Welcome to The Document Foundation Planet

This is a feed aggregator that collects what LibreOffice and Document Foundation contributors are writing in their respective blogs.

To have your blog added to this aggregator, please mail the website@global.libreoffice.org mailinglist or file a ticket in Redmine.


Thursday
21 November, 2024


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Dive deep into the revolutionary features of Firebird 5.0 with this comprehensive guide written by database expert Denis Simonov and edited by Alexey Kovyazin.This book offers an in-depth exploration of the significant advancements that make Firebird 5.0 a pivotal release in the world of relational databases.Whether you're a seasoned database administrator, a curious developer, or an IT


Wednesday
20 November, 2024


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El V Congreso Latinoamericano de LibreOffice se celebrará los días 5 y 6 de diciembre de 2024 en Montevideo, y entre sus charlas destacadas estará la presentación de Xisco Fauli (España), Ingeniero de Control de Calidad de LibreOffice. En su …


Tuesday
19 November, 2024


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Italo Vignoli and Mike Saunders from The Document Foundation, the non-profit organisation behind LibreOffice, discuss marketing free and open source software (FOSS). This video is also available on PeerTube.

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Sunday
17 November, 2024


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Month of LibreOffice banner

Yes, we’re half-way through the Month of LibreOffice, November 2024. And already, 206 contributors have already won cool LibreOffice sticker packs! Details on how to claim them will be provided at the end of the month, but if you don’t see your name (or username) on that page, it’s not too late to join…

How to take part

There are many ways you can help out – and you don’t need to be a developer. For instance, you can be a:

  • Handy Helper, answering questions from users on Ask LibreOffice. We’re keeping an eye on that site so if you give someone useful advice, you can claim your shiny stickers.
  • First Responder, helping to confirm new bug reports: Go to our Bugzilla page and look for new bugs. If you can recreate one, add a comment like “CONFIRMED on Windows 11 and LibreOffice 24.8.3”.
  • Drum Beater, spreading the word: Tell everyone about LibreOffice on Mastodon, Bluesky or X (Twitter)! Just say why you love it or what you’re using it for, add the #libreoffice hashtag, and at the end of the month you can claim your stickers.
  • Globetrotter, translating the user interface: LibreOffice is available in a wide range of languages, but its interface translations need to be kept up-to-date. Or maybe you want to translate the suite to a whole new language? Get involved here.
  • Docs Doctor, writing documentation: Whether you want to update the online help or add chapters to the handbooks, here’s where to start.

So, two more weeks to go! We’ll be posting more updates on this blog and our Mastodon, Bluesky and X (Twitter) accounts…


Friday
15 November, 2024


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The next batch is here! We’re editing and uploading more videos from our recent conference – these ones covering C++, the LibreOffice WebAssembly port from Allotropia, and Collabora Online. Use the icon in the top-right to choose videos from the playlist:

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Thursday
14 November, 2024


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Berlín, 14 de noviembre de 2024 – LibreOffice 24.8.3, la tercera corrección de la familia LibreOffice 24.8 de la suite ofimática gratuita de código abierto y con el respaldo de voluntarios para Windows (Intel, AMD y ARM), MacOS (Apple e …


[en] Michael Meeks: 2024-11-14 Thursday

21:00 UTC

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  • Mail chew, suffering from T-bird / GNOME interacting terribly badly - missing audible notifications of appointments, and so on - repeatedly making me late for meetings - despite adding innumerable reminders, tweaking the settings to play tunes etc. Increasingly desperate for a simple shell-script hook to just play a noise instead of notifying - but defeated by business here. Dear lazyweb - does anyone have a simple python-script to poll an iCal URL and provide popups / notifications based on what is found ?
  • Late for Tech planning call, chat with Thorsten, catch up with TDF marketing, plugged away at code review and ad-hoc meetings.
  • Home group in the evening.

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Notebookbar, or tabbed interface is an attempt to modernize LibreOffice user interface. In these series, I try to explain the implementation in LibreOffice code. In the first part, I discuss custom Glade widgets that are building blocks of Notebookbar user interface.

Building LibreOffice From Sources

If you haven’t built LibreOffice from sources before, you can refer to can refer to this tutorial:

Getting Started (Video Tutorial)

The next sections assume that you have a working build environment.

