Apple has released macOS 10.15 Catalina on October 7, 2019. Mac apps, installer packages and kernel extensions that are signed with a Developer ID must be notarized by Apple to run on macOS Catalina. Although we have duly followed the instructions, when users launch LibreOffice 6.3.x – which has been notarized by Apple – the system shows the following scary message: LibreOffice.app cannot be opened because the developer cannot be verified, and provides only two options: Move to Bin (delete) and Cancel (revert the operation, i.e. do not run LibreOffice). Of course, this represents a problem for all Mac users who rely on LibreOffice for their office documents after they have upgraded to macOS Catalina.

To solve the issue and bypass the block, the user has to right-click with the mouse (or press Control on the keyboard while clicking with the mouse) on the LibreOffice icon and select Open. The system will show a less scary message: macOS cannot verify the developer of LibreOffice.app. Are you sure you want to open it?, and will eventually provide the Open option to launch LibreOffice.

There is also another solution, which does not bypass Gatekeeper forcing macOS Catalina to open LibreOffice as the solution just described (which is perfectly safe, in any case).

When the first scary message is on screen, the user has to click first on Cancel to close the window and then on the Apple menu to open the System Preferences window. Here the user has to open Security & Privacy and click on the Open Anyway button on the right side of the message LibreOffice.app was blocked from use because it is not from an identified developer to launch LibreOffice. Both solutions authorize LibreOffice to run without further authorizations. Of course, we will try to sort out the issue with Apple, in order to avoid similar issues in the future with macOS Catalina.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Screenshots have been grabbed while installing LibreOfficeDev.app (LibreOffice 6.4 Alpha) instead of LibreOffice.app, but do reproduce the same windows.

To complete the article, four screenshots of LibreOffice Writer, LibreOffice Calc, LibreOffice Impress and LibreOffice Draw (version 6.3.3.1) running on macOS Catalina.

The LibreOffice Quality Assurance ( QA ) Team is happy to announce LibreOffice 6.4 Alpha1 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 Alpha1 the first pre-release since the development of version 6.4 started in the beginning of June, 2019. Since then, 4600 commits have been submitted to the code repository and more than 720 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 Alpha1 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!!

…

I add an additional item on my (very long) todo list:

• Update LibreOffice Dialogs

One Dialog is finished AutoCorrect tdf#127773 (left 6.3, right 6.4)

In addition to an better placement the Word Completion Tab should be now easier to understood.

Character Dialog tdf#127927, Paragraph Dialog tdf#128239 and > 100 Dialogs are on my todo list. If you like my work, become a

Yes, here’s anther bunch of videos from our recent LibreOffice Conference 2019 in Almeria, Spain. Let’s get started with Tor Lillqvist’s talk, “LibreOffice as an iOS app on the iPad”:

Then we have “Chart editing in Online” with Marco Cecchetti:

“Online: copy/paste” with Michael Meeks:

“Bringing the Sidebar Online” with Ashod Nakashian:

“Integrating LibreOffice Online in Alfresco” with Philippe Hemmel:

“LibreOffice adoption into 1&1 Mail & Media ecosystem” with Eduard Ardeleanu:

And “Improving the LibreOffice PDF export” with Thorsten Behrens:

My new book, Self-publishing using LibreOffice Writer 6, is now available in paperback or PDF.

Printed copies are available from Lulu.com for US$15.00. Pay at Lulu.com.

Download PDF here. Cost is US$5.00, on the honor system. Please pay using the button below (Paypal or credit card). If you buy a printed copy, you are welcome to a free copy of the PDF.

Have you ever wanted to have a way to see the full content of a spreadsheet document in a pdf form, without the usual slicing of the sheets into printable pages?

Why would I need that?

Here is the screenshot of a sheet containing some data and graphics: And this is how it looks like when exported to pdf in the old/usual way:

Also read the blog on the Collabora-website for more explanation.

How do I use it?

• Open your spreadsheet document in LibreOffice Calc
• From the menu, select File - Export as PDF…
• On the General tab of the PDF Options dialog, check the option named Full-Sheet Previews
• Click the Export button, and choose a location for your preview pdf
• Enjoy your pdf file of full sheet previews

Option on the dialog

Also available in the LibreOffice/Collabora Online api

If you happen to use the LibreOffice/Collabora Online REST api for document conversions, here is a command to get a preview output of your sheet:

curl --insecure -F "data=@YourSpreadSheetDocument.ods" -F "FullSheetPreview=true" https://localhost:9980/lool/convert-to/pdf > out.pdf

More info about the REST api

Where and when?

The feature was developed on the cp-6.2 branch of LibreOffice code-base (which is basicly Collabora Office 6.2), and is already available in Collabora Office snaphots. And is being backported to LibreOffice master, so it will be also available in LibreOffice development builds and soon in the Collabora Office snapshots.

For more info and the snapshot

Tips

• Currently, this option disregards most of the other options on the pdf export dialog
• Preview pages will have different sizes (same as the source sheets)
• This is not meant for printing
• The export dialog remembers your last choice, so better not forget to uncheck this option next time you would like to get a regular (for-printing) output

Dev Notes

• The PDF export dialog’s UI description is in filter/uiconfig/ui/pdfgeneralpage.ui
• The class for the dialog is named ImpPDFTabGeneralPage
• To introduce a new option, you need to add the widget to the .ui file, then add a proper item to the class, and connect the two in the constructor

  • In our case, the id of the new checkbox on the ui file is singlepagesheets

    <object class="GtkCheckButton" id="singlepagesheets">
                <property name="label" translatable="yes" context="pdfgeneralpage|singlepagesheets">Full-Sheet Previews</property>
                <property name="visible">True</property>
                <property name="can_focus">True</property>
                <property name="receives_default">False</property>
                <property name="use_underline">True</property>
                <property name="xalign">0</property>
                <property name="draw_indicator">True</property>
        </object>
    

