Wednesday
26 June, 2024

[en] Official TDF Blog: LibreOffice development in 2023 – TDF’s Annual Report

@ 08:54 UTC

In 2023, 11,272 commits were made to the LibreOffice source code, from 253 authors, in 21 repositories. We also took part in the Google Summer of Code, to support student developers

(This is part of The Document Foundation’s Annual Report for 2023 – we’ll post the full version here soon.)

Infrastructure for developers

TDF provides infrastructure for the developer community to continue their work on LibreOffice. These include Git and Gerrit, to make changes to the source code, along with Bugzilla (to track bug reports and enhancement requests), a wiki (to document changes), and Weblate (for translations).

Most technical discussions took place on the developer mailing list and IRC channel, with the latter providing more real-time communication. Members of the Engineering Steering Committee met weekly, to discuss the most pressing issues with the codebase.

Google Summer of Code (GSoC)

Google Summer of Code (GSoC) is an annual programme in which student developers of free and open source software projects receive stipends from Google for their work. LibreOffice takes part in GSoC every year, and in 2023, five students developed features and updates in the software. They were mentored by developers from the LibreOffice ecosystem and TDF. Let’s go through them…

Improving OpenPGP encryption experience in LibreOffice by Ahmed Gamal Eltokhy: LibreOffice can encrypt documents using OpenPGP public key cryptography by making use of external applications such as gpg4win, GPGTools and gnupg. Thanks to Ahmed’s work, it is now easier to manage and search keys and faster to navigate large keyrings.

Selecting tests to run on Gerrit patches based on machine learning by Baole Fang: This project was inspired by Mozilla’s work on Firefox’s continuous integration. There is now a system in place that makes predictions on the test failure possibility of submitted code changes and decides the most efficient way to build the changes. As this kind of machinery is very new to everyone, we expect many tweaks to follow.

Search Field in Options by Bayram Çiçek: Searching through options is standard in applications these days, so it is about time LibreOffice learned how to do it. This makes it much easier for end users to find specific options and settings, by simply typing a few letters, rather than having to navigate though a large set of menus and widgets.

Convert Writer’s Java UNO API Tests to C++ by Dipam Turkar: The idea here was to reduce the dependency on Java during the LibreOffice build process. Half of the tests for Writer were converted.

Add APNG import/export support by Paris Oplopoios: APNG is short for Animated Portable Network Graphics. It is not an official extension to PNG, but nevertheless has broad support in web browsers these days. Thanks to Paris’s work, LibreOffice now fully supports this format.

For the full details about the students’ work, see this post. And thanks to Andreas Heinisch, Thorsten Behrens (allotropia), Heiko Tietze (TDF), Hossein Nourikhah (TDF), Tomaž Vajngerl (Collabora), Xisco Faulí (TDF), Stéphane …

Monday
24 June, 2024

[en] Official TDF Blog: LibreOffice social media in 2023 – TDF’s Annual Report

@ 10:29 UTC

We use our social media channels to raise awareness about our work, share information and encourage new contributors to join us

(This is part of The Document Foundation’s Annual Report for 2023 – we’ll post the full version here soon.)

Social media

In January 2023, our X (formerly known as Twitter) account @LibreOffice had 53,541 followers; by the end of the year, we had grown this to 62,443. Our most popular tweets were for major releases, but we also tweeted customised images for “Community Member Monday” interviews with short quotes, encouraging more users to get involved with LibreOffice projects.

In addition, we focused not only on our own tweets, but also retweeting announcements from the LibreOffice ecosystem and community members. We liked and retweeted messages of support from end users – many of whom were surprised and thankful that a large project would show them support. To keep the content flowing, we retweeted popular older tweets, and responded to individual messages.

On other social media platforms, we focused on growing our account on Mastodon, a Twitter-like open source, federated and self-hosted microblogging service. In 2023 we worked more on expanding our activities on our account @libreoffice@fosstodon.org, and from January to December, we grew our follower base from 17,632 to 24,987. We also joined Bluesky in 2023 thanks to invites from a community member, with our new account @libreoffice.bsky.social reaching over 150 followers by the end of the year.

Our Facebook page growth was smaller, from 60,278 page followers to 63,189. We’ve noticed a gradual reduction in activity on Facebook over the last few years, which reflects its changing audience, and the move towards newer mobile applications. Nonetheless, Facebook still provides a good opportunity to interact with end users of LibreOffice, and every day we checked in to answer questions, get feedback, and post announcements/tips about the software.

YouTube channel

Our YouTube channel grew from 18,108 subscribers and 2,886,284 video views in January 2023 to 20,504 subscribers and 3,217,282 video views by the end of the year. The “LibreOffice 7.5: New Features” video (a fantastic production by the Indonesian community) had almost 60,000 views – while the video for LibreOffice 7.6 had over 60,000. We also added videos of talks, presentations and workshops from the LibreOffice Conference 2023.

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Meanwhile, our community helped out with tutorial videos – in particular Harald Berger of the German community, who continued to produce a series of professional-looking step-by-step guides to installing and using LibreOffice.

Like what we do? Support the LibreOffice project and The Document Foundation – get involved and help our volunteers, or make a donation. Thank you!

Wednesday
19 June, 2024

[en] Collabora Community: Hacking LibreOffice in Budapest

@ 11:00 UTC

Earlier this month, we were pleased to sponsor the Libreoffice Technology Hackfest in Budapest, Hungary, and enjoyed meeting up with some of our fellow LibreOffice Technology hackers. Over two days, a dozen developers from Collabora Productivity and the wider community met up in the Eco Community Space to work on the LibreOffice codebase, and reap the benefits of spending time together.

A hackfest is an event where developers from multiple organisations meet each other, work on what they want and also more freely exchange ideas while being together in person. While having an international community working remotely on the codebase is excellent, there are still many benefits to more directly seeing what problems are being tackled by other developer sitting next to you; and this friendly environment allows building relationships that can then help even more in the future (even remotely).

