We’re half-way through the event, so there’s still time to join us in Luxembourg (or you can watch recordings after the event).
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We’re half-way through the event, so there’s still time to join us in Luxembourg (or you can watch recordings after the event).
The LibreOffice and Open Source Conference 2024 has started! We’ll be uploading videos from the talks as soon as possible, and in the meantime, here are a few photos from today’s talks and events…
The LibreOffice and Open Source Conference 2024 starts in just a few days in Luxembourg, and it’s supported by the country’s Digital Learning Hub, which offers short and hands-on training courses in the fields of computer science. Director Serge Linckels says:
We are delighted to announce our partnership with the LibreOffice Conference 2024, taking place in Luxembourg. This collaboration underscores our commitment to fostering innovation and supporting the open-source community.
As the Digital Learning Hub, we are dedicated to advancing digital education and empowering individuals with the skills needed for the future. Our involvement in the LibreOffice Conference 2024 reflects our mission to promote digital literacy and open-source solutions. We believe that by supporting events like this, we can help build a more inclusive and technologically adept society.
We look forward to engaging with the vibrant community at the conference, sharing insights, and exploring new opportunities.
Thank you to The Document Foundation for organizing this pivotal event. We are very excited to be part of this journey.
The SVG export in Impress now supports a per-paragraph setting to handle semi-transparent shape text, while previously this was only possible to control at a per-shape level.
This work is primarily for Collabora Online, but the feature is available in desktop Impress as well.
As described in a previous post, Impress already had the capability to have semi-transparent shape text, but the SVG export of this for the case when not all paragraphs have the same setting was broken.
Transparency in SVG can be described as a property of a group (<g style="opacity: 0.5">...</g>)
and it can be also a property of the text (<tspan fill-opacity="0.5">...</tspan>).
The SVG export works with the metafile of the shape, so when looking for meta actions, it tries to
guess if the transparency will be for text: if so, it needs to use the tspan markup, otherwise
going with the g markup is OK.
What happened here is that meta action for a normal text started, so the SVG export assumed the text is not semi-transparent, but later the second line was still transparent, so we started a group element, and this resulted in a not even well-formed XML output.
The relevant part of the test document is simple: just 3 paragraphs, the second one is semi-transparent (and also has a bullet, as an extra):
Bugdoc: original Impress render
Once this was exported to SVG, this resulted in a non-well-formed XML, so you got this error in a web browser:
Once tweaking the transparency mask writer to check if text started already, we get the correct SVG render:
If you would like to know a bit more about how this works, continue reading... :-)
The bugfix commit was SVG export: fix handling of semi-transparent text inside a list.
The tracking bug was tdf#162782.
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).
On September 21, free and open source software (FOSS) enthusiasts celebrated the 21st worldwide Software Freedom Day. Our community members in Nepal were not behind with the celebrations either: they were active supporting small open source communities and connecting them for the greater good in the LibreOffice community. Here’s their report:
Suraj Bhattarai, LibreOffice liaison in Nepal, was available at the LibreOffice booth at the Software Freedom Day celebration by Open Source Klub (NOSK) at Nepal College of Information and Technology (NCIT), Lalitpur.
He described how the LibreOffice booth was so busy and engaging. In particular, the LibreOffice community supported the event with fun games, swag, candies, and engagement – all while advocating for the best free and open source office suite. The booth included amazing LibreOffice merchandise, such as T-shirts, tote-bags, water-bottles, round pin plastic badges, flyers, a variety of stickers, beer mats, candies, and so forth.
The booth had a LibreOffice crossword game, and showed LibreOffice 24.8 on a display for hands-on testing. There was also a presentation deck for newbies, and some verbal support/assistance to improve the LibreOffice experience and customization for easier navigation within the user interface. Suraj also mentioned that around three quarters of the people who appeared at the booth for a quick “hello” mentioned hearing about or knowing and using LibreOffice in their home or workspace.