  • And the corresponding member in the ImpPDFTabGeneralPage class is named as mxCbSinglePageSheets

    std::unique_ptr<weld::CheckButton> mxCbSinglePageSheets;
    

  • We connect the two via this line in the constructor of the class:

     mxCbSinglePageSheets(m_xBuilder->weld_check_button("singlepagesheets"))
    

And here is a list of related commits if you would like to see what other changes were done:

1. Add ‘SinglePageSheets’ option to the PDF export dialog
2. Handle SinglePageSheets option for pdf export
3. Add FullSheetPreview support for convert-to endpoint of online
4. Rename ‘Single-page sheets’ to ‘Full-Sheet Previews’ to avoid confusion

Berlin, October 17, 2019 – The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 6.2.8, the last minor release of the LibreOffice 6.2 family. All users of LibreOffice 6.2.x versions should update immediately for enhanced security, and be prepared to upgrade to LibreOffice 6.3.4 as soon as it becomes available in December.

For enterprise class deployments, TDF strongly recommends sourcing LibreOffice from one of the ecosystem partners to get long-term supported releases, dedicated assistance, custom new features and bug fixes, and other benefits. Also, the work done by ecosystem partners flows back into the LibreOffice project, benefiting everyone.

LibreOffice’s individual users are helped by a global community of volunteers: https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/community-support/. On the website and the wiki there are guides, manuals, tutorials and HowTos. Donations help us to make all of these resources available.

LibreOffice users are invited to join the community at https://ask.libreoffice.org, where they can get and provide user-to-user support. While TDF can not provide commercial level support, there are guides, manuals, tutorials and HowTos on the website and the wiki. Your donations help us make these available.

LibreOffice 6.2.8’s change log pages are available on TDF’s wiki: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/6.2.8/RC1 (changed in RC1) and https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/6.2.8/RC2 (changed in RC2).

Availability of LibreOffice 6.2.8

LibreOffice 6.2.8 is immediately available from the following link: https://www.libreoffice.org/download/. Minimum requirements for proprietary operating systems are Microsoft Windows 7 SP1 and Apple macOS 10.9. Builds of the latest LibreOffice Online source code are also available as Docker images: https://hub.docker.com/r/libreoffice/online/.

LibreOffice Online is fundamentally a server-based platform, and should be installed and configured by adding cloud storage and an SSL certificate. It might be considered an enabling technology for the cloud services offered by ISPs or the private cloud of enterprises and large organizations.

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

LibreOffice 6.2.8 is built with document conversion libraries from the Document Liberation Project: https://www.documentliberation.org.

In September we had the LibreOffice Conference 2019 in Almeria, Spain. We’re uploading videos from the presentations that took place, so here’s a new batch! First up is “Janitor of Sanity” with Stephan Bergmann:

Then “On making code more readable” with Luboš Luňák:

“Internal CI system with Jenkins” with Yunusemre Şentürk:

“Getting LibreOffice KDE5 support production-ready” with Thorsten Behrens:

“Bottom to top, left to right writing direction in Writer” with Miklos Vajna:

“Getting on key” with Iván Sánchez Ortega:

“QA: 1 year recap” with Xisco Fauli”

And “Reusing LibreOffice Online as an Android app” with Jan Holesovsky:

FOSDEM is one of the largest gatherings of Free Software contributors in the world and happens each year in Brussels (Belgium) at the ULB Campus Solbosch. In 2020, it will be held on Saturday, February 1, and Sunday, February 2.

The Open Document Editors (OFE) DevRoom is scheduled for Saturday, February 1, from 10:30AM to 7PM. Physical room has not yet been assigned by FOSDEM. The shared devroom gives all project in this area a chance to present ODF related developments and innovations.

We are now inviting proposals for talks about Open Document Editors or the ODF document format, on topics such as code, extensions, localization, QA, UX, tools and adoption related cases. This is a unique opportunity to show new ideas and developments to a wide technical audience.

Length of talks should be limited to a maximum of 20 minutes, as we would like to have questions after each presentation, and to fit as many presenters as possible in the schedule. Exceptions must be explicitly requested and justified. You may be assigned LESS time than you request.

All submissions have to be made in the Pentabarf event planning tool: https://penta.fosdem.org/submission/FOSDEM20.
While filing your proposal, please provide the title of your talk, a short abstract (one or two paragraphs), some information about yourself (name, bio and photo).

To submit your talk, click on “Create Event”, then make sure to select the “Open Document Editors” devroom as the “Track”. Otherwise your talk will not be even considered for any devroom at all.

If you already have a Pentabarf account from a previous year, even if your talk was not accepted, please reuse it. Create an account if, and only if, you don’t have one from a previous year. If you have any issues with Pentabarf, please contact ode-devroom-manager@fosdem.org.

The deadline is Saturday, November 30, 2019. Accepted speakers will be notified by Sunday, December 8th, 2019. The DevRoom schedule will be published by Tuesday, December 12, 2019.

Recording permission

The talks in the Open Document Editors DevRoom will be audio and video recorded, and possibly streamed live too.
In the “Submission notes” field, please indicate that you agree that your presentation will be licensed under the CC-BY-SA-4.0 or CC-BY-4.0 license and that you agree to have your presentation recorded. For example: “If my speech is accepted for FOSDEM, I hereby agree to license all recordings, slides, and other associated materials under the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 4.0 International License. Sincerely, Name”.

On Monday September 16th, Richard Stallman, long-time president and founder of the FSF, has resigned from both his position at the FSF, and the MIT.

There’s a plethora of reporting around that – if you’re short on time, then I recommend reading Thomas Bushnell’s rather excellent medium piece in full.

Many things can be said about this event, but immediately coming to defend RMS as a principled old man, who was the victim of a witch hunt, is not it. I fundamentally disagree with Michael here, and like to point out (though its obvious), that his point of view is not shared nor endorsed by The Document Foundation, albeit aggregated on their planet.