As one attendee Miklos Vajna shared with us after the event, “It was really great to spend a couple of days with the other developers. I found it very helpful seeing what other people are working on, sharing ideas about the future feature possibilities, and especially enjoyed going out for a dinner with everyone in Budapest after a hard day’s work!”

For this reason, we were very pleased to sponsor this most recent meet up. Many thanks to all who joined us in Budapest, we look forward to seeing you soon at the next meeting!

If you would like to find out more about joining the Collabora Online or LibreOffice community, we would encourage you to join the Collabora Online Community Forum or have a look at the Collabora Online Github to learn about how to get started.

For more information about our upcoming events, and to learn where you could meet us next, do have a look at our events page.

Tuesday
18 June, 2024

[en] Official TDF Blog: LibreOffice marketing activities in 2023 – TDF’s Annual Report

@ 08:06 UTC

In 2023, the marketing team continued the deployment of the Strategic Marketing Plan, without overlooking ongoing activities to promote LibreOffice and support the efforts of native language communities

(This is part of The Document Foundation’s Annual Report for 2023 – we’ll post the full version here soon.)

Slide Decks and Videos for Marketing Purposes

We updated presentations on The Document Foundation (project history and digital sovereignty), LibreOffice (technology, including commentary, and sustainability) and Open Document Format (standard format, ODF and interoperability, and OOXML issues) for use by community members. Videos are also available to help tailor a presentation to the audience.

We updated the LibreOffice Technology White Paper, which explains the evolution of LibreOffice from a single desktop product to a product-based technology for personal or enterprise productivity that is the foundation for a series of products optimised for different platforms, such as desktop, mobile and cloud. To emphasise the importance of the LibreOffice technology concept, a specific logo has been created to make it visually easier to associate all products based on this technology platform.

We also created a Security Backgrounder that describes – in a language accessible to everyone, even non-security specialists – the impressive work done by the developers and quality control specialists in the security area of LibreOffice.

Finally, the project continues to invest in communicating the sustainability of FOSS. Companies need to consider that focusing on the ‘free as beer’ nature of software can seriously damage the projects they rely on as strategic assets of their infrastructure. It is a short-sighted decision because they can save a lot by not paying a single penny, but they may also have to spend a lot tomorrow if the original project is unable to sustain itself by having to revert to a proprietary solution.

The Importance of Donations

Donations are essential for the current operations and future development of The Document Foundation, as they allow us to keep the organisation alive, fund specific activities, support events and other marketing tasks organised by the native language projects, and maintain a small team working on various aspects of LibreOffice.

In 2023, donations were used to fund various activities: the organisation of the LibreOffice conference in Bucharest and the regional LibreOffice conferences in Asia and Latin America, events and other activities of the native language communities, reimbursement of travel expenses to conferences around the world, the supply of merchandise for the Month of LibreOffice, and other small projects.

Ongoing Marketing Activities

Marketing for The Document Foundation and LibreOffice is a large team effort, with contractors paid for their work – thanks to the funds provided by our generous donors – and several volunteers who run activities on both a global and local level to increase visibility and brand awareness.

One of the ongoing projects is the Community Member Monday series, where one or more community members are interviewed about their contribution to the project.

The marketing team, supported by many volunteers, created a series of New Features videos for the announcement of LibreOffice 7 …

Sunday
16 June, 2024

[en] Official TDF Blog: Announcing the Impress Guide 24.2

@ 13:37 UTC

The Documentation Team is proud to announce the immediate availability of the Impress Guide 24.2.

The Impress Guide 24.2 update was coordinated by Peter Schofield, with assistance of Olivier Hallot and B. Antonio Fernandez, and is based on the Impress Guide 7.6.

Peter Schofield

LibreOffice 24.2 Community also includes many other changes, including improvements in accessibility, change tracking, spell checking, and interoperability with Microsoft’s proprietary file formats. Notably, Impress now allows small caps in text and secured slide show remote control with bluetooth, as well as enhancements to supplied templates.

Release Notes are here: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleaseNotes/24.2

The guide is available for immediate download in PDF format, and in HTML format for online reading, as well as in source format (OpenDocument Format). Soon it will be available as printed book by LuLu inc.

Download the Impress Guide 24.2 from the documentation websites at: documentation.libreoffice.org and the bookshelf at books.libreoffice.org.

Friday
14 June, 2024

[en] LibreOffice QA Blog: LibreOffice 24.8 Beta1 is available for testing

@ 14:23 UTC

LibreOffice 24.8 will be released as final at the end of August, 2024 ( Check the Release Plan ) being LibreOffice 24.8 Beta1 the second pre-release since the development of version 24.8 started at the beginning of December, 2023. Since the previous release, LibreOffice 24.8 Alpha1, 672 commits have been submitted to the code repository and 191 issues got fixed. Check the release notes to find the new features included in this version of LibreOffice.

IMPORTANT INFORMATION FOR WINDOWS 7 USERS
Internal python version has been upgraded to python 3.9 which no longer supports Windows 7. It’s very important to us to know whether LibreOffice 24.8 still works on Windows 7 or not, as well as its python functionalities. Please, do test this version and give us feedback.

LibreOffice 24.8 Beta1 can be downloaded 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 Matrix.

LibreOffice is a volunteer-driven community project, so please help us to test – we appreciate it!

Happy testing!!

