling.us. I particularly enjoy creating smaller things that feed into one another to create something larger.
I’ve mostly been working on JSDialog, such as ‘repair document’, ‘number format’ or ‘split table’. I think the most common (and arguably most important) one I’ve worked on is ‘insert captions’ which is ~90% done: there’s 3 dialogs that work together to make our captioning work and I’ve converted 2 of them fully and figured out but not fully fixed an issue for the third.
I went to a talk by Michael at my school where he told us about the benefits we’d get from doing an internship. He mentioned developing scalable techniques for big projects which I thought would be interesting and useful to learn.
I would have spent all Summer doing software programming anyway so I thought instead of letting the summer slip away, I would spend it learning. Plus it looks good on a university application!
The main thing I learnt was the importance of taking notes efficiently so you can see what you were thinking and see if there were any assumptions you made that were wrong. I also learned how to implement scalable techniques (as Michael was talking about) which has really helped me.
I’ve thought of various things I’d like to work on but I really enjoy back end development, much more than front end. I enjoy DevOps, scripts and testing – it’s satisfying to test and deploy.
I’m applying for university to do a Computer Science course focused on theory and software development and hopefully I’ll be able to get involved with some more projects at Collabora around my studies.
Yes absolutely, I’ve encouraged a few of my friends at school to apply!
It has been great to have Skyler work with us, and to see the impact on the codebase for all our users. Making our user-interface more visually consistent helps users to have a more easy to use and seamless experience. The underlying code improvements will also help to reduce complexity, making life easy for the next contributors to Collabora Online.
Why not get involved? We love to work alongside the next generation to help them discover what a career in Software Engineering might look like. If you’ve ever considered it for yourself, get in touch today!
The post Meet Skyler – Collabora Software Engineering Intern appeared first on Collabora Office and Collabora Online.
On September 19, The Document Foundation (TDF) announced the release of LibreOffice on Apple’s Mac App Store, to support end users who want to get all of their desktop software from Apple’s sales channel. TDF will continue to provide LibreOffice for macOS free from the LibreOffice website, which is the recommended source for all users.
LibreOffice packaged for the Mac App Store is based on the same source code, but does not include Java – because external dependencies are not allowed on the store – and therefore limits the functionalities of LibreOffice Base.
After the work to support 16384 columns in LibreOffice Calc I have also made sure that the feature works also in Collabora Online, thanks to the funding of NGI.
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 871498.
Since the Calc core is the same, the underlying functionality works just like in LibreOffice. But the online functionality presented some additional challenges that needed handling, as having more cells in a spreadsheet may mean more data sent over the network, slowing things down. There definitely used to be problems with large spreadsheets, as the tiled rendering used by Online in fact was already limited to 500000 rows compared to 1048576 rows of the desktop version (in fact, git history shows that this started at only 1000 rows initially and then was continually raised over the time as things improved). So together with raising column count to 16384 I have raised this to the normal 1048576 rows as well.
While working on this, one of the problems I needed to handle was a rather unusual one - some automated tests were failing because of timing out. Only with debug builds, because they of course do more checks compared to optimized release builds. And the problem turned out to be how some tests checked resulting spreadsheets after some operations. Since testing Calc running in a browser is more complicated than testing the desktop version, what the tests did was to select a large number of cells (e.g. one entire row), paste that to the clipboard and then the clipboard data was present in browsers HTML data, so the testing framework could test it and verify it is as expected. And this failed with unoptimized debug builds because even though the spreadsheet was almost empty, the unoptimized code checked every cell involved and together it added up enough to exceed the test timeout. Ironically enough, a significant portion was spent in code that was trying to optimize the size of the clipboard data. So I needed to improve the tests and optimize handling of unoptimized code, as strange as it may sound.
Now with hopefully all performance problems solved, Collabora Online 22.05 should support these spreadsheet sizes just as fine as the desktop version.
by llunak (noreply@blogger.com) at September 15, 2022 02:51 PM
Chart data table is a feature of charts, that presents in the chart area a data table with the values that are visualised by the chart. The data table is positioned automatically at the bottom of the chart, and can for certain chart types replace the X-axis labels. Until now this feature has been missing in LibreOffice, but thanks to the funding of NGI, it is now implemented.
 | This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 871498 |
 |
| Figure 1: Charts with a data table |
 |
| Figure 2: Insert data table dialog |
The chart data table can be added to the chart from the menu (Insert -> Data Table...), where it is possible to select to show the data table and set the data table specific properties (see Figure 2). The data table specific properties are:
 |
| Figure 3: Data Table Dialog |
by Tomaž Vajngerl (noreply@blogger.com) at September 15, 2022 01:19 PM
One of the bugs that we see in computer programs including LibreOffice is the crash. You’re working with the application, and the program is suddenly closed! Here we discuss the usual causes for these crashes, and how to fix some of them.
