What is Miklos hacking - Tags: libreoffice

The Hungarian Linux in the Education Conference 2012 was held today @ Budapest, I held a generic session about LibreOffice (slides), also talked a few guys into submitting Easy Hacks. ;)

Other interesting stuff: a free Logo interpreter in PyUNO by Laszlo, available here.

We were in Hamburg during this weekend, and I think all of us had great fun, kudos go to the organizers! If you are curious, here are the topics I worked on besides mentoring when I was asked to do so:

Also thanks Stefan for correcting the misleading icons of the horizontal/vertical flipping in Writer. ;)

We presented TDF on this conference with Andras today. It was nice to see familar and new faces as well, we turned some mentioned problems into bugreports and I also fixed the barcode extension to work again with LibreOffice 3.4+, as requested by a user.

We will give a talk about LPSP and CMIS with Cedric at FOSDEM2012. If you wonder what LPSP and CMIS are:

See you in Brussels!

There was an old Calc bugreport about this, and it was an interesting challenge, since I never touched Calc code before.

First, the references:

Given that there is no easy way to enter Ctrl-Shift-";" using a Hungarian keyboard, the Hungarian equivalent is Ctrl-Shift-".".

Actually, once this feature will be implemented, not sure how the Hungarian users will access it. :)

I’ve been invited to the first LibreOffice conference in Paris to give a short talk about this year’s GSoC work of mine: the RTF import rewrite in Writer. (Here are the slides.)

It also allowed me to allocate some time on hacking, including:

Thank you for the invitation, it was great fun!

When we got back from Munich, Andras had an idea what is the current bottleneck with the build when there are a lot of languages enabled, and it was the po2oo script, which is part of translate-toolkit.

First I tried to optimize that script, but then I tried to do the same gettext-to-SDF conversion from scratch, without using that framework at all, and it seems that caused a drastic speedup.

There were a few iterations, but now the two patches are in master, along with a fix in fast_merge.pl, which was there since at least commit 654810b (2009-06-17). ;)

We were in Munich during this weekend, and I think all of us had great fun, kudos go to the organizers! If you are curious, there is a growing list of features implemented during the event.

Update: Oh, and I forgot to mention that we (Andras and me) especially thank the FSF.hu foundation for funding our travel!

Tonight I worked on fdo#39337, and while the writerfilter-based RTF import filter almost handled the document in question correctly, the fonts were not correct.

It turned out that this was caused by the fact that RTF’s font table (a table where each row has an ID and it contains the font name, charset and other properties) does not require continuous ID’s (for example positions 0, 2, 3 are allowed, even if 1 is not set), but dmapper (the glue layer between the RTF tokenizer and the Writer UNO API) does.

I already sent the position of the entry to dmapper, but the position turned out to be ignored, so now I fixed the RTF tokenizer to send continuous ID’s.

A related improvement is that I just discovered the writerfilter::TagLogger::unoPropertySet() method, which can dump the properties of an UNO object, and now I’ve enabled dumping of shape properties, which can help a lot when something goes wrong there.

The next major LibreOffice version, 3.4, means some work for (Linux distribution, and other) packagers, as the build repo is now deprecated and packagers are suggested to use the bootstrap repo directly, which is a different build system.

On one hand, this is a nice cleanup - there is now a single configure script. OTOH this needs major rework of distro build scripts.

The interesting part here is that the official binary installers are not using the make DESTDIR=/some/path install method to install the compiled binaries, so it was discovered quite late that it wasn’t working properly. First Hanno and Petr worked on this, then I fixed a minor, but blocking glitch.

As a result 3.4 beta4 will be something packagers (even the ones not using the split build) can offer to distro users for testing without patching. Binaries for Frugalware users here (i686-only at the moment).