The event was mainly joined by students across Kathmandu valley, open source contributors, club alumni, and veteran FOSS contributors/kickstarters in Nepal. Apart from the event itinerary and other activities, the LibreOffice “paper plane contest” received major attention and everyone seems to have enjoyed their paper plane flight to software freedom!
The winner was awarded a 750ML aluminum water bottle, with the LibreOffice logo printed on it. Suraj concluded the competition with the 3R principle and the analogy of releasing paperwork and transitioning to digital open source office suites for document-related work pieces. The college administration expressed some interest in replacing Microsoft Office and migrating the campus computers to LibreOffice suite.
Similarly, Suraj also delivered a recorded talk named “Diversity, Inclusion and Community Model in Free Software Communities” at Birendra Multiple Campus, Chitwan. There, the Software Freedom Day celebration was hosted by the Birendra Open Source Club (BOSC) with support from the LibreOffice community.
The aim of the talk was to deepen and bridge the relationship of the club with the LibreOffice community and LibreOffice activities/contributions in the future. Previously, the club contributed greatly to the success of a local event: the LibreOffice Localization Sprint 2023. Achyut Koirala, the acting president of the on-campus club, represented the LibreOffice community there.
While Suraj himself couldn’t be present, Achyut Koirala together with Shreeram Lamichhane communicated the positive feedback from the recorded talk Suraj had shared. As a closing remark, Achyut thanked the LibreOffice community as a whole for the inclusive community model and for welcoming their community into the project.
And finally, Nirjal Bhurtel, representing LibreOffice’s local community, did the same at Kathmandu University …
LibreOffice options page provides rich set of settings for everyone who wants to tune LibreOffice to match their needs. But, what if you as a developer, need setting dialogs that are needed elsewhere in the LibreOffice application? Here I discuss some of such use cases, which are handled by defining UNO commands.
The code for providing “Tools > Options” is not in a single module, but main part resides in cui module, which contains code which is used across different modules. Looking into cui/source/options/ folder from LibreOffice core source code, you can see various different source files related to the options. The biggest file there is cui/source/options/treeopt.cxx, which is the actual implementation of the tree-based dialog that you see when you open Tools > Options dialog. There are other C++ files that handle .ui files related to options. You can find those UI files in cui/uiconfig/ui/ folder with a name like opt*.ui:
$ ls cui/uiconfig/ui/opt*.ui
These files can be edited and they are used as described in the LibreOffice design blog:
Only some of the dialogs can be opened available via UNO dispatch commands. As an example, you may see “.uno:AdditionsDialog” is used both in cui/source/options/optgdlg.cxx for creating a dialog in Tools > Options (when you click for “more icons”), and also in sfx2/source/appl/appserv.cxx.
You can try running this UNO command in LibreOffice BASIC editor with this code snippet:
Bugdoc: old SVG render
Bugdoc: new SVG renderSub Main()
Set oDispatch = CreateUnoService("com.sun.star.frame.DispatchHelper")
Dim args(0) As New com.sun.star.beans.PropertyValue
Set oFrame = StarDesktop.Frames.getByIndex(0)
oDispatch.executeDispatch(oFrame, ".uno:AdditionsDialog", "", 0, args)
End Sub
The above command is defined specifically to help developers use the “Extensions” dialog, anywhere in LibreOffice UI, from top menus to context menus and toolbars and also in code, in a simple way.
There is another dialog titled “Security Options and Warnings”, which is opened through .uno:OptionsSecurityDialog UNO command. In this way, it can be used easily in other modules of LibreOffice.
SecurityOptionsDialog
Adding a new UNO command was discussed before, in a separate blog post:
Adding a new UNO command for an options dialog is basically the same. There can be differences regarding the configurations and the data that is passed between the dialog and the caller.