Custom Widgets in Glade Catalogs

Notebookbar implementation consists of .ui files, configuration files and C++ implementation. Let’s look into the user interface files.

First time that you clone LibreOffice source code, and try to open a Notebookbar UI file like this, you may see error:

$ glade ./sc/uiconfig/scalc/ui/notebookbar.ui

You may see an error, which indicates that a required catalog related to LibreOffice is not available.

Glade error

Glade error

To fix this issue, you have to know that Notebookbar uses custom widgets that with the Glade interface designer. These custom widgets are available from a Glade catalog with the name of LibreOffice.

Inside sc/uiconfig/scalc/ui/notebookbar.ui, you may see these two lines:

<requires lib="gtk+" version="3.20"/>
<requires lib="LibreOffice" version="1.0"/>

Glade catalogs are xml files with the keyword glade-catalog inside them, so we can search for this keyword:

$ git grep -l glade-catalog
extras/source/glade/libreoffice-catalog.xml.in
extras/source/glade/makewidgetgroup.xslt

The .in files is an input file in which the build process creates the final xml file out of it. Searching for glade-catalog inside the build folder results:

$ grep -lr glade-catalog
...
instdir/share/glade/libreoffice-catalog.xml

As you can see, the result goes inside the folder instdir/share/glade/, so to be able to use the catalog, you should add this folder to the glade catalog search path. One of the easiest ways to do this, is to add it via Glade interface itself. Use ☰ (hamburger menu), go to “Glade Preferences”, and add instdir/share/glade/ to the “Extra Catalog & Template paths”. Then, reload a notebookbar UI file, and the error should go away. This setting is saved inside ~/.config/glade.conf configuration file.

Custom Widgets for the Notebookbar

Inside the Glade custom catalog instdir/share/glade/libreoffice-catalog.xml, you can see 10 custom widgets:

$ grep "glade-widget-class\ " instdir/share/glade/libreoffice-catalog.xml
<glade-widget-class title="Notebookbar ToolBox" name="sfxlo-NotebookbarToolBox" generic-name="Notebookbar ToolBox" parent="GtkToolbar" icon-name="widget-gtk-toolbar">
<glade-widget-class title="Notebook switching tabs depending on context" name="sfxlo-NotebookbarTabControl" generic-name="NotebookbarTabControl" parent="GtkNotebook" icon-name="widget-gtk-notebook"/>
<glade-widget-class title="Horizontal box hiding children depending on its priorities" name="sfxlo-PriorityHBox" generic-name="PriorityHBox" parent="GtkBox" icon-name="widget-gtk-box"/>
<glade-widget-class title="Horizontal box hiding children depending on its priorities" name="sfxlo-PriorityMergedHBox" generic-name="PriorityMergedHBox" parent="GtkBox" icon-name="widget-gtk-box"/>
<glade-widget-class title="Box which can move own content to the popup" name="sfxlo-DropdownBox" generic-name="DropdownBox" parent="GtkBox" icon-name="widget-gtk-box"/>
<glade-widget-class title="Box which can hide own content" name="VclOptionalBox" generic-name="VclOptionalBox" parent="GtkBox" icon-name="widget-gtk-box"/>
<glade-widget-class title="Vertical box hiding children depending 

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Berlin, 14 November 2024 – LibreOffice 24.8.3, the third minor release of the LibreOffice 24.8 family of the free open source, volunteer-supported office suite for Windows (Intel, AMD and ARM), MacOS (Apple and Intel) and Linux, is available at www.libreoffice.org/download.

The release includes over 80 bug and regression fixes over LibreOffice 24.8.2 [1] to improve the stability and robustness of the software, as well as interoperability with legacy and proprietary document formats. In addition, support for Visio template format VSTX has been added.

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

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

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

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

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

LibreOffice for Enterprise

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

Every line of code developed by ecosystem companies for enterprise customers is shared with the community on the master code repository and improves the LibreOffice Technology platform. Products based on LibreOffice Technology are available for all major desktop operating systems (Windows, macOS, Linux and ChromeOS), mobile platforms (Android and iOS) and the cloud.

The Document Foundation’s migration protocol helps companies move from proprietary office suites to LibreOffice, by installing the LTS (long-term support) enterprise-optimised version of LibreOffice, plus consulting and training provided by certified professionals: www.libreoffice.org/get-help/professional-support/.