This is what I posted last night to the TDF board, when we discussed the implications on Michael’s post being on that planet:


Dear board,

Björn wrote:

Or to put it much better argumented and better informed than I ever could:
View at Medium.com

Please do read the linked article in full. It echos my thoughts
exactly, but with much more authority & eloquence than I could have.

If you have some extra time, the entire story is many years, and
probably thousands of pages worth of words - but it's not a happy
story (it includes, at various occasions, RMS endorsing child
pornography and pedophilia).

For me, the sticking point is a slight remix of one of Thomas'
sentences: Michael treated the problem as being “let’s make sure we
don’t criticize RMS unfairly”, when the problem was actually, “how can
we come to terms with a decades-long history of RMS’s own mistreatment
of women and held views incompatible with broad societal norms &
ethics”.

In light of the above, I reject, in the strongest possible terms,
being seen near a statement that starts with "Really disappointed to
see the outcome with RMS". The blog post is offensive to women, the
victims in particular, tone-deaf to the wider issues at stake, and
harmful for TDF's reputation when issued by a board member on a
TDF-imprinted site.

It would have been better to stay silent.

Can someone please fix this?

Cheers,

-- Thorsten


Update 2019-09-23: Perhaps not entirely unambiguous – I wasn’t suggesting here that Michael would fully endorse RMS, but coming to his defense at this incident. Also adding the real name of my fellow TDF director, whom I was responding to in the mail above.

Update 2019-10-15: Bradley Kuhn’s statement after leaving the FSF is worth reading in its entirety, and well reflects what I believe leaders should aspire to.

• Mail chew, projections, planning, patch porting; performance win for idle JSON conversion of sidebars.
• Intensely frustrated to (minor) update openSUSE 15.1, and discover it jumped thunderbird from 60.8 to 68, breaking all of the extensions needed to be productive - (eg. making it possible to move E-mail between folders without getting RSI from mouse-use), horrible; downgraded with trepidation.
• TDF is making good progress on a carbon policy, but I was curious as to how writing more efficient software might help here. Crunching some numbers with a 50/50 desktop/laptop mix and a 65% increase from CPU use gives ~10^-5 kg of CO2 per CPU second you're not idle. Multiplying that by the number of LibreOffice users 2x10^8 (pace Sir David MacKay) to get a big number, that's around 2 tons of CO2 saved for every second of CPU busy time that we can save our user-base; go optimizers!

• Testing, project planning, etc. Got the Oculus Quest update making it possible to play 'go' games, very impressed with Daedalus' flying thing. Band practice at church, worked late.

• Mobile UX improvements and tweaking for Online; calls with the team variously; lots of fun.

• Mail chew, couple of team calls, admin. Misc. debugging, and re-factoring. PCC meeting in the evening, and collected minutes.

• All Saints in the morning, good to catch up with people. Back to see M&D passing through for lunch, David over later, caught up, played bananagrams. Read to M. and had a Mentalist at before bed with N. and H.

Hi,

If you think nothing happens in LibreOffice, that’s not true. I for example prepair some new Templates and Galleries for LibreOffice.

If you are interested, join the LibreOffice Design Team.

General Activities

1. LibreOffice 6.3.1 and LibreOffice 6.2.7 were released on September 5
2. LibreOffice 6.3.2 was released on September 26
3. The PPT/PPTX Team was created and announced publicly.
4. The Macro Team was created and announced publicly.
5. Roman Kuznetsov changed fonts in Help installer to Segoe UI 9 pt
6. Many problems with bullets and numbering in DOCX files were fixed: tdf#64222 (Michael Stahl, Samuel Mehrbrodt CIB) tdf#95848 (Michael Stahl) Timur was able to close many reports as duplicates of the fixed bugs
7. Caolán McNamara (Red Hat) did a massive amount of UI work under the hood, for example renovating the wizard dialogs
8. Caolán McNamara (Red Hat) removed the gtk+2 backend from master
9. Miklos Vajna (Collabora) solved a cluster of issues related to textbox alignment and spacing in DOCX files https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=124600
10. Tünde Tóth (NISZ) fixed a bunch of OOXML hyperlink issues
11. László Németh (NISZ) improved the workflow of manipulating tables in Writer tdf#84806 and tdf#118311
12. Balazs Varga (NISZ) keeps improving OOXML Charts interoperability
13. Xisco Fauli fixed some SVG issues
14. Björn Michaelsen keeps fighting against the SwClient monster. Check his last update

Reported Bugs

627 bugs, 87 of which are enhancements, have been reported by 394 people.

Top 10 Reporters

1. NISZ LibreOffice Team ( 33 )
2. andreas_k ( 16 )
3. nd101 ( 14 )
4. Regina Henschel ( 12 )
5. Mike Kaganski ( 12 )
6. Nicolas Christener ( 11 )
7. Thomas Lendo ( 9 )
8. Eyal Rozenberg ( 9 )
9. pedro.silva ( 8 )
10. Roman Kuznetsov ( 8 )

Triaged Bugs

608 bugs have been triaged by 82 people.

Top 10 Triagers

1. Xisco Faulí ( 152 )
2. Dieter Praas ( 66 )
3. Heiko Tietze ( 45 )
4. V Stuart Foote ( 41 )
5. Julien Nabet ( 36 )
6. Oliver Brinzing ( 30 )
7. Timur ( 26 )
8. m.a.riosv ( 21 )
9. Roman Kuznetsov ( 21 )
10. Alex Thurgood ( 13 )

Resolution of resolved bugs

551 bugs have been set to RESOLVED.

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

Fixed Bugs

166 bugs have been fixed by 43 people.