…

Thursday
06 June, 2024

[en] LibreOffice QA Blog: QA/Dev Report: May 2024

@ 10:41 UTC

General Activities

LibreOffice 24.2.3 was released on May 2
LibreOffice 7.6.7 was released on May 10
Olivier Hallot (TDF) added help pages for SEQUENCE and UNIQUE Calc functions and finalised help for RANDARRAY, XLOOKUP, XMATCH, FILTER, RANDARRAY, SORT and SORTBY functions. He also improved the help for Calc’s Advanced Filter, added extended tips to Sparklines dialog and improved the descriptions seen in the UI for Calc’s RANDARRAY and UNIQUE functions
Adolfo Jayme Barrientos improved the readability and grammar of Help pages
Stéphane Guillou (TDF) added help content for the new ability to start a presentation from the command line at an arbitrary slide number
Alain Romedenne added unit tests for officehelper.py
Dione Maddern added help content for new bar-of-pie and pie-of-pie chart types, updated help for File Properties, Slide Show Settings, Calc View Options, Summary and Expand Slides, Edit Points Bar, Calc change tracking, Shapes menu, Bullets and Numbering Image tab alongside various fixes and cleanups
Stanislav Horacek did corrections to Calc help content
Bogdan Buzea improved help about object positioning in Writer
Gábor Kelemen (allotropia) did code cleanups in the area of measurement units and snap lines, code simplification and includes
Laurent Balland did cleanups in Impress templates and added handling of xlink:type attributes for embedded charts, so they don’t produce a warning in the console
Miklós Vajna (Collabora) created a better implementation of continuous endnotes for Microsoft Word compatibility, implemented support for DOCX/DOC mirrored object positioning and adapted DOCX paragraph handling for files created with Word 2013 or newer, so the top margin of paragraphs on other pages than the first are collapsed
Áron Budea (Collabora) made it faster to open PPTX files with custom shapes
Gökay Şatır, Pranam Lashkari, Szymon Kłos, Méven Car, Hubert Figuière, Jaume Pujantell, Henry Castro and Michael Meeks (Collabora) worked on LOKit used by Collabora Online
Tomaž Vajngerl (Collabora) refactored the code for Impress annotations and cleaned up the accessibility checker code
Julien Nabet continued polishing gssapi authentication support for the MariaDB/MySQL connector and fixed a crash when exporting spreadsheet as PDF with “whole sheet export” option
Xisco Faulí (TDF) added support for SVG 2 attribute values context-stroke and context-fill, optimised the code for getting selected points and objects, added a couple of unit tests, upgraded many dependencies and started applying the newly-added SAL_RET_MAYBENULL for enforcing null checking
Michael Stahl (allotropia) implemented support for recognising localized paragraph style names in DOCX files, fixed the visibility of shapes in header/footer in DOCX files and fixed an issue with AutoText insertion or pasting overriding Writer paragraph style indentation
Mike Kaganski (Collabora) continued polishing HTML map export for text hyperlinks in frames, made LibreOffice’s own OLE objects obey AddReplacementImages setting, made it so the newly-added Windows version detection also handles architectures other than x86_64 and fixed a Writer undo issue affecting list levels
Caolán McNamara (Collabora) introduced SAL_RET_MAYBENULL which for debug builds and MSVC …

Wednesday
05 June, 2024

[en] LibreOffice Design Blog: Convenient handling of shortcuts

@ 13:35 UTC

Shortcuts are a major topic for user experience. Novices are advised to learn basic shortcuts beyond the famous Ctrl+C/X/V like Ctrl+1/2/3.. to quickly change the paragraph style to heading 1/2/3… in Writer. Once you have learned those combinations you never want to unlearn and to change the muscle memory.…

Monday
03 June, 2024

[en] Miklos Vajna: Section-based continuous endnotes in Writer

@ 14:26 UTC

Writer now has much better support for continuous / inline endnotes (not on a separate page) in Writer, enabled by default for DOCX files.

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

Motivation¶

As described in a previous post, Writer already had minimal support for not rendering endnotes on a separate endnote page, but it was not mature enough to enable is by default for DOCX files.

Results so far¶

What changed from the previous "continuous endnotes" approach is that instead of trying to map endnotes to footnotes, we now create a special endnotes section, which only exists at a layout level (no section node is backing this one), and this hosts all endnotes at the end of the document. It turns out this is a much more scalable technique, for example a stress-test with 72 endnotes over several pages is now handled just fine.

Here are some screenshots:

As you can see, there were various differences for this document, but the most problematic one was that the entire endnote was missing from the (originally) last page, as it was rendered on a separate page.

Now it's not only on the correct page, but also its position is correct: the endnote is after the body text, while the footnote is at the bottom of the page, as expected. The second screenshot shows ~no red, which means there is ~no reference output, where the Writer output would be missing.

How is this implemented?¶

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:

The tracking bug was tdf#160984.

Want to start using this?¶

You can get a development edition of Collabora Online 24.04 and try it out yourself right now …

Thursday
30 May, 2024

[en] LibreOffice Dev Blog: Porting Java tests to C++

@ 14:08 UTC

In this blog post, I discuss porting Java tests from Java to C++. We have many Java tests, and porting them to C++ is beneficial for LibreOffice. Here I discuss why, and how.

Why Porting Java Tests?

In the past, Java was used extensively in LibreOffice, and many tests where written in Java. They consist of various tests, including JUnit.

Searching for junit in LibreOffice source code gives many results: (Note that this is not the number of tests)

$ git grep -i junit | wc -l

901

Although these tests are useful, they have drawbacks:

1. They are slower than C++ CppUnitTests

2. They are outside process, which is creates them even more slower, and harder to debug

Porting these tests to C++ can make them faster, more reliable, and easier to debug. Let’s see how we can do it.

Start from Examples

The best way to find out how to do porting is to look into the previous examples. This issue is around porting Java API tests to C++:

tdf#45904 – Move Java based API tests to C++

There are many commits in the above page, which can be an interesting way to learn how to do that. For example, consider this commit:

tdf#45904 Move Java _XSheetCellRanges tests to C++

In the above commit, Jens has ported qadevOOo/tests/java/ifc/sheet/_XSheetCellRanges.java test to C++ test test/source/sheet/xsheetcellranges.cxx.

I can summarize the changes in this way:

1. An equivalent C++ file, in test/ folder

2. Removal of Java file from qadevOOo/.

3. The Makefiles in test/ and qadevOOo/ folders should reflect the removal of Java test, and addition of C++ test.

4. Some Java tests are adjusted to reflect the deletion of the old Java test.

5. Some C++ tests are adjusted to reflect the addition of new C++ test.

Final Words

To be able to port a test, one should be able to understand the old test. Reading the code is the best way that one can achieve this purpose. By looking into similar ports, you can gain a better understanding of what to do. In Bugzilla page for tdf#45904, you may find similar ports.