In fact, LibreOffice’s mature code base, rich feature set, strong support for open standards, excellent compatibility and LTS options make it the ideal solution for organisations looking to regain


Wednesday
13 November, 2024


[en] Michael Meeks: 2024-11-13 Wednesday

21:00 UTC

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  • Call with Dave, patch review, mail chew, etc. Sales call, quick sync with Karen, catch up with Philippe. Band practice.

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Los próximos 5 y 6 de diciembre de 2024 en Montevideo se celebrará el V Congreso Latinoamericano de LibreOffice, un evento que reunirá a expertos, colaboradores y entusiastas del software libre en América Latina. Este año, una de las presentaciones …


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Google Summer of Code logo

This year, LibreOffice was once again a mentoring organization in the Google Summer of Code (GSoC), a global program focused on bringing more developers into free and open source software development. Seven projects were finished successfully, plus one project mentored under Linux Foundation. Contributors and mentors enjoyed the time, and here we present some of the achievements, which should make their way into LibreOffice 25.2 in early February 2025!

You can experiment with the new features by using daily builds and report any problems in our bug tracker.


LibreOffice Theme by Sahil Gautam

Mentors: Rafael Lima, Heiko Tietze (TDF)

Theming LibreOffice has a long history. Support for Mozilla Personas was added in version 4.0 released in 2013. This was later changed to a selection of preinstalled themes. The current work started by Sahil aims to also supersede Application Colors.

The groundwork has been done and the design team is currently discussing how to present the feature in the user interface. Sahil continues to engage in the work and discussion and we are grateful for the commitment.

Learn more about the theme project in the final report.


Comments in Sidebar by Mohit Marathe

Mentors: Sarper Akdemir (allotropia), Heiko Tietze (TDF)

The Sidebar has proven to be very powerful when dealing with complex documents. The complexity of comments can certainly increase quickly, so the ability of managing them via the Sidebar was seen as a welcome addition.

Mohit is currently polishing the feature while working closely with the design team.

Learn more about the comment feature in the final report.


Improvements to the Functions Sidebar deck and Functions Wizard by Ahmed Hamed

Mentors: Andreas Heinisch, Heiko Tietze (TDF)

Both the Sidebar deck and the wizard now display the functions in collapsible groups when viewed with the “All” filtering option. Both also now have an optional similarity search.

Ahmed is currently working on adding a category to store favourite functions.

Learn more about the Functions deck improvements in the final report.


Native support for histogram chart and its variations by Devansh Varshney

Mentors: Tomaž Vajngerl (Collabora)

The new chart type will make it possible to visualise ranges of values. Adding a new type of chart is a can of worms, because file format support has to be added both for ODF and OOXML. Devansh is working to finish the implementation in this regard.

Learn more about the chart work in the final report.


Cross Platform .NET bindings for UNO API by Ritobroto Mukherjee

Mentors: Hossein Nourikhah (TDF), Thorsten Behrens (allotropia)

This is big news for .NET developers hoping to make use of LibreOffice’s UNO API. The earlier support was undocumented and targeted versions released over twenty years ago. Now with .NET 8 support added, the bindings for .NET programming languages, including C#, F# and Visual Basic are cross platform, available for Windows, Linux and macOS.

Learn more about the .NET work in the final report.


Lua UNO language bindings by Venetia Furtado

Mentors: Thorsten Behrens (allotropia), Stephan Bergmann (allotropia)

Lua


Tuesday
12 November, 2024


[en] Michael Meeks: 2024-11-12 Tuesday

21:00 UTC

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  • Planning call. Surreal TDF thread developing where people criticize the old board for their hard work on a policy, then replace it with a supposedly better one: legally approved and all that - and then FIXME: include the rest of this blog post - until people start reading it carefully.
  • Overlapping calls, variously 1:1 with Andras, partner calls.

Monday
11 November, 2024


[en] Michael Meeks: 2024-11-11 Monday

21:00 UTC

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  • Mail chew, lots of back-to-back calls, 1:1's etc. Eventually wrote a status report.

Sunday
10 November, 2024


[en] Michael Meeks: 2024-11-10 Sunday

21:00 UTC

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  • Breakfast with the parents; talked with Mum, poked at her PC problems. Helped to get leaves bagged & to the dump. Nice lunch together, bid a fond farewell.
  • Drove home together, Sermon on the way; collected E. from church, and enjoyed Alita & some House M.D..