Top 10 Fixers

1. Caolán McNamara ( 22 )
2. Julien Nabet ( 9 )
3. Heiko Tietze ( 9 )
4. László Németh ( 8 )
5. Tünde Tóth ( 8 )
6. Xisco Fauli ( 6 )
7. Michael Weghorn ( 5 )
8. Tamás Zolnai ( 5 )
9. Miklos Vajna ( 4 )
10. Michael Stahl ( 4 )

List of critical bugs fixed

1. tdf#127695 CRASH: Inserting textbox in a particular document ( Thanks to Caolán McNamara )

List of crashes fixed

1. tdf#127258 Impress Crash after Presentation Finished ( Thanks to Stephan Bergmann )
2. tdf#127272 odt document + UI “registers” etc.: Writer crashes when UI will be set to “registers” etc. resp. after this when odt file should be opened ( Thanks to Sumit Chauhan )
3. tdf#127461 data provider crashes LibreOffice when clicking “Apply Changes” ( Thanks to Julien Nabet )
4. tdf#127546 Calc Crashes if I click in to the Range-select fied of the ‘Define Label Range’ dialog (gen) ( Thanks to Caolán McNamara )
5. tdf#127646 GTK3 crash when create new macro ( Thanks to Caolán McNamara )
6. tdf#127652 After deleting some text the LibreOffice Writer crash ( Thanks to Michael Stahl )
7. tdf#127673 Crash when double tap’ing a table copyed from calc to writer in iOS ( Thanks to Jan Holesovsky )
8. tdf#127682 New Print dialog: Crash selecting (*) Even/Odd Pages with a 1 page document ( Thanks to Caolán McNamara )
9. tdf#127683 Crash when restart LO after having changing language ( Thanks to Caolán McNamara )
10. tdf#127695 CRASH: Inserting textbox in a particular document ( Thanks to Caolán McNamara )
11. tdf#127748 crash on modify a frame style, which has previously got writing-mode bt-lr ( Thanks to Julien Nabet )
12. tdf#127859 pressing edit button in footer or header make LO crash ( Thanks to Caolán McNamara )
13. tdf#127863 Crash when trying to edit macro assigned part for a button ( Thanks to Julien Nabet )

List of performance issues fixed

1. tdf#127786 LibreOffice hangs for a few seconds clicking on the title/subtitle textboxes (ca-ES-valencia) ( Thanks to Eike Rathke )

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

1. tdf#42990 EDITING Spreadsheet: Different handling of Text Cells in Calculations with SUM or addition of multiple cells ( Thanks to Olivier Hallot )
2. tdf#45789 automatic row height in reports ( Thanks to Ilhan Yesil )
3. tdf#50846 Macros: Wrong type of function GetLastUsedRow (standard library Tools, module Misc) ( Thanks to Andreas Heinisch )
4. tdf#55436 Need another numbering scheme: *, †, ‡, §, etc. (mainly for footnotes) ( Thanks to Tim Bartlett )
5. tdf#62326 Instruction Cint fails when converting Hex strings of a negative value to a 16-bit integer value. ( Thanks to Andreas Heinisch )
6. tdf#64222 FORMATTING: A DOCX-file in Writer shows different size of list elements (numbering) ( Thanks to Michael Stahl )
7. tdf#81436 Add Formula Numbering autotext to all l10n ( Thanks to Laurent BP )
8. tdf#84806 Apply actions to full table without the need to select paragraph before/after (to prevent e.g. an empty table is left) ( Thanks to László Németh )
9. tdf#94765 FILEOPEN: SVG: URL fails is the reference is not in the mapper (gradients/patterns) ( see comment 17 ) ( Thanks to Xisco Fauli )

WORKSFORME bugs

99 bugs have been retested by 30 people.

Top 10 testers

1. Xisco Faulí ( 23 )
2. Timur ( 14 )
3. Buovjaga ( 13 )
4. Julien Nabet ( 8 )
5. Roman Kuznetsov ( 4 )
6. Dieter Praas ( 4 )
7. Aron Budea ( 3 )
8. Heiko Tietze ( 3 )
9. raal ( 3 )
10. Thomas Lendo ( 2 )

DUPLICATED bugs

136 bugs have been duplicated by 27 people.

Top 10 testers

1. Xisco Faulí ( 41 )
2. V Stuart Foote ( 18 )
3. Timur ( 11 )
4. Gabor Kelemen ( 8 )
5. Heiko Tietze ( 7 )
6. Oliver Brinzing ( 7 )
7. Julien Nabet ( 6 )
8. Justin L ( 4 )
9. m.a.riosv ( 4 )
10. Dieter Praas ( 4 )

Verified bug fixes

110 bugs have been verified by 12 people.

Top 10 Verifiers

1. Dieter Praas ( 47 )
2. Xisco Faulí ( 42 )
3. Timur ( 6 )
4. Julien Nabet ( 6 )
5. Alex Thurgood ( 2 )
6. Harald Koester ( 1 )
7. Michael Weghorn ( 1 )
8. Patrick Jaap ( 1 )
9. Markus ( 1 )
10. Roman Kuznetsov ( 1 )

Categorized Bugs

399 bugs have been categorized with a metabug by 36 people.

Top 10 Categorizers

1. Dieter Praas ( 59 )
2. Thomas Lendo ( 48 )
3. oesterblog-admin ( 44 )
4. NISZ LibreOffice Team ( 38 )
5. LibreOfficiant ( 37 )
6. Roman Kuznetsov ( 32 )
7. himajin100000 ( 26 )
8. V Stuart Foote ( 18 )
9. Buovjaga ( 17 )
10. Rizal Muttaqin ( 14 )

Regression Bugs

97 bugs have been set as regressions by 22 people.

Top 10

1. Xisco Faulí ( 31 )
2. NISZ LibreOffice Team ( 18 )
3. Timur ( 9 )
4. Alex Thurgood ( 4 )
5. m.a.riosv ( 4 )
6. raal ( 3 )
7. V Stuart Foote ( 3 )
8. Oliver Brinzing ( 3 )
9. MM ( 3 )
10. Julien Nabet ( 3 )

Bisected Bugs

81 bugs have been bisected by 10 people.