Monday
27 May, 2024

[en] Björn Michaelsen: Writer Again!

@ 12:14 UTC

Writer Again!

After resigning from the Board of Directors of TDF over the weekend, I hope I will again find more time to look into the technical details of LibreOffice Writer. I will also try to do my best to write some good article here about the depth of that application. While a text processor in itself is not that interesting anymore these days, the challenges of migrating that big old legacy code might be fascinating quite often. Hope to have you as a reader for that soon!

Comments? Feedback? Additions? Most welcome here on the fediverse !

Sunday
26 May, 2024

[es] Blog de LibreOffice Hispano: Convocatoria para Pruebas – LibreOffice 24.8 Alpha 1

@ 20:48 UTC

La versión final de LibreOffice 24.8 será presentada a finales de agosto de 2024 (véase el Plan de lanzamiento), siendo LibreOffice 24.8 Alpha1 la primera versión preliminar desde que comenzó el desarrollo de la versión 24.8 a principios de …

Tuesday
21 May, 2024

[en] LibreOffice QA Blog: LibreOffice 24.8 Alpha1 is available for testing

@ 11:12 UTC

LibreOffice 24.8 will be released as final at the end of August, 2024 ( Check the Release Plan ) being LibreOffice 24.8 Alpha1 the first pre-release since the development of version 24.8 started at the beginning of December, 2023. Since then, 4448 commits have been submitted to the code repository and more than 667 bugs were set to FIXED in Bugzilla. Check the release notes to find the new features included in this version of LibreOffice.

LibreOffice 24.8 Alpha1 can be downloaded 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 Matrix.

LibreOffice is a volunteer-driven community project, so please help us to test – we appreciate it!

Happy testing!!

…

Tuesday
14 May, 2024

[es] Blog de LibreOffice Hispano: Conferencia LibreOffice 2024 – Luxemburgo

@ 22:20 UTC

La Conferencia LibreOffice 2024 tendrá lugar en Luxemburgo, en el Digital Learning Hub junto con el campus de 42 Luxembourg en Belval, Esch-sur-Alzette, del 10 al 12 de octubre de 2024. Como es habitual, la conferencia irá precedida de reuniones …

[en] LibreOffice Dev Blog: Crash fixes, part 4: assertion failure

@ 11:46 UTC

In the previous parts of the blog posts series on fixing software crashes, I have written about some crash fixes in LibreOffice around segfaults, aborts, and I discussed how test them. Here I write about fixing assertion failure.

What is Assertion Failure?

Assertion is a mechanism provided to the developers to make sure that things are good in runtime, conforming to what they were assuming. For example, making sure that some pointer is valid, some data elements match expectation, or some similar assumptions that need to be valid in order to get the correct results.

As an example, consider the C++ function basegfx::utils::createAreaGeometryForLineStartEnd(), which creates a geometric representation of an arrow. The code resides here:

basegfx/source/polygon/b2dlinegeometry.cxx:84

This is the line of code which contains assertion:

assert((rCandidate.count() > 1) && "createAreaGeometryForLineStartEnd: Line polygon has too few points");

On top of the actual function implementation, the C++ code asserts many conditions to make sure that they are met. In the above assertion, it checks to make sure that the number of points in the given data structure is more than 1. Otherwise, it leads to an assertion failure.

For various reasons, sometimes these sort of assumption may not be valid. To avoid reaching to incorrect results, it is important to have such assertions in place, to find such issues as soon as possible. If you are developing LibreOffice, you may have already built the code from sources in debug mode. Therefore, you may see software stops working, or simply crashes.

This crash may not happen for the end users, which use the release version of software. Therefore, these type of crashes have lower impact for the end users, and they are usually considered of lower importance compared to the crashes that happen for the end users.

Backtrace

One of the things that can help diagnose the problem is the stack trace, or simply backtrace. The way to obtain a backtrace depends on the platform and/or IDE that you use. If you use an IDE like Qt Creator, Visual Studio, etc., getting a backtrace would be as easy as debugging LibreOffice, making the assert fail, and then copy the backtrace from the UI. To learn more about IDEs, see this Wiki page:

TDF Wiki: Development/IDE

If you want to use gdb on Linux, you may run LibreOffice with this command line:

$ instdir/program/soffice –backtrace

and then make the assert fail, and you will have the backtrace in gdbtrace.log file. You can learn more int this QA Wiki article:

TDF Wiki: QA/BugReport/Debug_Information

One thing to mention is that if you work on a reported bug regarding to assertion failure, then the actual way to reproduce the issue and make the assertion fail is usually described in the relevant TDF Bugzilla issue. In the meta bug related to assertion failure, you may find some of these issues in the last part of this blog post.