When you create a dialog box directly like the code snippet below, you have access to the member functions defined for that specific dialog:
IMPL_LINK_NOARG( SwGlossaryDlg, PathHdl, weld::Button&, void )
{
SvxAbstractDialogFactory* pFact = SvxAbstractDialogFactory::Create();
ScopedVclPtr<AbstractSvxMultiPathDialog> pDlg(pFact->CreateSvxPathSelectDialog(m_xDialog.get()));
SvtPathOptions aPathOpt;
const OUString sGlosPath( aPathOpt.GetAutoTextPath() );
pDlg->SetPath(sGlosPath);
if(RET_OK == pDlg->Execute())
{
const OUString sTmp(pDlg->GetPath());
if(sTmp != sGlosPath)
{
aPathOpt.SetAutoTextPath( sTmp );
::GetGlossaries()->UpdateGlosPath( true );
Init();
}
}
}
As you can see, pDlg->GetPath() is accessible here, and you can use it to …
Our LibreOffice and Open Source Conference 2024 is taking place next week in Luxembourg, and one of the sponsors is Passbolt S.A., which makes an open source password manager. Kevin Muller, the company’s CEO, says:
We are excited to participate in the LibreOffice and Open Source Conference, where I will be speaking about the pivotal role open source has played in Passbolt’s commercial success.
Passbolt has been 100% open source from day one—and it always will be. This approach has given us a significant competitive edge, driving market adoption and commercialization from the outset. Compared to many competitors Passbolt’s open source philosophy offers unmatched transparency and control.
In today’s world, where nations are increasingly focused on reclaiming their digital sovereignty, the transparency and trust fostered by open source software are more critical than ever.
Kevin is giving a talk on the opening day, so check it out!
The Annual Report of The Document Foundation describes the foundation’s activities and projects, especially in regard to LibreOffice and the Document Liberation Project.
We’ve been posting sections of the 2023 report here on the blog, and now the full version is available in PDF format on TDF’s Nextcloud server in two different versions: low resolution (6.4MB) and high resolution (43.7MB). The Annual Report is based on the German version presented to the authorities.
The document has been entirely created with free open source software: written contents have obviously been developed with LibreOffice Writer (desktop) and collaboratively modified with LibreOffice Writer (online), charts have been created with LibreOffice Calc and prepared for publishing with LibreOffice Draw, drawings and tables have been developed or modified (from legacy PDF originals) with LibreOffice Draw, images have been prepared for publishing with GIMP, and the layout has been created with Scribus based on the existing templates.
We at The Document Foundation are very grateful to all contributors to our projects and communities in 2023 – none of this would be possible without you!
Translated by Timothy Brennan Jr.
Rio de Janeiro, September 26, 2024 – The Brazilian LibreOffice community proudly presents its new edition of the Writer Guide 7.6 , based on LibreOffice 7.6 and with the innovations introduced in this version.
The guide meets the need for LibreOffice documentation in Brazilian Portuguese and the Writer Guide will help all LibreOffice users in editing texts, monographs, theses, reports, minutes and much more.
This book introduces the most important features of LibreOffice Writer:
The Brazilian documentation team was composed of Jackson Cavalcanti Jr., Timothy Brennan Jr., Túlio Macedo, Luciana Motta, and Olivier Hallot. The Writer’s Guide translation and editing process was coordinated by Timothy Jr.
“It has been a pleasure to work with the Brazilian team. I have had the privilege of completing the publication of the Writer’s Guide 7.6, a milestone for me personally. We are a great team and I had a lot of help during the process, which was quite valuable. I consider that working on the LibreOffice guides is a very good way to learn how to use office software and develop skills in the area”, said Timothy Brennan Jr,. “The pleasure of working on a translation and editing project of this scope, of learning new skills, and, above all, having contact with other Brazilians from different regions, is an immense and unparalleled joy”, added Timothy.