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General Activities

  1. LibreOffice 24.2.7 was released on October 31
  2. Olivier Hallot (TDF) continued with a massive Help bookmark cleanup effort and improved the help for BASIC’s Option Explicit statement
  3. Pierre F. reorganised some help pages for Calc functions
  4. Bogdan Buzea fixed nearly 70 issues pointed out by PVS-Studio static analyser
  5. Miklós Vajna (Collabora) made the Hide Whitespace feature in Writer more robust, fixed an issue with losing the character position of an anchor point when copying content and fixed an issue with frames becoming disconnected from their content after dragging
  6. Tomaž Vajngerl, Szymon Kłos, Skyler Grey, Vivek Javiya, Marco Cecchetti, Rashesh Padia, Jaume Pujantell and Henry Castro (Collabora) worked on LOKit used by Collabora Online
  7. Julien Nabet synchronised the API code with Java Database Connectivity version 4.3 and fixed several issues pointed out by static analysers
  8. Xisco Faulí (TDF) fixed nearly 80 issues pointed out by PVS-Studio static analyser, improved the support for context-fill and context-stroke in SVG files, converted many Java tests to CppUnit tests, added support for “greater than or equal” attribute in conditional formatting, added many automated tests while also simplifying code used across tests, upgraded many dependencies and fixed some crashes
  9. Michael Stahl (allotropia) did some fixes in Writer’s automated tests and made the zip package handling more robust
  10. Mike Kaganski (Collabora) made the breaking of Writer tables across pages more robust, improved the handling of time durations in ODS files, fixed an issue with in-document custom toolbar icons not showing in versions earlier than 6.4, made cycling from first to last tab in Calc configurable as an expert configuration option, improved grammar check popups from Duden and made assigning fixed-length strings in BASIC work. He also fixed crashes and did code cleanups
  11. Caolán McNamara (Collabora) made it possible to create rich content comments in Writer via the UNO API, improved the loading time of Impress/Draw documents with lots of master slides/pages, made presentations work on fractionally scaled displays on Linux with gtk3 UI, made it so an infobar will appear in case an opened Impress/Draw document has over a 100 master slides/pages, improved the saving speed of spreadsheets and added handling of div elements into Calc’s HTML cell content support. He also fixed many issues found by static analysers and fuzzers and did code cleanups
  12. Stephan Bergmann (allotropia) worked on WASM build. He also adapted the code to compiler changes
  13. Noel Grandin (Collabora) did a big Skia upgrade going from release m116 to m130 requiring a lot of patch rework, made it faster to open ODS files with large merged ranges and XLS files with lots of conditional formatting or query formulas, made PPTX chart importing more robust, made saving metafiles as images work, fixed lack of metadata in images or drawings exported as PNG, fixed an issue with opening RTF files with broken images and fixed an Impress/draw comment issue after a still-unreleased code rework. He also did many

Saturday
09 November, 2024


[en] Michael Meeks: 2024-11-09 Saturday

21:00 UTC

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  • Up earlyish, got stuck into sorting wood & collecting leaves in the garden. Made some good progress.
  • Drove off to see H. in Durham with M&D, nice Turkish restuarant meal, admired her flat, caught up somewhat. Back to M&D's - enjoyed an evening together.

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We’re editing and uploading more videos from our recent conference – these ones covering the Google Summer of Code, new Calc functions and optimisations, improvements to language support and more (use the icon in the top-right to choose videos from the playlist):

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Friday
08 November, 2024


[en] Michael Meeks: 2024-11-08 Friday

21:00 UTC

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  • Up early, chat with Dave, drove north to my parents with J. caught up with E-mail and got a bit of hacking done in the car. Stopped off at Aunti Nicki's for tea, and on to my parents - dinner together in the evning.

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Hamburg and Bolzano, November 8th, 2024 – During the two-day annual South Tyrol Free Software Conference, allotropia software GmbH today announces beta versions of its new product line “ZetaOffice”.

ZetaOffice is a new set of applications, libraries and services, all powered by the LibreOffice Technology stack. Featured among its products is ZetaJS, an innovative browser-based plugin, with unique programmability & embeddability – the perfect tool for complex office editing, process automation and line-of-business applications in the web.