Top 10 Bisecters

1. Xisco Faulí ( 42 )
2. NISZ LibreOffice Team ( 17 )
3. raal ( 11 )
4. Michael Weghorn ( 3 )
5. LE GARREC Vincent ( 2 )
6. Aron Budea ( 2 )
7. Terrence Enger ( 1 )
8. Justin L ( 1 )
9. Roman Kuznetsov ( 1 )
10. Buovjaga ( 1 )

Evolution of Unconfirmed Bugs

Check the current list of unconfirmed bugs here

Evolution of Open Regressions

Check the current list of open regressions here

Evolution of Open bibisectRequests

Check the current list of open bibisectrequests here

Evolution of Highest Priority Bugs

Check the current list of highest priority bugs here

Evolution of High Priority Bugs

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!…

This below is a screenshot of my LibreOffice build using the Skia library.
Now, admittedly, this looks way better than it should, as it is actually still far from finished. It is so far X11-only, using the venerable not-that-performant XPutImage(). No Windows, no Vulkan. Yet. Also, while it passes all VCL unit tests, that rather says something about the poor state of coverage of those tests, as they fail to hit any of those abort() calls I still have in a number of places. Well, maybe I should rather post the screenshot from yesterday:

Paul Beach has finally managed to get around to preparing a mechanism for creating an embedded Firebird Framework on MacOSX.If you can’t build Firebird from scratch you can download a copy of the embedded framework (currently Firebird 3.0.4) from IBPhoenix. (Approx 15mb)32bit Embedded Framework64bit Embedded Framework

Successfully submitting a very first patch to LibreOffice can be quite challenging. Not only because you have to deal with the build dependencies first, but because the project doesn’t come with a default/suggested development environment. Even though it can be annoying, it is actually a good thing, because you can use your favorite. In this blog post I want to show you how to use VS code for LibreOffice hacking:

1. 1. 1. Build LibreOffice.. (make check)
      2. Create compile_commands.json with the following command:
         make vim-ide-integration
      3. Install VS code, but I guess you did it already.
      4. Install the C++ extension.
      5. File -> Preferences -> Settings -> Workspace Settings -> Extensions -> C/C++. Find a link to your settings.json file.
      6. Insert the following line:

"C_Cpp.default.compileCommands":"${workspaceFolder}/compile_commands.json"

The compile_commands.json file helps the IDE find all the include paths/dependencies. Luckily, VS code can use the same structure as the YouCompleteMe code-completion engine for vim. The above line in settings.json specifies the location of the file relative to the workspace folder.

After this the semantic code completion features (code completion, Goto Definition, …) should work. In order to get debug working, you can follow this description. For handy tricks you should take a look at this and this.

Disclaimer: I couldn’t configure the debugger which symbols to load. It doesn’t affect the code completion features, but for the debugging – unless you know how to restrict symbol loading (then tell me in a comment) – you’ll need more than 8 GB of RAM.

Nine years ago, something very special was created. It changed my life a lot for sure, it gave me new challenges too, and I am proud and eternally honoured to be part of this amazing community of friends. Happy Birthday, LibreOffice!

Happy Birthday, LibreOffice!

this is the simpliest extension I ever did, but it’s also one of the coolest.

https://extensions.libreoffice.org/extensions

This extension add you an pin gallery on top of each galleries so if you switch to galleries you can drag & drop your favorite drawings, images, … simple but usefull.

Take out the papers and the trash
Or you don’t get no spendin’ cash

— Yakety Yak, The Coasters

 

At last years LibreOffice conference in Tirana I gave a talk on how SwClient is considered harmful. At this years LibreOffice conference in Almeria, I presented a lightning talk, giving some updates on the progress.

Additionally, with some recent idle changes not only the unocore directory in Writer is free of the error prone old SwClient/SwModify combo, but also the directories:

• sw/source/core/view
• sw/source/filter/html
• sw/source/filter/basflt
• sw/source/filter/ww8
• sw/source/filter/xml
• sw/source/ui
• sw/source/uibase

So far, it seems the hope I expressed at the conference that getting rid of SwClient and SwModify (leaving aside the core layout for now) seems to be quite doable and well worth it for the errors and fragility this will prevent in those areas of code.

In the desktop suite we have the sidebar which is a context dependant feature improving user performance eg. in chart editing. Unfortunately it's not the perfect UI for a mobile clients, so the new concept is to tunnel the UI description to the browser and create native widgets there. I did some prototyping work in this area and I can see first results:

As we can see all basic widgets and layout are preserved. All sections are visible, it will be possible to create an UI where user will see only one section at time for better mobile experience. Complex controls like color selectors are not available yet (I'm going to use our color selector present in the toolbar). The development takes place in the feature branch.

A new version 1.3 of the distributed C/C++ compilation tool Icecream has been released. To accompany it, version 3.3 of the GUI monitor Icemon has been released as well.

The changelogs are here and here. In a less changelog-y way, the changes are:

• Compiler location are no longer hardcoded anywhere. Previously the compiler automatically packaged and sent to remote nodes was always /usr/bin/gcc (g++, clang, clang++). That might not match the actual compiler used and the workaround was to manually package the proper one using icecc-create-env. But now it's possible to build even with e.g. CXX=/my/own/build/of/clang and it'll simply work. This should also mean that explicitly setting $ICECC_VERSION now should be needed only for cross-compiling.
• Slightly better job scheduling, both for remote and local builds. For example, the local machine should no longer be possibly overloaded by running way too many local preprocessor steps.
• Better compression, both for sending data and packaged compilers. Compilation data is compressed using zstd if the other node supports it, compiler environments can be compiled using zstd or xz. This improves performance by reducing both network and CPU usage. Note that while compilation compression falls back to the older method if not supported by the other side, for compiler environments this is more tricky and so it has to be set up manually. You can set e.g. ICECC_ENV_COMPRESSION=xz , but the daemon will not fall back to using any other mechanism. Which means it will use only nodes that are at least version 1.3, the scheduler should also be from 1.3 (run another one if needed, the newest one wins) and the remote node needs to support the compression (1.3 uses newly uses libarchive, which supports zstd only in its relatively recent releases). So this is mainly useful if you have full control over the Icecream cluster, but by default the compression is the old gzip, for backwards compatibility.
• Speaking of which, the maximum cache size for compiler environments now defaults to 256MiB. Use the --cache-size option of iceccd for different sizes.
• Objective C/C++ support has been fixed.
• Some special workarounds for GCC's -fdirectives-only option that is used when sending sources to remote nodes, as it breaks in some corner cases.
• The --interface option of the daemons (and scheduler) now allow binding only to a specific network interface, if needed. Note that Icecream still assumes it runs in a trusted network and if that's not so it's up to you to ensure it by using tools such as a firewall.
• Icemon now displays in the defailed host view what protocol a node supports (1.3 has protocol version 42, env_xz/env_zstd mean it supports compiler environments compiled using xz/zstd).
• And various other fixes.

Szymon Kłos showing how to debug conveniently 💪 #collaboraonline #libreoffice #libreofficeonline @LibOCon #debug pic.twitter.com/EXrqk0WvCM

— Collabora Office (@CollaboraOffice) 13 września 2019

Two months ago I post my todo list for LibreOffice 6.4 and I my work is already available via LibreOffice extensions.

BPMN Shapes are available to install see extensions.libreoffice.org/extensions/bpmn-gallery

It’s so easy to improve LibreOffice via an extension. Have fun

I update the LineStyles for LibreOffice for the 6.4 release but in addition I made an Extension for all users how like to have > 20 different predefined LineStyles.

https://extensions.libreoffice.org/extensions/ms-office-line-styles

Have fun with the new LibreOffice LineStyles AND the LineStyles from MS Word and MS Visio.

Szymon Kłos showing how to debug conveniently 💪 #collaboraonline #libreoffice #libreofficeonline @LibOCon #debug pic.twitter.com/EXrqk0WvCM

— Collabora Office (@CollaboraOffice) 13 września 2019

General Activities

1. On August 8, LibreOffice 6.3.0 was announced
2. On August 14, LibreOffice 6.2.6 was released
3. On August 19, the GSOC coding period ended and the 6 students working on LibreOffice succeed with their projects.
4. Gabor Kelemen Add checkbox to enable/disable sending crash reports to TDF
5. Kohei Yoshida upgraded his orcus library allowing many XML import/export bugs to be closed
6. Miklos Vajna (Collabora) keeps working on improving btLr text direction in Writer
7. Miklos Vajna (Collabora) fixed some flickering issues
8. Balazs Varga (NISZ Team) keeps fixing OOXML Chart issues
9. Tünde Tóth (NISZ Team) keeps fixing hyperlink interoperability issues
10. Tamás Zolnai (Collabora) fixed some ActiveX form control issues
11. Grzegorz Araminowicz (Collabora) keeps improving SmartArt support
12. Vasily Melenchuk (CIB) fixed some potential crashes while using undo/redo with styles
13. Christian Lohmaier added support for Android NDK 19 and above
14. Scott Clarke added support for flagging comments as resolved

Reported Bugs

592 bugs, 61 of which are enhancements, have been reported by 390 people.

Top 10 Reporters

1. Xisco Faulí ( 15 )
2. Nicolas Christener ( 14 )
3. Telesto ( 11 )
4. Roman Kuznetsov ( 10 )
5. Robert Großkopf ( 9 )
6. Mike Kaganski ( 9 )
7. Aron Budea ( 8 )
8. Gabor Kelemen ( 8 )
9. Adalbert Hanßen ( 7 )
10. BottleOnTheGround ( 7 )

Triaged Bugs

657 bugs have been triaged by 88 people.

Top 10 Triagers

1. Xisco Faulí ( 119 )
2. Buovjaga ( 94 )
3. Heiko Tietze ( 48 )
4. Oliver Brinzing ( 45 )
5. Dieter Praas ( 39 )
6. raal ( 28 )
7. Julien Nabet ( 22 )
8. V Stuart Foote ( 21 )
9. Aron Budea ( 20 )
10. Alex Thurgood ( 20 )

Resolution of resolved bugs

590 bugs have been set to RESOLVED.

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

Fixed Bugs

212 bugs have been fixed by 41 people.

Top 10 Fixers

1. Caolán McNamara ( 24 )
2. Balazs Varga ( 9 )
3. Miklos Vajna ( 9 )
4. Noel Grandin ( 9 )
5. Samuel Mehrbrodt ( 8 )
6. László Németh ( 8 )
7. Eike Rathke ( 8 )
8. Olivier Hallot ( 8 )
9. Mike Kaganski ( 8 )
10. Heiko Tietze ( 6 )

List of critical bugs fixed

1. tdf#123583 Processing loop for SfxEnumItem ( Thanks to Jan-Marek Glogowski )
2. tdf#126418 Crash in: ScColumn::MergeBlockFrame(SvxBoxItem *,SvxBoxInfoItem *,ScLineFlags &,long,long,bool,short) ( Thanks to Mike Kaganski )