Writer’s Guide 7.6 can be downloaded in PDF and the ODF format from the LibreOffice Bookshelf website at https://books.libreoffice.org/pt-br/
Would you like to help us produce new LibreOffice guides for the Brazilian public? Contact our team at pt-docs@community.documentfoundation.org
An office suite optimised for the privacy-conscious office suite user who wants full control over the information they share
Berlin, 27 September 2024 – LibreOffice 24.8.2, the second minor release of the LibreOffice 24.8 family of the free, volunteer-supported office suite for Windows (Intel, AMD and ARM), MacOS (Apple and Intel) and Linux, is available at https://www.libreoffice.org/download.
The release includes over 80 bug and regression fixes over LibreOffice 24.8.1 [1] to improve the stability and robustness of the software, as well as interoperability with legacy and proprietary document formats.
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. As such, LibreOffice is the best option for the privacy-conscious office suite user, and offers a feature set comparable to the leading product on the market.
In addition, 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 optimising 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 proprietary Microsoft OOXML (DOCX, XLSX, PPTX). The latter hides a great deal of artificial complexity, which 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 Guide from the following link: https://books.libreoffice.org/. In addition, they will be able to get first-level technical support from volunteers on the user mailing lists and the Ask LibreOffice website: https://ask.libreoffice.org.
LibreOffice for Enterprise
For enterprise-class deployments, TDF strongly recommends the LibreOffice Enterprise family of applications from ecosystem partners with dedicated value-added features and SLAs: https://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: https://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 control of their data and break free from vendor lock-in …
Berlin, 25 September 2024 – The LibreOffice and Open Source Conference 2024 will take place in Luxembourg from the 10 to the 12 October 2024. It will be hosted by the Digital Learning Hub and the local campus of 42 Luxembourg at the Terres Rouges buildings in Belval, Esch-sur-Alzette.
This is a key event that brings together the LibreOffice community – supporting the leading FOSS office suite – with a large number of stakeholders: large open source projects, international organizations and representatives from EU institutions and European government departments.
Organized in partnership with the Luxembourg Media & Digital Design Centre (LMDDC), which will host the EdTech track, the event is sponsored by allotropia and Collabora, the two companies contributing more actively to the development of LibreOffice; Passbolt, the Luxembourg made open source password manager for teams; and the Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust (SnT) of the University of Luxembourg.
In addition, local partners such as Luxembourg Convention Bureau, LIST, LU-CIX and Luxembourg House of Cybersecurity are supporting the organization of various aspects of the conference.
After the opening session in the morning of the 10 October, which includes institutional presentations from the Minister for Digitalisation, the Ministry of the Economy and the European Commission’s OSPO, there will be tracks about LibreOffice covering development, quality, security, documentation, localization, marketing and enterprise deployments, and tracks about open source covering technologies in education, OSS applications and cybersecurity. Another session will focus on OSPOs (Open Source Programme Officers).
The LibreOffice and Open Source Conference Luxembourg 2024 provides a platform to discuss the latest technical developments, community contributions, and the challenges facing open source software and communities of which TDF, LibreOffice and its community are important components. Professionals, developers, volunteers and users from various fields will share their experiences and collaborate on the future direction of the leading office suite.
Policy and decision makers will find counterparts from all over Europe with which they will be able to exchange ideas and experiences that will help them to promote and implement open source software in public, education and private sector organizations.
On 11 and 12 October, there will also be workshops focusing on different aspects of LibreOffice development, targeted to undergraduate Computer Science students or anyone who knows programming, and wants to become familiar with a large scale real world open source software project. To be able to better support the participants we limited the number of seats to 20 so register for the workshops as soon as possible to reserve your place.
Everyone is encouraged to register and participate in the conference to engage with the open source community, learn from different experts and contribute to meaningful discussions. Please note that, to avoid waste, we will plan for food, drinks and other free items for registered attendees so help us to cater for your needs by registering in time.
In my last post on Libreoffice I promised to talk about Writer changes once in a while, but then ... nothing ever happened. However, given that I had an annoying motorcycle accident in the meantime that turned out much more persistently annoying than originally thought, I think I have a bit of an excuse.