Additionally, leveraging the unique portability and flexibility of the LibreOffice Technology stack, ZetaOffice will be available in bit-by-bit identical versions (allowing for perfect interoperability and feature parity) also for open-source-based mobile operating systems (Android, and derived OS), as well as for all relevant desktop operating systems (Windows, macOS, Linux – via flatpak and snapcraft).

“We’re very excited being able to offer powerful, data-sovereign Open Source office functionality on even more platforms today”, says Thorsten Behrens, owner and managing director of allotropia software. “In particular our innovative, WASM-based browser version of LibreOffice will be a game-changer for every web developer in need of processing, analysing or integrating with office documents.”

“This could not have come at a better time”, says Michiel Leenaars, director of strategy at philanthropic investor NLnet Foundation. “It is long overdue but certainly in the wake of the recent geo-political developments, we all recognise the urgent need for Europe to regain its technological independence when it comes to core technologies – as boring as these may seem. ZetaOffice shows that Europe has the talent and capacity to break with the past and create new paradigms and use innovation and collaboration to save the day.”

“ZetaOffice is the perfect addition to our portfolio of tools for document and business process automation”, says Uli Brandner, CEO and owner of CIB Group. “With solutions like CIB flow for workflow modeling and CIB coSys for high-quality template management, CIB Group already offers powerful digitalization tools. As demand grows to bring proven applications to the web and stay on the cutting edge of technology, ZetaOffice stands out as an innovative solution precisely tailored to our customers’ needs.”

A detailed blog post, including links to beta versions of the software, is available here.

For the products, please refer to our website at zetaoffice.net.

ZetaOffice and the team at allotropia thanks the European Commission’s Next Generation Internet initiative/NGI Zero for its financial contribution to the development of this software.

About ZetaOffice:

ZetaOffice is a product line based on LibreOffice Technology, comprising of desktop LTS products for classical office productivity requirements; a browser-native version based on WebAssembly for fast, client-side integration and automation of office technology; and an
upcoming mobile app widget, for deep integration in mobile line-of-business applications. ZetaOffice is focused on speed, superb embeddability, excellent inter-product as well as Office compatibility, and geared towards digital-sovereign & data protection needs.

About ZetaJS:

ZetaJS is a JavaScript library, available via the npm package manager, to enable developers to quickly & conveniently embed ZetaOffice WebAssembly in web applications. ZetaJS makes available the entire


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Today allotropia has launched the ZetaOffice range of products at the SFSCON in South Tyrol. ZetaOffice is a LibreOffice Technology built & designed for professional use in the browser, on the desktop and on mobile.

We are excited to additionally announce a massively improved way for which LibreOffice Technology can be used fully client-side on the web. As an additional building block, we have developed the ZetaJS wrapper, which enables convenient embedding and automating WASM (WebAssembly) builds of ZetaOffice via JavaScript. With that, all of the LibreOffice Technology APIs and features are available to web applications – and by leveraging WASM, which runs ZetaOffice client-side, no server or cloud services are needed. All processing is taking place on the client browser, which minimizes latencies & load (of course, a minimal static delivery of web application code, assets and the WASM binary is still needed, but that’s extremely light-weight). 

Examples

Let’s look at some simple examples to give you an idea, how easy ZetaOffice integration is. All comprise of an HTML and a JavaScript file. A ZetaOffice WASM build will automatically be included from the following URL. To replace it with a custom WASM build see config.sample.js of each demo.

https://cdn.zetaoffice.net/zetaoffice_latest/

Next you need to upload the zetajs/ folder onto a webserver of your choice, which sets the following HTTP headers (see developer.mozilla.org for further details):

Cross-Origin-Opener-Policy "same-origin"
Cross-Origin-Embedder-Policy "require-corp"

So back to the example code. The HTML files for all examples embed ZetaOffice and some JavaScript loading code. Please check the actual JavaScript file for the code interacting with ZetaOffice.

Lets have a look at the simple.html (see live). ZetaOffice displays its content using an HTML canvas. So in line 14 we initialize this canvas. Currently a list of attributes like is needed for the canvas. But we will migrate those attributes to the ZetaJS wrapper, so they won’t be needed anymore in the HTML code.