List of crashes fixed

1. tdf#125340 CRASH: closing LibreOffice while migration dialog is open ( GTK3 ) ( Thanks to Caolán McNamara )
2. tdf#126168 Crash in: rtl_uString_acquire: frame style undo redo ( Thanks to Vasily Melenchuk )
3. tdf#126418 Crash in: ScColumn::MergeBlockFrame(SvxBoxItem *,SvxBoxInfoItem *,ScLineFlags &,long,long,bool,short) ( Thanks to Mike Kaganski )
4. tdf#126588 EDITING: Firebird: View could be executed, but crashes when trying to save ( Thanks to Noel Grandin )
5. tdf#126626 CRASH: pasting fly at-char selection ( Thanks to Michael Stahl )
6. tdf#126627 CRASH: undoing redlinehide deletion ( Thanks to Michael Stahl )
7. tdf#126661 Organize basic macro: crash with gtk3 backend when opened from start center ( Thanks to Caolán McNamara )
8. tdf#126685 CRASH: selecting all in sheet ( Thanks to Noel Grandin )
9. tdf#126686 CRASH: selecting all in cutting ( Thanks to Balazs Varga )
10. tdf#126732 FILEOPEN: Writer crashes on opening Docx file ( Thanks to Caolán McNamara )
11. tdf#126748 Intermittent crash exporting a ODS to XLSX ( Thanks to Mike Kaganski )
12. tdf#126751 CRASH: Adding Hyperlink with no text ( Thanks to Samuel Mehrbrodt )
13. tdf#126790 CRASH: Closing LibreOffice while ‘Help is not Installed’ dialog is open in extension manager (gen/gtk) ( Thanks to Caolán McNamara )
14. tdf#126808 UI: Writer crashes opening the style edit window after doing many style edits ( Thanks to Miklos Vajna )
15. tdf#126877 crash on inserting floating frame ( Thanks to Noel Grandin )
16. tdf#126943 CRASH: Closing LibreOffice while load Styles dialog is open ( gen ) ( Thanks to Caolán McNamara )
17. tdf#126951 crash in custom slide show ( Thanks to Caolán McNamara )

List of performance issues fixed

1. tdf#119388 Calc freezes in Linux and very slow in Windows after trying to delete column or line in much compressed ods with lot of draw:custom-shape ( Thanks to Noel Grandin )
2. tdf#123583 Processing loop for SfxEnumItem ( Thanks to Jan-Marek Glogowski )
3. tdf#125869 LibreOffice UI freezes (shows not responding) while exporting a pdf ( Thanks to Noel Grandin )
4. tdf#126663 XLSX: LibreOffice is freezed when I try open Style list in Sidebar ( Thanks to Noel Grandin )

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

1. tdf#42316 Creating a new document from a template removes the signature from all Macros ( Thanks to Jan-Marek Glogowski )
2. tdf#43527 Help text regarding inserting notes does not apply for Calc ( Thanks to Olivier Hallot )
3. tdf#49482 Searching in the Basic IDE: showing found line completely at the bottom (or top with reverse search) is nasty: better to show this in center of the screen ( Thanks to Andreas Heinisch )
4. tdf#61076 UI User dictionary name is not validated ( Thanks to Rtch90 )
5. tdf#61586 LOCALHELP: Misleading for Ctrl+Down Arrow ( Thanks to Olivier Hallot )
6. tdf#61588 LOCALHELP: Misleading for Ctrl+Shift+Arrow ( Thanks to Olivier Hallot )
7. tdf#72040 TABLE: Add Date-Time-Format YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ss to Predifined Formats ( Thanks to Eike Rathke )
8. tdf#74045 SLIDESHOW: ImageMap hyperlink doesn’t work ( Thanks to Samuel Mehrbrodt )
9. tdf#76535 [LOCALHELP] FORMCONTROLS: Enhancement: Help file in Calc needs to show How to edit hyperlinks ( Thanks to Vipul Gupta )
10. tdf#89467 document ctrl-shift-T properly which focuses the name box (Calc) ( Thanks to Olivier Hallot )
11. tdf#91843 SIDEBAR: White borders appearing around slide layouts ( Thanks to Miklos Vajna )

WORKSFORME bugs

108 bugs have been retested by 42 people.

Top 10 testers

1. Buovjaga ( 22 )
2. Xisco Faulí ( 17 )
3. Julien Nabet ( 8 )
4. Heiko Tietze ( 5 )
5. Alex Thurgood ( 5 )
6. Thomas Lendo ( 5 )
7. Samuel Mehrbrodt (CIB) ( 4 )
8. Telesto ( 3 )
9. Aron Budea ( 2 )
10. Adalbert Hanßen ( 2 )

DUPLICATED bugs

117 bugs have been duplicated by 37 people.

Top 10 testers

1. Xisco Faulí ( 14 )
2. Buovjaga ( 12 )
3. Alex Thurgood ( 11 )
4. V Stuart Foote ( 9 )
5. Oliver Brinzing ( 8 )
6. Heiko Tietze ( 6 )
7. Thomas Lendo ( 6 )
8. m.a.riosv ( 6 )
9. Aron Budea ( 5 )
10. Samuel Mehrbrodt (CIB) ( 4 )

Verified bug fixes

73 bugs have been verified by 10 people.

Top 10 Verifiers

1. Xisco Faulí ( 55 )
2. Dieter Praas ( 6 )
3. BogdanB ( 5 )
4. Timur ( 1 )
5. Telesto ( 1 )
6. Roman Kuznetsov ( 1 )
7. Buovjaga ( 1 )
8. m.a.riosv ( 1 )
9. Adolfo Jayme ( 1 )
10. Julien Nabet ( 1 )

Categorized Bugs

487 bugs have been categorized with a metabug by 31 people.

Top 10 Categorizers

1. Thomas Lendo ( 299 )
2. Dieter Praas ( 34 )
3. Roman Kuznetsov ( 28 )
4. Aron Budea ( 23 )
5. Buovjaga ( 16 )
6. Xisco Faulí ( 12 )
7. V Stuart Foote ( 11 )
8. Gabor Kelemen ( 11 )
9. Oliver Brinzing ( 5 )
10. raal ( 5 )

Regression Bugs

100 bugs have been set as regressions by 24 people.