So ... what did happen? For one, I fixed quite a few regressions with my name on them, but ... is there much to talk about here? Mostly not: If you look at the fixes, they are often oneliners fixing something that seems rather obvious in retrospect. The more tricky question is: how did these get in in the first place? Its hard for me to say that, as the introducing commits are from even longer ago.
One thing is certain though: Often a unittest would have caught them, so whenever possible, I tried to create a reproducer adding such a test with the fix. To anyone writing bug reports: Creating minimal reproduction test is hugely valuable in this -- not just for finding the issue, but also as a starting point for a regression test. So if a bug bugs you and it is missing a minimal reproduction scenario, adding one is a great way to move this forward. Oh, and maybe verifying a bugfix, if someone provided a fix and the friendly bot say affected users are "encouraged to test the fix and report feedback".
While doing these fixes, I stumbled over Noel suggesting to speed up bookmarks in writer which is of course great, but I noticed that the code could be optimized a bit more as the bookmarks of a document are now sorted by their starting position (which was one of the first changes I made back on OpenOffice.org about more than a decade ago). Thus we can use bisectional search on the bookmarks here, which should be even faster. Now, it would be great if the discussion on this between Noel and me would available for others to learn from, wouldnt it? The cool thing is: it is.
All discussion happened on gerrit in the comments so if you want to learn about bookmark in Writer and how to maybe speed them up for documents that have a lot of them, that is a great starting point! Is there anything to add? Well maybe the following: Currently the bookmarks starting at the same position are currently not sorted. If one would sort them by their end position, the bisectional search could maybe cover even more? This would also remove one extra loop of logic and make the code simpler and easier to read.
The performance improvement is likely irrelevant -- esp. since there will be not that many documents with lots of bookmarks starting at the same position. The simpler code might …
Our LibreOffice and Open Source Conference 2024 is taking place in a few weeks in Luxembourg, and the country’s Ministry for Digitalisation wrote to tell us:
We are pleased to contribute to the LibreOffice and Open Source Conference with a speech by Luxembourg’s Minister for Digitalisation and Minister for Research and Higher Education, Stéphanie Obertin and a presentation of Luxchat4Gov by project manager, Patrick Weber.
The secure and interoperable instant messaging dedicated to the public sector, Luxchat4Gov was developed by the Ministry for Digitalisation in collaboration with LU-CIX and leverages the Matrix protocol to ensure seamless interoperability between systems, while maintaining stringent data security. In parallel, LU-CIX and its partners build LuxChat, the public version of LuxChat4Gov to offer the same level of security and digital autonomy.
By adopting this platform, Luxembourg sets a precedent for achieving digital autonomy while fostering an interconnected and secure communication environment across government entities, and the national Luxchat ecosystem. This is just the first effort to assert Luxembourg’s Digital Sovereignty, through using open-source software which has been tailored to fit the country’s specific needs and that is now operating under Luxembourgish jurisdiction. It’s only by having full control on the open-source software and by hosting it in national data centers that a high level of security and confidentiality of the data can ensured.
We’re very happy to have their participation!
Writer now has support for doing partial layout passes when LOK clients have pending events, which sometimes improves interactivity a lot.
This work is primarily for Collabora Online, but the feature is useful for any LOK clients.
I recently worked with a document that has relatively simple structure, but it has 300 pages, and most of the content is part of a numbered list. Pasting a simple string (like an URL) into the end of a paragraph resulted in a short, but annoying hang. It turns out we updated Writer's layout for all the 300 pages before the content was repainted on the single visible page. In theory, you could reorder events, so you first calculate the first page, you paint the first page, then you calculate the remaining 299 pages. Is this possible in practice? Let's try!
The relevant part of the test document is simple: just an empty numbered paragraph, so we can paste somewhere:
Bugdoc: empty paragraph, part of a numbered list and then pasting an URL there
This is a good sample, because pasting into a numbered list requires invalidating all list items in that list, since possibly the paste operation created a new list item, and then the number portion has to be updated for all items in the rest of the list. So if you paste into a numbered list, you need to re-calculate the entire document if all the document is just a numbered list.