Fixing the Problem

To fix the problem …

Thursday
09 May, 2024

[en] LibreOffice QA Blog: QA/Dev Report: April 2024

@ 08:19 UTC

General Activities

Olivier Hallot (TDF) added Help content for user interface selection dialog, Calc row recalculation at load time, automatic labeled ranges in Calc and font embedding. He also updated menu item paths in Help
Rafael Lima added support for hidden named expressions in Calc, added Reload command to Notebookbar UIs and made named ranges created by the Solver in Calc hidden by default
Stéphane Guillou (TDF) updated Help content for Navigator’s Navigate By
Alain Romedenne continued improving the officehelper Python script for connecting to LibreOffice processes
Dione Maddern improved Help content for inserting objects from the Gallery and did cleanups in Help
Colton Garrett improved Help content for OpenCL and added a Help page for digital signing of paragraphs
Laurent Balland did style cleanups in Impress templates
Miklós Vajna (Collabora) fixed an issue with shape positioning in DOCX import and did many code cleanups
Áron Budea (Collabora) fixed an issue with unwanted spacing in printed text
Marco Cecchetti, Gökay Şatır, Pranam Lashkari, Szymon Kłos and Michael Meeks (Collabora) worked on LOKit used by Collabora Online
Attila Szűcs (Collabora) continued improving the performance of handling transparent animated GIFs
Tomaž Vajngerl (Collabora) improved the text scaling in Impress text boxes, implemented support for custom cell format of pivot table output found in OOXML and did many code cleanups and restructurings
Julien Nabet added gssapi authentication support for the MariaDB/MySQL connector, fixed UI issues in Writer’s Paragraph dialog related to the “Allow to split paragraph” option, fixed crashes and did code cleanups
Xisco Faulí (TDF) continued the implementation of SVG filters
Michael Stahl (allotropia) changed the handling of paragraph and text attributes in empty lines at the end of paragraphs to match the behaviour seen in Microsoft Word
Mike Kaganski (Collabora) fixed issues with rotated text being partially cut off, made it possible to create DDE links to files with special characters in their names on Windows, made the Basic LIKE operator more robust, fixed an issue preventing Windows users with special characters in their names from importing PDF files into Draw, made the position shifting behaviour more robust for objects anchored As Character in Writer, fixed an issue with chapter titles in headers/footers getting mixed up due to headings in endnote content, fixed handling of em and ex units in the properties of imported SVG files, improved the stability of text part positioning in SVG files, fixed handling of whitespace in SVG text, fixed a Draw issue causing font colour to not be retained in certain situations and restored HTML map export for text hyperlinks in frames. He also did many code cleanups and optimisations
Caolán McNamara (Collabora) continued improving performance of threaded calculation in Calc. He also fixed crashes and many issues found by static analysers and fuzzers
Stephan Bergmann (allotropia) worked on WASM build, added a new Expert Configuration setting to not offer Safe Mode in the UI, fixed the msvc_win32_arm64 UNO bridge and worked on Windows Subsystem …

Monday
06 May, 2024

[es] Blog de LibreOffice Hispano: Cómo evitar incompatibilidades entre formatos privativos y ODF

@ 00:00 UTC

En el chat de Telegram LibreOffice-ES, el equipo de contribuyentes y aliados de esta gran suite ofimática han vertido su experiencia para recomendarnos estas buenas prácticas a la hora de recibir o enviar documentos que estén en formatos privativos. …

Thursday
02 May, 2024

[es] Blog de LibreOffice Hispano: Lanzamiento de LibreOffice 24.2.3 Community

@ 20:08 UTC

Berlín, 2 de mayo de 2024 – LibreOffice Community 24.2.3, la tercera versión de correcciones del paquete Office gratuito creado por voluntarios, ya está disponible en https://es.libreoffice.org/descarga/ para Windows, macOS y Linux.

La versión incluye alrededor de 80 correcciones de …

[it] LibreItalia: GNIC2024: Giornata Nazionale dell’Informazione Costruttiva

@ 17:30 UTC

Il 3 maggio, in occasione della Giornata Mondiale per la Libertà di Stampa, torna la Giornata Nazionale dell’Informazione Costruttiva (GNIC), il più importante evento italiano sull’informazione positiva e di soluzione. La GNIC, giunta alla quarta edizione è ideata dal Movimento Mezzopieno insieme a una lunga lista di promotori, aderenti e patrocini, tra cui Associazione LibreItalia. […]

Tuesday
30 April, 2024

[en] = allotropia: LibreOffice, JavaScript’ed

@ 11:32 UTC

LOWA is LibreOffice built with Emscripten as a Wasm executable that runs in the browser. Controlling that LibreOffice through UNO with JavaScript looks like a natural fit. Enter Embind, a mechanism to generate the binding glue between JavaScript and Wasm/C++.

As we will see, the Embind vs. UNO match is not perfect, but it kind-of gets the job done, at least for a first iteration.

Mappings

To dive straight into technical matters, the UNO type system is mapped to JavaScript as follows. (If you would like to see some example code first, jump ahead to the Starting Points and come back here later for reference.)

UNO BOOLEAN, depending on context and somewhat inconsistently maps to JavaScript Boolean and to JavaScript Number values 0 and 1. (The C/C++ representation of UNO BOOLEAN is sal_Bool, which is an alias for unsigned char, which Embind maps to JavaScript Number. So in places where we directly rely on Embind, like for the return value of a UNO interface method invocation, we get the Embind mapping to Number. But in places where we have more control, like for the JavaScript get method for a UNO ANY, we can be a bit more fancy and use a mapping to Boolean.)
UNO BYTE, SHORT, UNSIGNED SHORT, LONG, UNSIGNED LONG, FLOAT, and DOUBLE all map to JavaScript Number (with restricted value ranges for everything but UNO DOUBLE).
UNO HYPER and UNSIGNED HYPER both map to JavaScript BigInt (with restricted value ranges).
UNO CHAR and STRING both map to JavaScript String (with single UTF-16 code unit strings for UNO CHAR).
UNO TYPE maps to JavaScript Module.uno_Type objects. There are construction functions Module.uno_Type.Void, Module.uno_Type.Boolean, Module.uno_Type.Byte, Module.uno_Type.Short, Module.uno_Type.UnsignedShort, Module.uno_Type.Long, Module.uno_Type.UnsignedLong, Module.uno_Type.Hyper, Module.uno_Type.UnsignedHyper, Module.uno_Type.Float, Module.uno_Type.Double, Module.uno_Type.Char, Module.uno_Type.String, Module.uno_Type.Type, Module.uno_Type.Any, Module.uno_Type.Sequence, Module.uno_Type.Enum, Module.uno_Type.Struct, Module.uno_Type.Exception, and Module.uno_Type.Interface for representations of all the UNO TYPE values. The Module.uno_Type.Sequence construction function recursively takes a UNO TYPE argument for the component type, while the Module.uno_Type.Enum, Module.uno_Type.Struct, Module.uno_Type.Exception, and Module.uno_Type.Interface construction functions each take a string argument denoting the given type’s name in dotted notation (e.g., Module.uno_Type.Interface('com.sun.star.uno.XInterface')). Those JavaScript objects implement toString, which is also used for equality checks (e.g., type === 'com.sun.star.uno.XInterface').
UNO ANY maps to JavaScript Module.uno_Any objects. There is a constructor taking a UNO TYPE argument and a corresponding value (using an undefined value for UNO type VOID). Those JavaScript objects implement a method get that returns the JavaScript representation of the contained UNO value.
UNO sequence types map to a pre-canned variety of JavaScript Module.uno_Sequence_... objects. The problem is that Embind does not let us have a generic mapping to the C++ com::sun::star::uno …

Thursday
18 April, 2024

[en] LibreOffice Dev Blog: Crash fixes part 3 – Testing crashes

@ 13:40 UTC

I have previously discussed fixing crashes in 2 parts (segfaults, aborts). Here I discuss testing crashes to avoid creating re-creating regressions.