<canvas
  id="qtcanvas" contenteditable="true"
  oncontextmenu="event.preventDefault()" onkeydown="event.preventDefault()"
  style="height:100%; width:100%; border:0px none; padding:0;"/>

The Module variable on line 30 passes the information needed to initialize WASM binaries. First is the canvas. And second is an array of JavaScript files which will be executed in the main Web Worker running the WASM binary. Web Workers are a process like feature of the browsers WASM runtime environment. We pass the ZetaJS wrapper and a file with custom JavaScript code, in this example the simple.js. You may need to ensure, that the zeta.js is reachable under the given URL path.

Line 33 to 39 preload the soffice.js file to ensure, it’s not being blocked by the browsers origin policy when loaded from a foreign origin. Line 42 triggers a website resize event, to make ZetaOffice display nicely inside the canvas. This can be done more precise, as shown in the more complex demos. But for the start the resize event will be triggered after a fixed


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Writer TextBoxes provide the user with shapes that can have complex geometry and complex content. There is also a feature to capture shapes inside page boundaries: now the two features interact with each other better.

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

Motivation

As described in a previous post, Writer implements the TextBox feature with a pair of objects: a Draw shape (with complex geometry) and a (hidden) Writer TextFrame, providing complex content. To avoid wrapping problems, the underlying TextFrame always has its wrap type set to "through", i.e. text may wrap around the Draw shape, but the hidden TextFrame is always ignored during text wrapping.

In most cases this provides the expected behavior, because the user sees one object, so wrapping around at most one object is not surprising.

However, there is also an other feature, that shapes may be captured inside page frames: if their position would be outside the page frame, Writer corrects this, so they are not off-page. This also makes sense, so it can't happen that your document has a shape that is hard to find, due to a silly position.

The trouble comes when these two are combined: the Draw shape's position gets adjusted to be captured inside the page frame, but the TextFrame's wrap type is "through", and objects with this wrap type are an exception from the capturing mechanism, so the position of the two shapes get out of sync.

Results so far

The problem is now solved by improving the layout, so in case the TextFrame is actually part of a Draw shape + TextFrame pair (forming a TextBox), then we calculate the effective wrap type of the TextFrame based on the wrap type of its Draw shape, so either both objects are captured or none, which results in consistent render result.

Here is a sample document where all margins are configured to be equal, but capturing corrected the Draw shape (and not the TextFrame):

Bugdoc: old Writer render

And here is the same document, with consistent positioning:

Bugdoc: new Writer render

As you can see, now the rendered margins actually equal, as wanted.

How is this implemented?

If you would like to know a bit more about how this works, continue reading... :-)

The bugfix commit was sw textbox: capture fly when its draw object is captured.

The tracking bug was tdf#138711.

Want to start using this?

You can get a development edition of Collabora Online 24.04 and try it out yourself right now: try the development edition. Collabora intends to continue supporting and contributing to LibreOffice, the code is merged so we expect all of this work will be available in TDF's next release too (25.2).


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Writer Guide 24.8

Jean H. Weber (photo) and the Documentation Team are happy to announce the immediate availability of the Writer Guide 24.8, the latest update based on the recently released LibreOffice 24.8.

Writer is the word-processing application. It is compatible with a wide range of document formats including Microsoft Word (.doc, .docx), and you can export your work in several formats including PDF. Anyone who wants to get up to speed quickly with Writer will find this book valuable. You may be new to word processing software, or you may be familiar with another office suite.

What’s new in LibreOffice Writer 24.8 Community?

This book has been updated from LibreOffice 24.2 Writer Guide. It covers some of the changes that are visible in the LibreOffice Writer user interface, including:

  • Width of Comment pane can now be adjusted.
  • Bullets used in the document can be selected in the Unordered List dropdown.
  • New features in the Navigator.
  • New hyphenation features.
  • Hyperlink tab was removed from character properties; use the Hyperlink dialog instead.
  • Formatting aid: to enclose selected text with parentheses, square brackets, curly braces
    or quotation marks, press the opening character.
  • Table Alignment and Left/Right spacing can be changed via the Sidebar.
  • New Find deck in Sidebar lists results of a quick search along with their context.
  • Improved support for multi-page floating tables.
  • Organizer page in style dialogs now named General page.
  • And more; see the Release Notes.
    LibreOffice 24.8 Community also includes many other changes, including:
  • Improved support for multi-page floating tables.
  • Accessibility improvements.
  • Improvements in interoperability with Microsoft’s proprietary file formats.
  • “Legal” ordered list numbering: DOC and RTF support.