The first problem was that Writer tracks its visible area, but LOK needs two kinds of visible areas. The first kind decides if invalidations are interesting for part of the document area. LOK wants to get all invalidations, so in case we cache some document content in the client that is near the visible area, we need to know when to throw away that cache. On the other hand, we want to still track the actually visible viewport of the client, so we can prioritize visible vs hidden parts of the document. Writer in LOK mode thought that all parts of the document are a priority, but this could improved by taking the client's viewport into account.
The second problem was that even if Writer had two layout passes (first is synchronous, for the visible area; second is async, for the rest of the document), both passes were performed before allowing a LOK client to request tiles for the issued invalidations.
This is now solved by a new registerAnyInputCallback() API, which allows the LOK client to signal if
it has pending events (e.g. unprocessed callbacks, tiles to be painted) or it's OK for Writer layout
to finish its idle job first.
The end result for pasting a URL into this 300 pages document, when measuring end-to-end (from sending the paste command to getting the first updated tile) is a decrease in response time, from 963 ms to 14 ms.
If you would like to know …
When I translated one book about Python to Russian which contained many examples of Python code I though quite long how to highlight them in the normal text. For book writing I used LibreOffice Writer (of course) but Writer has no a standard tool for code highlighting.
So after some searching I found the LibreOffice extension - Code Highlighter 2. It is also available on our extension site. This extension makes code highlighting using Pygments Python library. There is support for many programming languages and many color styles for highlighting there.
The extension worked fine, but I didn't like that for highlighting I should manually select every code example in the text, then press some shortcut, then select another code example, etc...
I wrote an issue on the extension github page and after some discussions the extension author Jean-Marc Zambon implemented a new feature that allows to highlight all code example in the book in only one action using Paragraph style!
So my workflow in this case will be as follows:
Above you can see examples of the Code Highlighter work with some light and some dark styles.
In Collabora Online (for the normal mode of operation) we have a single server process (coolwsd) that spawns a separate process (kit) to load and manage each individual document. Each of those per-document kit processes runs in its own isolated environment. See architecture for details.
Each environment contains a minimal file system (ideally bind mounted from a template dir for speed, but linked/copied if not possible) that each kit chroots into, limiting its access to that subtree.
That chroot requires the CAP_SYS_CHROOT capability (and the desirable mount requires the CAP_SYS_ADMIN capability), and granting those capabilities to the coolforkit and coolmount binaries is a root privilege that, for typical deb/rpm packages, is done automatically at install time.
But it would be far more convenient not to require these capabilities to be set to do this isolation. They grant online more ability to affect its host system than it uses, we only want to mount dirs and chroot into dirs that belong to online and have no need or desire to make them available to any other process or user, and it's awkward, especially during development. to require root privileges to set these capabilities.
This scenario is not unique, and Linux provides namespaces, typically used by container implementations, to support achieving this. So recent work in Collabora Online leverages these namespaces to do its own layer of per-document kit isolation. (There's a good series of articles by Steve Ovens on the various namespaces, with the mount namespaces the most relevant one here.)
In essence, a user level process can create its own namespace in which it is apparently root from its own perspective, but as the original uid from the outside perspective and limited to operating on resources that the original uid is limited to accessing. So for each forkit, instead of requiring initial system capabilities and creating a system level bind mount we instead have no specific initial capabilities, enter a new namespace, unique to each forkit, in which that forkit becomes king of its own castle with apparent full capabilities, and can create bind mounts and chroot into its minimal file system.
Which is pretty magical to me as the whole existence of namespaces passed me by entirely without notice despite debuting over a decade ago.
Nothing is ever simple however, so some hurdles along the way.