Crash Report
There can be many reasons for a crash in C/C++, including segmentation faults (segfaults), assertion failures, aborts, and exceptions that lead to abort. Here we discuss the segmentation faults.
There can be many reasons for a segfault in C/C++, and most of them are are related to the incorrect use of memory. For example:
1. Accessing memory that the program does now own
2. Using memory outside the allocated parts
3. Using uninitialized variables
If you use a variable without properly initializing it, that may lead to a segfault. For example:
int main() {
int *p;
*p = 1;
return 0;
}
Trying to de-reference a null pointer also leads to crash.
int main() {
int *p = nullptr;
*p = 1;'
return 0;
}
$ g++ main.cpp -o main; ./main
Segmentation fault (core dumped)
In C/C++, most compilers do not check the array bounds automatically. When working with arrays, you have to take care that you are accessing inside the array bounds, and not beyond them. Look at this example:
int main() {
int a[10];
a[1000000] = 1;
return 0;
}
When working with pointers, it is important to make sure that the pointer is not null before working with it. For example, look at this file:
sc/source/ui/view/tabview.cxx
Inside it, look at this method:
bool lcl_HasRowOutline( const ScViewData& rViewData )
{
const ScOutlineTable* pTable = rViewData.GetDocument().GetOutlineTable(rViewData.GetTabNo());
if (pTable)
{
const ScOutlineArray& rArray = pTable->GetRowArray();
if ( rArray.GetDepth() > 0 )
return true;
}
return false;
}
Here, before working with pTable, with the condition “if (pTable)“, we make sure that the pTable pointer is not null.
That is also the case when working with arguments. Look at this function inside the same file:
IMPL_LINK_NOARG(ScTabView, TimerHdl, Timer *, void)
{
if (pTimerWindow)
pTimerWindow->MouseMove( aTimerMEvt );
}
The condition makes sure that pTimerWindow is not null.
To describe how to fix some of the segfaults, I discuss to fixes that are merged recently by Caolan and me.
First, please take a look at this recently fixed crash by Caolan:
The crash was happening when you created a page break, and then tried to edit it. The backtrace showed that the problem is happening in this file:
sw/source/uibase/docvw/PageBreakWin.cxx
inside this method:
IMPL_LINK_NOARG(SwPageBreakWin, FadeHandler, Timer *, void)
just in this line, when invoking IsVisible().
if (IsVisible( ) && m_nFadeRate > 0 && m_nFadeRate < 100)
m_aFadeTimer.Start();
In a debug session for LibreOffice, one can see that the window object is actually destroyed, but the code wants to check if the window is visible or not. In this way, it leads to a segfault. Looking carefully, it becomes visible that the problem comes from some lines below that. We see that m_pLine->DestroyWin() is invoked, but the control sequence is working in a way that IsVisible() is called right after that. To fix this, Caolan simply added a return after destroying the window, and it fixed the problem.
if ( m_bIsAppearing && m_nFadeRate > 0 )
m_nFadeRate -= 25;
else if ( !m_bIsAppearing && m_nFadeRate < 100 ) m_nFadeRate += 25; if ( m_nFadeRate != 100 && !IsVisible() ) Show(); else if ( m_nFadeRate == 100 && IsVisible( ) ) {
Hide();
m_pLine->DestroyWin();
}
else
{
m_pLine->UpdatePosition();
PaintButton();
}
if (IsVisible( ) && m_nFadeRate > 0 && m_nFadeRate < 100)
m_aFadeTimer.Start();</pre
if (IsVisible( ) && m_nFadeRate > 0 && m_nFadeRate < 100)
m_aFadeTimer.Start();
Not all the crashes can be fixed this way. Sometimes, you have to work on the logic of the application in a higher abstraction level, to be able to fix the crash. For example, see one of the crashes that I have fixed recently.
You could select many footnotes by pressing up/down keys and holding shift, then delete all the footnotes at once. Then, hovering on a reference of such a footnote, lead to crash.
To fix the crash, I bibisected the problem to find the responsible commit. In that specific change, the commit author changed the behavior of the arrow keys to be able to to go to the beginning of the first line just by pressing up in the first line. Also, the same behavior for the last line was also part of the goal.
