Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) is a mechanism to use complete Linux distributions on Windows. Here I discuss how to use it to build LibreOffice for both Linux and Windows binaries.
What is WSL?
WSL is the relatively new mechanism in Windows that lets you use a complete Linux distribution alongside your Windows. Interoperability between WSL and Windows lets you to share files and utilities between Windows and Linux. That is where it becomes helpful for LibreOffice, as LibreOffice make depends heavily on GNU tools, which are available in Linux.
Linux or Windows?
You can use WSL for 2 different scenarios:
1. Building for Linux: this is the full Linux build, in which Linux compilers, libraries and utilities will be used to create a Linux binary. You can then run or package the Linux build. You can find more information here:
TDF Wiki – BuildingOnWSL
Using WSL2 is recommended, as it is supposed to be faster, and also you can simply use the graphical interface of LibreOffice.
LibreOffice build on WSL with Linux binaries, displayed on Windows
When you run the resulting binary, the graphical interface is usable, and it will use GTK fronted by default.
2. Building for Windows: this is the WSL as helper mode, where it uses only a few Linux utilities like pkg-config, make, automake and a few other utilities to configure the project. Then, GNU Make for Windows will be the tool to build the project. More information is available here:
TDF Wiki: BuildingOnWSLWindows
The results are Windows .exe files, and you can simply run them on Windows as native programs.
Build Options on Windows
You can build LibreOffice on different platforms. On Windows, it is possible to use Cygwin, but using WSL can be faster, and considering some issues with recent Cygwin versions, WSL is an alternative.
One can imagine of other ways to build LibreOffice on Windows, including MinGW. But, at the moment, MinGW, both as a helper to use Visual Studio, and also as an independent distribution to build LibreOffice, is not usable due to various reasons.
And last note: if you do not have prior experience with LibreOffice development but you are interested, you can start from our video tutorial for getting started with LibreOffice development.
General Activities
LibreOffice 24.2.6 was released on September 5
LibreOffice 24.8.1 was released on September 12
LibreOffice 24.8.2 was released on September 27
Olivier Hallot (TDF) continued with a massive Help bookmark cleanup effort, updated help for BASIC Now() function, improved the help for regular expressions by including a description of \w and \W patterns and extended the Document Type Definition of Help XML
Pierre F. improved readability and maintainability of the Document Type Definition of Help XML and updated help for Navigator in Calc after the addition of comment deletion functionality
Dione Maddern added help pages for Properties Sidebar decks, updated help for Styles Sidebar deck and added a help page for database table references
Adolfo Jayme Barrientos improved UI strings in Calc and updated Help pages accordingly
Bogdan Buzea improved UI strings and updated Help pages accordingly
Laurent Balland did many updates and cleanups to Impress templates, for example replacing images with vector graphics for better quality
Miklós Vajna (Collabora) implemented per-paragraph semi-transparent shape text in Impress and added digital signing support to LOKit
Michael Meeks, Tomaž Vajngerl, Bayram Çiçek, Rashesh Padia, Gülşah Köse and Marco Cecchetti (Collabora) worked on LOKit used by Collabora Online
Jaume Pujantell (Collabora) added a command to promote a Writer reply comment to a new main one and fixed an issue with comment threads breaking when exporting ODT files as DOCX
Julien Nabet fixed database queries being saved corrupted, fixed incorrectly included values with BETWEEN and NOT BETWEEN statements in dBASE file connections, fixed an issue preventing the use of Report Builder Wizard and added the new Histogram chart type to Sidebar’s Chart deck
Xisco Faulí (TDF) added the schema for ODF 1.4 while doing several fixes and adaptations related to it, converted many Java tests to CppUnit tests, fixed an issue with Position and Size dialog showing dimensions in incorrect measurement units, upgraded many dependencies and fixed some crashes
Michael Stahl (allotropia) fixed issues with hiding of FlyFrames in hidden sections, made zip file handling more robust, made the display of hidden text with a non-hidden paragraph marker in Microsoft document formats match that of MS Word and fixed an issue related to widow paragraphs in sections
Mike Kaganski (Collabora) made BASIC’s CStr() and Format() functions produce localized output for currency values, fixed a DOCX table layout issue, fixed an issue with undo history being populated simply by opening a certain Impress presentation, implemented a fallback for inline formulas in imported PPTX files, implemented handling of Exit Property for Property Set in BASIC, improved the performance of Writer table row height calculation while also making it correct and fixed an issue resulting in broken OLE objects when re-exporting some PPTX files. He also fixed many crashes and did code cleanups
Caolán McNamara (Collabora) improved the layout of Start Center and made Impress/Draw Navigator focus handling more robust. He also fixed many issues found by static analysers and fuzzers, this time tackling a particularly massive batch of Coverity findings, including lots of Java issues