Entering the namespace "requires that the calling process is not threaded" (man 2 unshare) which is not a problem for the normal use case in each kit, but did pose a problem for the test coolwsd does in advance to probe if there are working namespaces on the system in determine if it should operate kits in namespace mode or not. There it turned out that the Poco::Logger we use backups existing logs when it creates a new one, and then by default spawns a thread to compress the old log.
I initially had the vague notion that I could treat a namespace as a sort pseudo-sudo and …
Various functionalities of the LibreOffice are available through its programming interface, the UNO API. Here I discuss how to extend it.
Many functionalities of the LibreOffice is available through UNO API. You can write extensions and external programs that use LibreOffice functionality without the need to change the LibreOffice core source code.
Extensions work seamlessly with the software, and external applications can connect to the LibreOffice process and use it. The ability to do that depends on the UNO API.
On the other hand, some functionalities may not be available through this API. For example, newer features of the decent versions of LibreOffice, or functionalities that are not useful and/or important for external applications. Sometimes, you may want to use such functionalities elsewhere. Then you have to modify the LibreOffice core source code, and expose those functionalities through the API make them available to the external applications.
Let’s refer to the LibreOffice Developer’s Guide, which is mostly around the LibreOffice UNO API. There, you can read:
“The goal of UNO (Universal Network Objects) is to provide an environment for network objects across programming language and platform boundaries. UNO objects run and communicate everywhere.”
As UNO objects should be usable across different languages and platforms, they are described in an abstract meta language called UNOIDL (UNO interface definition language). This is similar to the IDL definitions in many other technologies like CORBA.
The API that I discuss here, provides functionality to control full screen functionality for top level windows. Stephan, experienced LibreOffice developer, added that API in this commit:
commit af5c4092052c98853b88cf886adb11b4a1532fff Expose WorkWindow fullscreen mode via new XTopWindow3 ...deriving from the existing XTopWindow2. (Exposing this functionality via UNO is useful e.g. for some embedded LOWA example application.)
The changes in this commit are over these files:
offapi/UnoApi_offapi.mk offapi/com/sun/star/awt/XTopWindow3.idl toolkit/inc/awt/vclxtopwindow.hxx toolkit/source/awt/vclxtopwindow.cxx
First one, offapi/UnoApi_offapi.mk is needed to introduce the IDL file, according to its module, in a proper location. XTopWindow3.idl is added in com/sun/star/awt, which corresponds to com.sun.star.awt module. The other two, vclxtopwindow.hxx and vclxtopwindow.cxx are the implementation of the API in C++.
Let’s look into XTopWindow3.idl:
module com { module sun { module star { module awt {
/** extends XTopWindow with additional functionality
@since LibreOffice 25.2
*/
interface XTopWindow3: XTopWindow2 {
/** controls whether the window is currently shown full screen */
[attribute] boolean FullScreen;
};
}; }; }; };
As you may see, it contains these important information:
1. It is an interface, called XTopWindow3.
2.It has a boolean attribute, FullScreen.
3. This functionality will be available in LibreOffice 25.2 and later.
4. This interface extends XTopWindow interface. You may find the documentation for XTopWindow in api.libreoffice.org.
More information about XTopWindow interface can be found in XWindow section of the LibreOffice Developer’s Guide, chapter 2.
C++ implementation basically consists of two functions to set …
Writer now has improved support for font fallback when you open a DOCX file that refers to fonts which are not available currently.
This work is primarily for Collabora Online, but the feature is fully available in desktop Writer as well.
Font embedding is meant to solve the problems around missing fonts, but you can also find documents with stub embedded fonts that are to be ignored and our code didn't have any sanity check on such fonts, leading to unexpected glyph-level fallbacks. Additionally, once font-level fallback happened, we didn't take the font style (e.g. sans vs serif) into account, which is expected to work when finding a good replacement for the missing font.