Why testing crashes?

When you fix a crash, you have to make sure that it does not happen again in the future. The key to achieve such a goal is to write a suitable test. The test should do the exact steps to reproduce the problem on the program in order to detect the known crash before the new code is merged.

This can be done using either UITests, or CppUnitTests. UITests are written in Python. They are easier to write, but they do not run on each and every platform, and they are usually slower. CppUnitTests, on the other hand, are written in C++. They are much faster, and they run on every platform that CI runs to make sure that everything is built and can be run correctly.

An Example Crash Testing

Consider the below issue around footnotes:

tdf#150457 Fix crash on hovering removed footnote reference

This problem was happening when someone created a footnote, deleted the reference, and then hovered the mouse on the removed footnote reference. To reproduce that, one could use keyboard to generate a key sequence that repeats the required steps:

Write something, add footnote, select all the footnotes and remove them, then go back to the text, and hover the footnote reference.

Using keyboard-only is not always enough, but here it was possible. To implement the UITest, you should first find the appropriate place to put the test file, and then write a Python script for that. Here, the test was written in sw/qa/uitest/writer_tests2/deleteFootnotes.py. The UITest test can be found alongside the bug fix, in the class class tdf150457(UITestCase):

tdf#150457 Fix crash on hovering removed footnote reference

If you look into the code, the test_delete_footnotes() function consists of many invocations of postKeyEvent calls, that emulate key input events:

pTextDoc->postKeyEvent(LOK_KEYEVENT_KEYINPUT, 'a', 0);

To insert footnotes, UNO commands are used.

dispatchCommand(mxComponent, ".uno:InsertFootnote", {});

Just doing the same steps would be enough, as if the crash happens with the fix in place, or in a bad commit in the future, the test would fail. This test failure will prevent the same problem in the future.

The nice thing is that it turned out the same test could have been written using C++ and CppUnitTest, which is considered superior.

The new CppUnitTest can be found in the below change:

tdf#150457 Port UITest to CppunitTest

The new test resides in sw/qa/extras/uiwriter/uiwriter3.cxx, and essentially uses postKeyEvent and dispatchCommand as similar functions.

If you look at the current version of the test, you can see that it was simplified in later commits, but the idea is the same: “repeat the same steps that lead to crash in the code”.

Final Words

It is expected that every bug fix is accompanied with a test, to avoid seeing the same problem in the future …

Thursday
11 April, 2024

[en] LibreOffice QA Blog: QA/Dev Report: March 2024

@ 10:04 UTC

General Activities

LibreOffice 7.6.6 and LibreOffice 24.2.2 were released on March 28
Olivier Hallot (TDF) renamed Fontwork to Text along Path in the UI while updating Help, added Help content for ExportAsFixedFormat VBA method and new Calc functions FILTER, SORT and SORTBY and did several cleanups and fixes in Help
Rafael Lima made several improvements to Calc’s Solver dialog, improved the visual consistency of the Tabbed UI and added a warning about the need to reload file after changing macro security level
Stéphane Guillou (TDF) updated Help content after UI changes and improved the Help page for macro security
Alain Romedenne made many improvements to the officehelper Python script for connecting to LibreOffice processes
Dione Maddern rewrote the Help page for Calc’s SUMIF function, updated Help for Writer’s View options and did cleanups in Help
Gábor Kelemen (allotropia) did many cleanups in the area of includes while improving the script for finding unneeded includes. He also made some Help fixes
Pierre F. made many improvements and fixes to Help pages, for example in the areas of regular expressions and Basic
Andras Timar (Collabora) made Help build more robust on Windows and made some cleanups in Help regarding translatable strings
Laurent Balland updated Grey Elegant Impress template
Miklós Vajna (Collabora) improved copying and pasting between Google Sheets and Calc and did many code cleanups and improvements to automated tests
Áron Budea, Marco Cecchetti, Gökay Şatır, Pranam Lashkari, Jaume Pujantell and Michael Meeks (Collabora) worked on LOKit used by Collabora Online
Gülşah Köse (Collabora) made it so pressing Enter in an empty list item ends the list in Impress
Attila Szűcs (Collabora) improved the performance of handling transparent animated GIFs and made it so image placeholders imported from PPTX files do not display text
Tomaž Vajngerl (Collabora) did many code cleanups in graphics code
Julien Nabet fixed incorrect display of custom page numbers in Sidebar, fixed an issue with duplicating a sheet in Calc causing unwanted axis label to appear in charts and fixed some crashes
Andreas Heinisch fixed an issue with saving print ranges to XLS files
Xisco Faulí (TDF) made a dozen additions and changes to automated tests and added a script to replace missing fonts in test documents. He also improved SVG support by implementing overflow:visible, switch element and the filters feMerge, feMergeNode, feBlend and feComposite.
Michael Stahl (allotropia) made the Curl-based WebDAV content provider more robust
Mike Kaganski (Collabora) fixed issues with copying and pasting charts in Calc, fixed an issue causing incorrect closing tags in Writer HTML export, fixed an issue affecting conditional formatting in overlapping cell ranges, made canceling out of Insert Chart dialog more robust in case of multiple views, fixed an issue with picking a connection type in Database Wizard, fixed an issue in the UNO API implementation for text ranges, harmonised the rounding in Calc’s number formatter and ROUND function and made it so index …

Thursday
04 April, 2024

[en] Miklos Vajna: Improve copy&paste in Calc and elsewhere

@ 07:50 UTC

Calc now supports much better copy&paste when you transfer data between Google Sheets and Calc.