Stephan Bergmann (allotropia) worked on WASM build. He also adapted the code to compiler changes
Noel Grandin (Collabora) made it faster to import PDFs with lots of pages and optimised Writer code after the big item handling rework. He also did many code cleanups and fixed many issues found by static analysers
Justin Luth (Collabora) fixed an issue with localised footnote style, implemented support for ToCs with no page numbers in DOCX import, continued improving the handling of OOXML layoutInCell property, adapted the DOCX shape handling code to strange new inconsistencies from Microsoft and fixed crashes
Michael Weghorn (TDF) worked on the accessibility features of Windows, GTK4 and Qt UIs in areas such as switching sheets in Calc, selecting elements in Writer tables and toolbar positions. He also worked on using native widgets in Qt UIs
Balázs Varga (allotropia) continued polishing support for uniform Glow effect for text in shapes, fixed missing table borders in PPTX files and worked on the accessibility checker
Patrick Luby improved the look of the active cell indicator in Calc on macOS, adapted the code to changes in restorable state handling in macOS Sonoma and made colorspace handling more robust on macOS
Jim Raykowski made the Quick Find Sidebar deck inherit the search string from the Quick Find toolbar, fixed an issue with importing macro libraries as read-only, fixed an undo issue affecting style manipulation via the Sidebar, got rid of annoying page jumping behaviour when switching between page view modes in Writer, enriched the Quick Find Sidebar deck by adding match numbers and made comment tracking in Writer Navigator work also when focusing into comment boxes
Armin Le Grand (allotropia/Collabora) worked on a renovation of graphics rendering on Linux with Cairo library
Oliver Specht (CIB) added the ability to define default zoom values in global options, fixed an RTF issue with incorrect frame positioning and made it so character formatting and styles are cleared, if a paragraph or a character style is applied by holding down Ctrl while double-clicking in the Sidebar
Heiko Tietze (TDF) improved the user experience of the direct SQL dialog, added an option to disable the warning that only the active sheet will be saved when exporting to CSV (based on work by Martin van Zijl), improved the layout of document properties dialog, made it so double-clicking on document information fields in Writer opens the Properties dialog when relevant, made text in Calc cells with line breaks respect application colour setting, differentiated the context menu labels per the various index types and changed certain default bullet characters
László Németh improved the support for smart justify in DOCX files and added support for style separators in DOCX files
Ilmari Lauhakangas (TDF) updated Help after UI changes and did many fixes and optimisations to icon themes
Christian Lohmaier (TDF) did build-related cleanups
Eike Rathke (Red Hat) continued polishing the handling of custom Add-In function names
Jonathan Clark (TDF) further improved large paragraph layout performance, especially affecting languages such as Tibetan, fixed several issues related to kashida characters, fixed an issue with incorrect textbox positions when anchored As character inside RTL text, added base text group and mono features to Asian Phonetic Guide, implemented missing support for RTL text in EMF graphics, implemented Syriac justification and fixed issues with text grid spacing in DOC import
Regina Henschel implemented support for exporting the database range property TotalsRow to ODF
Tibor Nagy (allotropia) fixed issues with exporting comments as PDF annotations and made it so a linked presentation opens in slideshow or editing mode depending on what the mode is in the source presentation
Adam Seskunas worked on the GSoC project to port Java tests to C++
Ritobroto Mukherjee worked on the GSoC project to implement cross platform .NET bindings for UNO API
Ahmed Hamed worked on the GSoC project for improving the Functions Sidebar deck in Calc
Sahil Gautam worked on the GSoC project to implement themes and added a “Handle Duplicate Records” command to Calc while creating a Help page for it
Mohit Marathe worked on the GSoC project for adding a Comments Sidebar deck
Rafael Lima made it so Solver Options dialog accepts parameters of TypeClass BYTE and SHORT, made it possible to set solver settings at the sheet level via the UNO API and improved the stability of the solver and fixed issues with resizing the Comments Sidebar deck
Kira Tubo removed redundant Open and Save buttons from Notebookbar and updated Help accordingly, moved “Protect” section to “Position and Size” tab in Properties dialogs of document elements while updating the layout of the dialogs, defined some default Comment style attributes and made Hanging Indent command create a hanging indent when used on a paragraph without one
Jean-Pierre Ledure worked on the ScriptForge library
Andreas Heinisch added a check for missing parameters to BASIC
Arnaud Versini did some code cleanups
Bartosz Kosiorek added support for MS Visio Template format with .vstx extension
Sohrab Kazak added a checkbox to toggle the title in a ToC/Index
Chris Sherlock did code cleanups in VCL
Eloi Montañés fixed an issue with unverifiable timestamps in signatures when using the NSS backend
Rico Tzschichholz (Ubuntu) made some build fixes
DaeHyun Sung improved the Korean UI font priority
Henry Castro (Collabora) fixed an issue with currency format previews in Calc
Kudos to Ilmari Lauhakangas for helping to elaborate this list.