Here is how to the original rendering looked like:
Bugdoc, before: ugly glyph-level fallback
Once the handler for the embedded fonts in ODT/DOCX was improved to ignore stub fonts where even basic glyphs were not available, the result was a bit more consistent, but still bad. Here is a different document to show the problem:
Bugdoc, first improvement: no glyph fallback but the result is sans
Note how now we used the same font, but the glyphs are always sans, not serif. So the final step was to import the font type from DOCX and consider that while deciding font fallback:
Bugdoc, second improvement: no glyph fallback and the result is sans / serif
With this, we ignore stub embedded fonts from DOCX, we import the font type and in general font fallback on Linux takes the font type into account while deciding font fallback.
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 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 (24.8).
"Michael, as the Christian & Hacker at Collabora Ltd you know how hard choosing the right global employment and work payment partner can be."
LibreOffice 24.8 will be released as final at the end of August, 2024 ( Check the Release Plan ) being LibreOffice 24.8 Release Candidate 2 (RC2) the forth and last pre-release since the development of version 24.8 started at the beginning of December, 2023. Since the previous release, LibreOffice 24.8 RC1, 138 commits have been submitted to the code repository and 87 issues got fixed. Check the release notes to find the new features included in this version of LibreOffice.
LibreOffice 24.8 RC2 can be downloaded for Linux, macOS and Windows, and it will replace the standard installation.
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 Matrix.
LibreOffice is a volunteer-driven community project, so please help us to test – we appreciate it!
Happy testing!!
IMPORTANT INFORMATION FOR WINDOWS 7 USERS
Internal python version has been upgraded to python 3.9 which no longer supports Windows 7. Be aware some LibreOffice functionalities written in Python may not work, like the wizards in File – Wizards. Please, do test this version and give us feedback.
…
Here I discuss what fuzz testing is, and how LibreOffice developers use it incrementally to maintain LibreOffice code quality.
LibreOffice developers use various different methods and tools to maintain LibreOffice code quality. These are some of them:
1. Code review: Every patch from contributors should pass code review on Gerrit, and after conforming to coding standards and conventions, it can become part of the LibreOffice source code.
2. Static code checking: “Coverity Scan” continuously scans LibreOffice source code to find the possible defects. An automated script reports these issues to the LibreOffice developers mailing list so that developers can fix them.
3. Continuous Testing: There are various C++ unit test and Python UI tests in LibreOffice core source code to make sure that the functionalities of the software remain working during the later changes. They are also helpful for making sure that the fixed regressions do not happen again. These test run continuously for each and every Gerrit submission on CI machines via Jenkins.
4. Crash testing: A good way to make sure that LibreOffice works fine is to batch open and convert a huge set of documents. This task is done regularly, and if some failure occurs developers are informed to fix the issue.
5. Crash reporting: LibreOffice uses crash testing to find out about the recurrent crashes, and fix them.
6. Tinderbox Platforms: Using dedicated machines with various different architectures, LibreOffice developers make sure that LibreOffice source code builds and runs without problem on different platforms. Here is the description of tinderbox (TB) from TDF Wiki:
Tinderbox is a script to run un-attended build on multiple repos, for multiple branches and for gerrit patch review system.
LibreOffice tinderboxes status
You can see the build status here:
https://tinderbox.libreoffice.org/
7. Fuzz testing: LibreOffice software is checked continuously using Fuzz testing. This is essentially giving various automated inputs to the program to find the possible places in the code where problem occurs. Then, developers will become aware of the those problematic places in the code, and can fix them.
Fuzz testing on LibreOffice source code is active since 2017, and since then there has been various bug fixes for the problems that the fuzz tester reported. You can see more than 1500 of such fixes in the git log until now:
$ git shortlog -s -n --grep=ofz#
This tool can find various different problems. These issues are then filed in a section of Chromium bug tracker, and after ~30 days, they are made public. When developers fix bugs of this kind, they refer to the issue number (for example 321) as ofz#321. A comprehensive list of all issues found is visible here:
Let’s look at one of the fixes. You can find commits related to fuzzing with:
$ git log --grep=ofz
This is a recent fix from Caolán, an experienced LibreOffice developer that provided most of …
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