Top 10

1. Xisco Faulí ( 32 )
2. Oliver Brinzing ( 13 )
3. raal ( 11 )
4. Buovjaga ( 5 )
5. Justin L ( 4 )
6. Alex Thurgood ( 4 )
7. Aron Budea ( 3 )
8. Telesto ( 3 )
9. Robert Großkopf ( 3 )
10. Roman Kuznetsov ( 3 )

Bisected Bugs

76 bugs have been bisected by 11 people.

Top 10 Bisecters

1. Xisco Faulí ( 37 )
2. Oliver Brinzing ( 13 )
3. raal ( 12 )
4. Aron Budea ( 3 )
5. Justin L ( 3 )
6. Buovjaga ( 2 )
7. Terrence Enger ( 2 )
8. Gabor Kelemen ( 1 )
9. trainman75 ( 1 )
10. Michael Weghorn ( 1 )

Evolution of Unconfirmed Bugs

Check the current list of unconfirmed bugs here

Evolution of Open Regressions

Check the current list of open regressions here

Evolution of Open bibisectRequests

Check the current list of open bibisectrequests here

Evolution of Highest Priority Bugs

Check the current list of highest priority bugs here

Evolution of High Priority Bugs

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!…

Understanding High Performance via Michael Abrash's Graphics Programming Black Book "Before we can create high-performance code, we must understand what high performance is. The objective (not always attained) in creating high-performance software is to make the software able to carry out its appointed tasks so rapidly that it responds instantaneously, as far as the user is concerned. In other

New version 7.1.0.0 of ADO.NET provider for Firebird is ready for download. The main focus of this release is performance.

On August 14, 2019 The Document Foundation announced LibreOffice 6.2.6, the sixth minor release of the LibreOffice 6.2 family, targeted at users in production environments. All users of LibreOffice 6.1.x and LibreOffice 6.2.x versions should upgrade immediately for enhanced security, as the software includes both security fixes and some months of back-ported fixes. See their blog post.

(LibreOffice 6.2 and 6.3 are concurrent releases. LibreOffice 6.3 represents the bleeding edge in term of features for open source office suites, and is targeted at technology enthusiasts, early adopters and power users. V6.2 is for users in production environments.)

This is a from-scratch project created separately from the LibreOffice source.

This program is meant to run on a single-board computer connected to a TV screen displaying LibreOffice Impress presentations automatically. There is a “conference” mode, where users can upload presentations, select them to be played and then control the presentation with the Impress Remote. For this the JavaScript/ browser version of the Impress Remote was created as part of the GSOC project. There is also a “digital signage” mode where presentations are displayed automatically after being uploaded and looped indefinitely.

The original project proposal and plan can be found here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1FZKM2I_5Fc2ENsLxlMmkWTo6GJaS8_QHiYEERIVxVfY/edit

Work done:

• App to control LibreOffice to run presentations automatically
• Python package on pypi.org (pip install libresign)
• Flask control panel app with ‘fancy’ user interface
• JavaScript version of the Impress Remote
• 250 commits in 4 repositories
  • https://github.com/LibreOffice/libresign/commits/master
  • https://github.com/rptr/impress-remote-js/commits/master
  • https://github.com/rptr/irpjs-client/commits/master
  • https://github.com/rptr/irpjs/commits/master

Screenshot of the control panel

Screenshot of the browser Impress Remote

What you can do with it:

• Users can upload their Impress presentations which will be started and displayed on the screen
• They can either let this happen automatically in a “signage” mode or control it manually with e.g. the Impress Remote in “conference” mode

Please refer to the readme in the LibreSign repository for instructions on how to use this project: https://github.com/LibreOffice/libresign

Things to do:

The original project plan was rather modest, so some things were planned and added as we went along during the summer. We’ve also come up with features that might be added in the future. Here’s what’s left on the Kanban board,

• Switching between conference and sign mode
• Checking for uploaded file validity
• Going through TODOs I added while writing the code
• Writing some documentation on PyUNO on the TDF wiki

If you have any suggestions for additions you can e-mail me or send in a pull request with changes to the WISHLIST in the main repository (https://github.com/LibreOffice/libresign).

Future:

I hope people will find a use for this and that someone might even add to it. I intend to fix any kind of problem with it in the future and would love to add any reasonable features which might be wanted.

New version 7.0.0.0 of ADO.NET provider for Firebird is ready for download. The main focus of this release is wire encryption.

This week:

1) It was The last week of GSoC program. Raal was working on testing all the project and the generated files and I help him by solving some bugs or add anything.

• add the SideBar implementation:
  their was no implementation for the sidebar commands to be converted to uitest so here I added the implementation of it:
  https://gerrit.libreoffice.org/#/c/77653/
• Ignore the logging part of the QuerySaveDialog while closing the app:
  as it is not important for a uitest to make in every test simulation of asking the user for saving the document or not. This can be found here:
  https://gerrit.libreoffice.org/#/c/77615/
• Use prefix for names that has conflict with python's words:
  avoid using a reserved work of the python words to avoid making variable that name is 'if' or any of these words. This can be found here:
  https://gerrit.libreoffice.org/#/c/77557/
• Replace tabs with spaces:
  as LO uses spaces . This can be found here:
  https://gerrit.libreoffice.org/#/c/77539/
•  Add footer line:
  https://gerrit.libreoffice.org/#/c/77429/ 

2) Markus start working on merging the project to the master. He prepare the code by adding some small changes. He put all the code in new branch feature/gsoc-uitest-2019 and I helped him by reformat the python script with black library to make it in good format and ignore unneeded bractis. this can be found here:
 https://cgit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice/core/commit/?id=471b185b8b1ce3982271bbb77261fbb5e6860d17



3) Start writing a documentation of the uilogger in LiberOffice and write also the final GSoC report and I will put them in same blog here.


4) Working on fixing typos because thier was some mistakes in the comments whithen the code and I will make another commit for it but the content can be found here: https://gerrit.libreoffice.org/#/c/77743/
 also merged here: https://cgit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice/core/commit/?id=01af2d7122e8de8cbf96d1a04eb88817276db410