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

Motivation¶

First, Collabora Online was using the deprecated document.execCommand() API to paste text, which is problematic, as the "paste" button on the toolbar can't behave the same way as pressing Ctrl-V on the keyboard.

Second, it turns out Google Sheets came up with some additional HTML attributes to represent spreadsheet data in HTML in a much better way, and Calc HTML import/export had no support for this, while this is all fixable.

Results so far¶

In short, Collabora Online now uses the Clipboard API to read from the system clipboard -- this has to be supported by the integration, and Calc's HTML filter now support the subset of the Google Sheets markup I figured out so far. This subset is also documented.

Note that the default behavior is that the new Clipboard API is available in Chrome/Safari, but not in Firefox.

For the longer version, here are some screenshots:

How is this implemented?¶

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:

Tuesday
02 April, 2024

[es] Blog de LibreOffice Hispano: El equipo de documentación ha publicado la Guía de Calc en formato HTML

@ 18:38 UTC

Este formato resulta ideal para su lectura en dispositivos móviles ya que se adapta al tamaño de la pantalla. No tienes excusa, puedes leer las guías en cualquier sitio , basta con que visites https://books.libreoffice.org/es/index.html

Una ventaja adicional que ofrece …

Thursday
28 March, 2024

[es] Blog de LibreOffice Hispano: Publicación conjunta de LibreOffice 24.2.2 Community y LibreOffice 7.6.6 Community

@ 14:11 UTC

Berlín, 28 de marzo de 2024 – Hoy The Document Foundation publica LibreOffice 24.2.2 Community [1] y LibreOffice 7.6.6 Community [2], ambas versiones menores que corrigen errores y regresiones para mejorar la calidad y la interoperabilidad para la productividad individual.…

Wednesday
27 March, 2024

[es] Blog de LibreOffice Hispano: Celebración del Día del Documento Libre 2024

@ 11:07 UTC

Hoy es el Día del Documento Libre, que sensibiliza sobre cómo los estándares abiertos y los formatos de documento abiertos nos proporcionan la libertad de leer y escribir como queramos:

¿Recuerdas cuando te enviaron un archivo importante que tu

…

Monday
18 March, 2024

[en] LibreOffice Dev Blog: Test improvement – More and better tests for LibreOffice

@ 06:45 UTC

One of the areas that can help LibreOffice, but may not directly be visible to the users even though it has a big impact is the quality assurance, is automated testing. Here, I discuss some areas and notes around improving tests for LibreOffice. First, I start with regressions and bug fixes without a test.

Missing Unit Tests

This is the description from the GSoC ideas page:

While there are some automated tests for LibreOffice, there are not nearly enough. Adding more and better tests helps developers who work on the code to be more productive by allowing them to find regressions as early as possible.

To elaborate more, I should say there are many regressions and bugs in general that are fixed, but lack testing. It is important to have tests for those bug fixes, to avoid such problems in the future. You can see a list of those fixed issues that lack tests here:

If you want to add some new tests for the bug fixes, first you should read the bug report very carefully to understand what is it about, and try to test the fix yourself. You can either use git revert command to revert the fix, and see the problem in action, or try changing back the fix in the code, if it is not too big.

That is important, because you have to see that the test fails without the fix in place, but succeeds when it is applied. This is an essential step when writing the test.

To know more about unit tests, you may look into these Wiki pages:

The Document Foundation Wiki – UITests

Porting Existing Test to C++ or Python

Some tests are written in the past, but now have issues because of the way they are written. In this case, porting them can provide improvement.

Tests can be written in multiple languages. At least, C++, Python, Java and BASIC are currently in use for different tests across the LibreOffice code base. Again in the GSoC ideas page, you can read:

There is some support in LibreOffice for automated tests, both at the level of unit tests, and at the level of system tests that drive a full LibreOffice instance. Currently tests can be written in C++, Java, or Python. Various new automated tests should be developed to improve the test coverage.

Tests written exclusively for Java (e.g. the JUnit framework) should be ported to C++ so that they can execute much more rapidly. Similarly, tests that do remote control of an existing LibreOffice instance, should be re-factored to run inside that instance to make debugging much easier.

Almost all JUnitTests and UITests, and also some smoke tests, run as an outside process. To verify, the trick is to remove the soffice(.exe) binary, or to remove its execute permission (on Linux). In this way, out-of-process tests should fail, as they need to run the soffice binary. After a …