Reported Bugs
479 bugs, 69 of which are enhancements, have been reported by 297 people.
Top 10 Reporters
Mike Kaganski ( 15 )
Eyal Rozenberg ( 15 )
yoylasfpgas ( 13 )
Gabor Kelemen (allotropia) ( 10 )
peter josvai ( 10 )
Buovjaga ( 9 )
nobu ( 8 )
Hossein ( 8 )
Rafael Lima ( 8 )
Regina Henschel ( 7 )
Triaged Bugs
464 bugs have been triaged by 66 people.
Top 10 Triagers
Buovjaga ( 115 )
m_a_riosv ( 65 )
Xisco Faulí ( 41 )
V Stuart Foote ( 35 )
Heiko Tietze ( 24 )
Mike Kaganski ( 22 )
Julien Nabet ( 21 )
Dieter ( 14 )
raal ( 11 )
ady ( 11 )
Resolution of resolved bugs
446 bugs have been set to RESOLVED.
Check the following sections for more information about bugs resolved as FIXED, WORKSFORME and DUPLICATE.
Fixed Bugs
161 bugs have been fixed by 36 people.
Top 10 Fixers
Mike Kaganski ( 14 )
Heiko Tietze ( 13 )
Jonathan Clark ( 10 )
Xisco Fauli ( 9 )
Caolán McNamara ( 7 )
Julien Nabet ( 7 )
Justin Luth ( 6 )
Rafael Lima ( 6 )
Patrick Luby ( 6 )
László Németh ( 5 )
List of critical bugs fixed
tdf#162911 Inserting multiple Hyperlinks and undoing an insertion (Ctrl-Z) crashes Writer ( Thanks to Michael Stahl )
List of high severity bugs fixed
tdf#160937 Document Properties pages in all modules do not fit screen and cannot be resized (gtk3/gtk4) ( Thanks to Heiko Tietze )
tdf#161724 FILEOPEN PPTX: image completely disappears, other quite off (zoomed in?) ( Thanks to Xisco Fauli )
tdf#162507 Page layout reflow after pressing delete causes hang (involving tables) ( Thanks to Miklos Vajna )
tdf#162728 Crash on saving in Math Formula editor ( Thanks to Noel Grandin )
tdf#162746 Cannot open DOCX file from 24.8 ( Thanks to Mike Kaganski )
tdf#162829 CRASH: Editing Formula Bar with two views ( Thanks to Xisco Fauli )
List of crashes fixed
tdf#158323 CRASH when switch back from HTML View to Normal View after edit in HTML source code ( Thanks to Julien Nabet )
tdf#160945 LibreOffice crashes in vtableCall at startup (Windows ARM) ( Thanks to Stephan Bergmann )
tdf#161256 Libreoffice crashes using gtk4 VCL on kde plasma wayland ( Thanks to Michael Weghorn )
tdf#162405 Multiple password dialogs + crash in file save dialog with configured OpenPGP key signing key ( Thanks to Sarper Akdemir )
tdf#162728 Crash on saving in Math Formula editor ( Thanks to Noel Grandin )
tdf#162760 Calc solver crashes on large spreadsheet but runs in LO 7.6.7 ( Thanks to Rafael Lima )
tdf#162764 CRASH: closing LibreOffice while TextControlParagraphPropertiesDialog/TextControlCharacterPropertiesDialog are open (gen) ( Thanks to Xisco Fauli )
tdf#162772 Crash in “Target in Document” in Hyperlink dialog, if path is not suitable ( Thanks to Noel Grandin )
tdf#162782 FILESAVE SVG: semi-transparent shape text in a bullet list crashes ( Thanks to Miklos Vajna )
tdf#162829 CRASH: Editing Formula Bar with two views ( Thanks to Xisco Fauli )
tdf#162887 CRASH: xpdfimport crash on textual tiling pattern ( Thanks to Dr. David Alan Gilbert )
tdf#162911 Inserting multiple Hyperlinks and undoing an insertion (Ctrl-Z) crashes Writer ( Thanks to Michael Stahl )
tdf#162987 Executing .uno:DataFilterAutoFilter on a hidden spreadsheet crashes ( Thanks to Mike Kaganski )
tdf#163091 crash the file with macro ( Thanks to Mike Kaganski )
List of performance issues fixed
tdf#152298 FILEOPEN DOCX Copying and pasting between table cells is slow (steps in comment 7) ( Thanks to Mike Kaganski )
tdf#161562 Sluggish scrolling after saving and …
Up earlyish; bus to the airport, flight with KLM
who do rather better than Ryanair - via Amsterdam to
Manchester. Got slides nearly done on the plane.