To fix the problem, I reduced the behavior change to anywhere other than the footnotes, and set the previous behavior for the footnotes. With this change, the crash no longer happened.
diff --git a/sw/source/core/crsr/swcrsr.cxx b/sw/source/core/crsr/swcrsr.cxx
index b379fe6..06c73af 100644
--- a/sw/source/core/crsr/swcrsr.cxx
+++ b/sw/source/core/crsr/swcrsr.cxx
@@ -2088,7 +2088,9 @@ bool SwCursor::UpDown( bool bUp, sal_uInt16 nCnt, } bRet = !IsSelOvr( SwCursorSelOverFlags::Toggle | SwCursorSelOverFlags::ChangePos ); } else else if (!pFrame->IsInFootnote()) // tdf#150457 Jump to the begin/end // of the first/last line only if the // cursor is not inside a footenote { sal_Int32 nOffset = 0; @@ -2114,6 +2116,8 @@ bool SwCursor::UpDown( bool bUp, sal_uInt16 nCnt, } } else *GetPoint() = aOldPos; DoSetBidiLevelUpDown(); // calculate cursor bidi level }
Last line, *GetPoint() = aOldPos; comes from the previous behavior, as it was before the commit that introduced the regression.
There are many other types of crashes, and many other tricks for fixing those crashes. If you look for the crash fixes, you will find many of them, and take a look into them.
git log --oneline|grep -i crash|grep -i fix
You can also refer to a list of recently fixed crashes in the LibreOffice QA report of the August 2022 which is published recently:
One can learn a lot from the code itself!
I will continue this tutorial, and talk about other sources of crashes including assert failures, aborts, and exceptions that lead to abort.
In the end, these are some related links:
Kudos to Ilmari Lauhakangas for helping to elaborate this list.
480 bugs, 44 of which are enhancements, have been reported by 289 people.
Top 10 Reporters
470 bugs have been triaged by 69 people.
Top 10 Triagers
478 bugs have been set to RESOLVED.
Check the following sections for more information about bugs resolved as FIXED, WORKSFORME and DUPLICATE.
168 bugs have been fixed by 38 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
The LibreOffice documentation team published a new user guide in August: LibreOffice 7.4 Calc Guide, available in free PDF and ODT. Low-cost printed copies are available from Lulu.com.
Visit the Documentation page on the LibreOffice website for links.
Impress now supports cropped videos in slide edit mode and during slideshow for documents imported from PowerPoint.
First, thanks to our partner SUSE for working with Collabora to make this possible.
PowerPoint handles videos by taking a preview bitmap from the video, and then it allows users to apply various effects on that bitmap, like cropping. The complex aspect of this is that such filters are also respected while playing the video as well.
Impress didn't store such properties on the media shape, which lead to distorted aspect ratio when playing some cropped videos from PPTX files. This lead to this preview in Impress before the work:
The first problem was that the Impress preview was picked from the 3rd second of the video
(presumably to avoid a black preview in many videos that start with a short black fade-in), while
PowerPoint can store an explicit preview from the video (seems to be the first frame), so no matter
what effects you apply, the previews were just different as the source bitmap was different. This
could be fixed by looking for an explicitly provided bitmap for the video first, and only then
asking the various avmedia/ backends to produce a preview.
Once the preview's initial bitmap was OK, it was necessary to take cropping into account. This was
first done for the preview bitmap, and then also for the gstreamer backend (the relevant one for
Linux, as a start) of avmedia/, which is responsible for the actual video playback. The gstreamer
bits were done by first creating a
videocrop element and
then connecting that to the existing
playbin.
With these sorted out, we get rendering which matches the reference:
The last step was to load/save the explicit preview and the crop from/to ODF as well, not only PPTX. We use a markup like this to store the information:
<style:style style:name="gr1">
<style:graphic-properties fo:clip="rect(0cm, 1.356cm, 0cm, 1.356cm)"/>
</style:style>
And now that the gr1 automatic style is defined, we can refer to it from a media shape:
<draw:frame draw:name="test" draw:style-name="gr1">
<draw:plugin xlink:href="..." xlink:type="simple" xlink:show="embed" xlink:actuate="onLoad" draw:mime-type="application/vnd.sun.star.media">
...
</draw:plugin>
<draw:image xlink:href="Pictures/MediaPreview1.png"/>
</draw:frame>
The nice property of this markup is that automatic styles are already used for other shapes and image previews are also used for e.g. table shapes, so this is just using existing markup in a new context, but the ODF spec already allows this markup.
If you would like to know a bit more about how this works, continue reading... :-)
As usual, the high-level problem was addressed by a series of small changes:
User interface to create such a crop, support for other video effects (e.g. black-and-white) and other backends (Windows, macOS) could be done, but is future work currently.
You can get a snapshot / demo of Collabora Office and try it out yourself right now: try unstable snapshot. Collabora intends to continue supporting and contributing to LibreOffice, the code is merged so we expect all of this work will be available in TDF's next release too (7.5).
LibreOffice 7.4 Community was released on 18 August 2022. Here is the official blog post about it, with much more information about the release and about LibreOffice.
You can get LibreOffice 7.4 from the download page for Windows, macOS (Apple Silicon and Intel processors), and Linux.
A video summarizing the top new features in LibreOffice 7.4 Community is available on YouTube.