Release Notes are here: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleaseNotes/24.8

The Writer Guide 24.8 is available in the Documentation Website as well as in the LibreOffice Bookshelf website and it includes the guides in HTML format for web navigation, as well as the traditional PDF, ODT and the printed version from LuLu Inc.


Thursday
07 November, 2024


[en] Michael Meeks: 2024-11-07 Thursday

21:00 UTC

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  • Up too early, mail chew, patch review. Taxi, Bus, Plane + drove home - lovely to be back.
  • Plugged away at some work, caught up with J. Bible study group on Revelation.

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El V Congreso Latinoamericano de LibreOffice se celebrará los días 5 y 6 de diciembre de 2024 en Montevideo y contará con la participación de uno de los referentes más destacados del software libre: Italo Vignoli (Italia). En su presentación …


Wednesday
06 November, 2024


[en] Michael Meeks: 2024-11-06 Wednesday

21:00 UTC

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  • Disturbed sleep watching vote in USA; something of a deja-vu take from 2016.
  • Lots of great content and attendees to talk with at the Nextcloud Enterprise day. Lunch, gave a quick update on various new bits in Nextcloud Office.
  • Lots of happy chatting to various customers, Nextclouders and partners with lots of useful feedback and input variously. Out for dinner with the team, more late-night discussion & drinks, bed late.

Tuesday
05 November, 2024


[en] Michael Meeks: 2024-11-05 Tuesday

21:00 UTC

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  • Up early, mail chew, code review, drove to STN, flight to Frankfurt (Hahn) - diverted to Cologne; train to Frankfurt instead - perhaps better this way.
  • Arrived, catch up with Frank & Jos; out to meet up with Eloy & Lily; bed.

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Manuel Frassinetti is one of our heroic volunteers working on the localisation of LibreOffice, including the site and wiki, in Italian. During the day, Manuel runs a tobacco shop in Modena – the city where he was born and where he lives – where he organises exhibitions of works by local artists.

In 2023, after the conclusion of the tenth edition of Art at the Tobacconist’s, he decided to publish a catalogue of the eight exhibitions that took place in the first six months of the year, followed by a series of photos recalling the journeys he made together with his wife Patrizia, who passed away in 2022.

To produce the catalogue, Manuel used his Linux PC with LibreOffice, in the unusual guise of a desktop publishing tool. The catalogue was printed and distributed to the customers of the tobacco shop, as well as to the artists who participated in the exhibitions.

FRASSINETTI_CATALOGO_COMP

The resolution of the images has been reduced to 150 dpi to keep the file size within the limit imposed by the blog.


Monday
04 November, 2024


[en] Michael Meeks: 2024-11-04 Monday

21:00 UTC

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  • Up early, slide preparation, customer sales & planning call; various 1:1's until late.

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LibreOffice Conference 2024 group photo

Here’s our summary of updates, events and activities in the LibreOffice project in the last four weeks – click the links to learn more…

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  • In addition, we’ve started editing and uploading videos from the talks. Here’s the first batch – but there are many more to come, and we’ll put them on PeerTube too. (Apologies for the occasional video stutter in some places.)

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LibreOffice at Software Freedom Day celebrations in Nepal

  • We talked to Ritobroto Mukherjee about the work he’s doing to improve LibreOffice, as part of the Google Summer of Code. He also tells us about his experiences joining our community.

Ritobroto Mukherjee<

  • Then we caught up with Jonathan Clark, who recently joined the small team at The Document Foundation to work on improving LibreOffice’s language support, especially for RTL / CTL / CJK.

Jonathan Clark

  • On the release side, we had one update to LibreOffice in October – version 24.2.7, planned to be the last in the 24.2 branch. Then all users are strongly recommended to upgrade to the latest stable branch, LibreOffice 24.8.

LibreOffice 24.2 banner

Rafael Lima

  • And finally, we looked ahead to some upcoming and future events. The LibreOffice project will be at FOSDEM 2025 in Brussels at the start of February, for instance. And thinking further ahead: we’re looking for people to host the LibreOffice Conference 2025!

Keep in touch – follow us on Mastodon, X (formerly Twitter), Bluesky, Reddit and Facebook. Like what we do? Support our community with a donation – or join our community and help to make LibreOffice even better!

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