Monday
11 March, 2024

[en] LibreOffice QA Blog: QA/Dev Report: February 2024

@ 12:21 UTC

General Activities

LibreOffice 7.6.5 was released on February 22
LibreOffice 24.2.1 was released on February 29
Olivier Hallot (TDF) added help content for Calc’s XLOOKUP and XMATCH functions, Navigate By in Find toolbar, Draw’s Shrink text on overflow and did many fixed and cleanups in Help
Rafael Lima made it so selected text in the BASIC editor is automatically inserted into the search bar, added a command for toggling code block commenting in BASIC IDE and fixed an issue where Duplicate Sheet command might create the sheet in the wrong file, if having two open files with the same name
Stanislav Horacek updated command paths in Help
Stéphane Guillou (TDF) updated command paths in Help
Alain Romedenne updated ScriptForge Help pages, updated Python shell script Help for macOS and improved Python example in SDK
Dione Maddern did many fixes and updates to Help pages, mostly fixing links
Gábor Kelemen (allotropia) made some cleanups in Help and in UI and UNO bridges code
Laurent Balland fixed an issue with skip empty cells option not working for the last column in Calc Text Import dialog, made it so custom number formats using the ? character replace trailing zeroes with figure spaces which have a width approximating a digit and removed unneeded thumbnail.png images from Wizard templates
Miklós Vajna (Collabora) added legal numbering support for DOC and RTF files, made Calc HTML import support data-sheets attributes, made Calc’s cell editing accept pasted HTML fragments, made DOCX content control handling more robust and continued polishing floating table support
Szymon Kłos, Gülşah Köse, Marco Cecchetti, Gökay Şatır, Pranam Lashkari, Michael Meeks and Méven Car (Collabora) worked on LOKit used by Collabora Online
Attila Szűcs (Collabora) fixed PPTX issues with multiline field wrapping and stacked text
Henry Castro (Collabora) tweaked Calc’s background colour filter to not extend transparent colours to empty cells and fixed an issue with Sidebar not displaying the full localised currency string for cell properties
Tomaž Vajngerl (Collabora) made it so the currencies used in a spreadsheet are put at the top of the currency pop-up list, made pivot table data cache handling smarter and improved the handling of XLS documents with unknown DRM encryption (mainly due to some Excel addons)
Julien Nabet fixed an issue where Data validation without error check allowed entering incorrect data, fixed LOWER not being supported in Base’s Query-GUI if condition was LIKE and fixed an issue with Calc Macro setting SearchWildcard to False changing SearchRegularExpression value. He also fixed some crashes
Andreas Heinisch made Calc’s Autofilter sorting and removing duplicates more robust and made it so a single click is enough to access options through Calc’s status bar
Xisco Faulí (TDF) made over a dozen additions and changes to automated tests, improved dark mode support of Writer comment UI, fixed an issue with Autofilter empty option, made SVG text baseline handling more intuitive, added support …

Wednesday
06 March, 2024

[it] LibreItalia: Decima Conferenza Italiana – LibreItalia

@ 22:26 UTC

Monte San Vito (AN), Centro turistico «Carlo Urbani», 4 maggio 2024 (dalle 9:00 alle 17:00) 6 marzo 2024 – Associazione LibreItalia annuncia la decima Conferenza Italiana LibreItalia, che si terrà sabato 4 maggio 2024 presso il Centro turistico sociale «Carlo Urbani», Via Antonio Gramsci 19 a Monte San Vito (AN), con inizio alle ore 9:00 […]

Friday
01 March, 2024

[es] Blog de LibreOffice Hispano: El nuevo Consejo de Administración de The Document Foundation

@ 17:35 UTC

El nuevo Consejo de Administración de The Document Foundation acaba de iniciar su mandato de dos años el 18 de febrero de 2024.

Los miembros titulares son, por orden alfabético Eliane Domingos, Sophie Gautier, Björn Michaelsen, László Németh, Simon Phipps, …

Overview

Welcome to The Document Foundation Planet

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Wednesday26 June, 2024

[en] Official TDF Blog: LibreOffice development in 2023 – TDF’s Annual Report

@ 08:54 UTC

In 2023, 11,272 commits were made to the LibreOffice source code, from 253 authors, in 21 repositories. We also took part in the Google Summer of Code, to support student developers

Infrastructure for developers

Google Summer of Code (GSoC)

Monday24 June, 2024

[en] Official TDF Blog: LibreOffice social media in 2023 – TDF’s Annual Report

@ 10:29 UTC

We use our social media channels to raise awareness about our work, share information and encourage new contributors to join us

Social media

YouTube channel

Like what we do? Support the LibreOffice project and The Document Foundation – get involved and help our volunteers, or make a donation. Thank you!

Wednesday19 June, 2024

[en] Collabora Community: Hacking LibreOffice in Budapest

@ 11:00 UTC

Tuesday18 June, 2024

[en] Official TDF Blog: LibreOffice marketing activities in 2023 – TDF’s Annual Report

@ 08:06 UTC

In 2023, the marketing team continued the deployment of the Strategic Marketing Plan, without overlooking ongoing activities to promote LibreOffice and support the efforts of native language communities

Slide Decks and Videos for Marketing Purposes

The Importance of Donations

Ongoing Marketing Activities

Sunday16 June, 2024

[en] Official TDF Blog: Announcing the Impress Guide 24.2

@ 13:37 UTC

Friday14 June, 2024

[en] LibreOffice QA Blog: LibreOffice 24.8 Beta1 is available for testing

@ 14:23 UTC

Thursday06 June, 2024

[en] LibreOffice QA Blog: QA/Dev Report: May 2024

@ 10:41 UTC

General Activities

Wednesday05 June, 2024

[en] LibreOffice Design Blog: Convenient handling of shortcuts

@ 13:35 UTC

Monday03 June, 2024

[en] Miklos Vajna: Section-based continuous endnotes in Writer

@ 14:26 UTC

Motivation¶

Results so far¶

How is this implemented?¶

Want to start using this?¶

Thursday30 May, 2024

[en] LibreOffice Dev Blog: Porting Java tests to C++

@ 14:08 UTC

Why Porting Java Tests?

Start from Examples

Final Words

Monday27 May, 2024

[en] Björn Michaelsen: Writer Again!

@ 12:14 UTC

Writer Again!

Sunday26 May, 2024

[es] Blog de LibreOffice Hispano: Convocatoria para Pruebas – LibreOffice 24.8 Alpha 1

@ 20:48 UTC

Tuesday21 May, 2024

[en] LibreOffice QA Blog: LibreOffice 24.8 Alpha1 is available for testing

@ 11:12 UTC

Tuesday14 May, 2024

[es] Blog de LibreOffice Hispano: Conferencia LibreOffice 2024 – Luxemburgo

@ 22:20 UTC

[en] LibreOffice Dev Blog: Crash fixes, part 4: assertion failure

@ 11:46 UTC

What is Assertion Failure?

Backtrace

Fixing the Problem

Thursday09 May, 2024

[en] LibreOffice QA Blog: QA/Dev Report: April 2024

@ 08:19 UTC

General Activities

Monday06 May, 2024

[es] Blog de LibreOffice Hispano: Cómo evitar incompatibilidades entre formatos privativos y ODF

@ 00:00 UTC

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