GENERAL
Support for WebP images and EMZ/WMZ files
Help pages for the ScriptForge scripting library
Search field for the Extension Manager
Performance and compatibility improvements
WRITER
Better change tracking in the footnote area
Edited lists show original numbers in change tracking
New typographic settings for hyphenation
CALC
Support for 16,384 columns in spreadsheets
Extra functions in drop-down AutoSum widget
New menu item to search for sheet names
IMPRESS
New support for document themes
Open Document Format (ODF) is a standard (ISO/IEC 26300) and native file format that LibreOffice uses. OASIS developed this file format based on the file format of StarOffice, the ancestor of LibreOffice.
To understand the ODF standard, working with the LibreOffice code and fixing a small bug is enlightening. Here we discuss a related EasyHack.
If you are a LibreOffice user, you may already know these extensions:
.odt for text processing documents (LibreOffice Writer)
.odp for presentations (LibreOffice Impress)
.ods for spreadsheets (LibreOffice Calc)
.odg for drawings (LibreOffice Draw)
.odf for formulas (LibreOffice Math)
Essentially, these are zip files containing XML and binary files. Additionally, Open Document Format can also be text-only format with the extensions of .fodt, .fods and .fodg instead of .odt, .ods, and odg respectively.
OASIS website provides the documents that describe the Open Document Format extensively . You can find the specifications for ODF 1.3, which is the latest version of the standard here:
Beside LibreOffice, several other applications support ODF standard, including Microsoft Office, ONLYOFFICE, Calligra Suite, Google Docs, and many others! But here, we focus on LibreOffice.
Basically, LibreOffice handles the Open Document format by opening the zip file using the zip parser and the deflate algorithm, and then parses the XML files inside it using libxml2 library.
On the other hand, the meaning of the XML tags and attributes are available via the specification from OASIS. In essence, the specification describes the text, pictures, shapes and other elements of the text processing, presentations, spreadsheets and formulas. Additionally, ODF standard discusses accessibility, collaboration and many more topics.
To best way to understand the ODF standard, is working with the LibreOffice code. Please take a look at this small bug, which has the label of EasyHack (tdf#150302):
In this EasyHack, there is a sample document which is using a specific feature in the drawings. Looking at the <draw:enhanced-geometry> tag, one can see that there is an attribute draw:text-path-same-letter-heights that is used to control the way that text is rendered in shapes. It is described in ODF standard as:
The draw:text-path-same-letter-heights attribute specifies if all letters in a custom shape have the same height.
The defined values for the attribute are:
false: letters in a custom shape need not have the same height.true: letters in a custom shape have the same height.The default value for this attribute is false.
The issue is that handling this parameter in the code is not correct. Specifically, the effect of this bug is that if you open the sample file and click on the SameLetterHeights button in the Fontwork toolbar, nothing happens. On the other hand, the correct behavior should be that the shape changes, and “shows the characters vertical stretched to fit the place between the paths”.
Shapes inside the example ODF file
After all, to fix this issue one should refer to the code pointer that Regina Henschel has provided:
If you open the file core/svx/source/toolbars/fontworkbar.cxx, you will see that the else part is missing, and that is the cause of the problem. Specifically, you should fix that part of the code, and then submit your changes to Gerrit. To begin, please refer to this page for more information on how to submit code to LibreOffice Gerrit:
The fix is rather straightforward, but this is not the end of the task! Furthermore, you have to make sure that the problem does not happen again. In order to achieve this goal, writing a unit test is necessary. The test code should open the example file, and then use the toolbar option. This is possible by invoking .uno:FontworkSameLetterHeights command.
Fontwork toolbar: SameLetterHeights is the second icon
There are some examples in sd/qa/unit/uiimpress.cxx that invoke UNO commands, and you may use as the starting point.
EasyHacks are good starting points for the newcomers. This specific improvement is filed as tdf#150302.
If you want to contribute to LibreOffice code by working on this improvement, but you need to know how to get started with LibreOffice development, I suggest you to see our video tutorial:
Kudos to Ilmari Lauhakangas for helping to elaborate this list.
385 bugs, 56 of which are enhancements, have been reported by 249 people.
Top 10 Reporters
391 bugs have been triaged by 72 people.
Top 10 Triagers
406 bugs have been set to RESOLVED.
Check the following sections for more information about bugs resolved as FIXED, WORKSFORME and DUPLICATE.
138 bugs have been fixed by 40 people.
Top 10 Fixers
List of high severity bugs fixed
List of crashes fixed
List of old bugs ( more than 4 years old ) fixed
56 bugs have been retested by 27 people.
Top 10 testers
102 bugs have been duplicated by 26 people.
Top 10 testers
42 bugs have been verified by 11 people.
Top 10 Verifiers
206 bugs have been categorized with a metabug by 21 people.
Top 10 Categorizers
44…
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