Arrived at OggCamp - met lots of interesting new
UK based people around FLOSS: really good, I missed the
old UKUUG style conferences with a great community feel
and low-commerciality.
Sync with Simon and met interesting people at
dinner; finished slides late.
Up rather early; train to the strikingly cool post-
industrial conference venue. Various talks.
And finally another topic that Uwe wanted presented more widely,
albeit being a rather old tool:
Managed to talk with some of the board together before
heading out: talking across difference respectfully is something
we need to do a lot more of.
Back to the hotel, Ethiopian dinner, drinks with team
& allotropians at the hotel until rather late.
Up remarkably early, train to the University; Eliane's
opened, lots of open-source'y talks, gave my keynote.
Enjoyed a number of talks from friends, partners, and
caught up and shook the hand of many great contributors to the
project; lunch etc.
Gave a tentative Building a successful Open
Source business around LibreOffice talk.
Out for the community dinner in the evening; chatted
happily to people in the evening.
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…
Breakfast, got slides finished; bus + pretty walk
+ train to the University venue. Caught up with various
types before doing some OggCamp slides through the community
meeting.
Back into town to a new hotel, enjoyed a drink, and
out for dinner at a rather tiny Italian restaurant, on for
some drinks.
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.
Click here to learn more about the conference – and join us there!
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.
Motivation¶
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.
Results so far¶
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:
Bugdoc: old SVG render
Once tweaking the transparency mask writer to check if text started already, we get the correct SVG
render:
Bugdoc: new SVG render
How is this implemented?¶
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.
Want to start using this?¶
You can get a development edition of Collabora Online 24.04 and try it out yourself right now: try
the development edition. Collabora intends to continue
supporting and contributing to LibreOffice, the code is merged so we expect all of this work will be
available in TDF's next release too (25.2).
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 where the celebration was hosted by their own on-campus community. Kathmandu Open Source Community has been the veteran contributor when it comes to the history of contributions from Nepal in the LibreOffice project.
TDF says: Many thanks to Suraj and the Nepalese community for the great work! And as a bonus, here’s a video from the aforementioned paper plane contest:
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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.
Options Page
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:
LibreOffice Design Blog: Easyhacking: How to create a new “Tip-Of-The-Day” dialog
UNO Dispatch Commands
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:
Sub 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
Implementing UNO Command
Adding a new UNO command was discussed before, in a separate blog post:
Adding a new UNO command
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 pass data. But when you are using UNO commands, those functions will not be available directly. Instead, you may pass values that denote the data that will be read from somewhere else, like the configuration.
For example, consider there are multiple paths that you may want to edit using this UNO command with the same dialog. In this case, you can pass a value that shows the associated path that you are changing. It can be passed as an enumeration, and then you set and/or get the value directly from the configuration.
In this way, the callers in the C++ code will have much easier task to do, as it is only calling the UNO command, and the rest is done in the implementation of the UNO command.
For AdditionsDialog, the calling code is as simple as this in cui/source/options/optgdlg.cxx:
IMPL_STATIC_LINK_NOARG(OfaViewTabPage, OnMoreIconsClick, weld::Button&, void)
{
css::uno::Sequence<css::beans::PropertyValue> aArgs{ comphelper::makePropertyValue(
u"AdditionsTag"_ustr, u"Icons"_ustr) };
comphelper::dispatchCommand(u".uno:AdditionsDialog"_ustr, aArgs);
}
Passing Parameters to UNO Commands
UNO dispatch commands can take parameters. As an example, take a look at .uno:NewDoc defined in sfx2/sdi/sfx.sdi:
SfxStringItem NewDoc SID_NEWDOC
(SfxStringItem Region SID_TEMPLATE_REGIONNAME,SfxStringItem Name SID_TEMPLATE_NAME)
[
...
]
As you can see, there are two parameters:
SfxStringItem Region SID_TEMPLATE_REGIONNAME SfxStringItem Name SID_TEMPLATE_NAME
The SfxStringItem is the type, Region and Name are the names of the parameters, SID_TEMPLATE_REGIONNAME and SID_TEMPLATE_NAME are the constants used for passing parameters. The parameter type is not limited to numbers and strings, and it can be any defined class.
To set and get data for this parameters, you may use appropriate Set and Put functions. For example, this gets the parameter if set:
const SfxStringItem *pItem = rSet.GetItemIfSet( SID_TEMPLATE_REGIONNAME, false)
Or, this sets the data:
OUString sVal = u"test"_ustr;
rSet.Put( SfxStringItem( SID_TEMPLATE_REGIONNAME, sVal ) );
Final Notes
To get to know better how to implement more complex UNO dispatch commands, you can refer to the implementation of the existing UNO commands to get idea about how they are implemented. You can see a comprehensive list of UNO commands here:
TDF Wiki – UNO Dispatch Commands
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!
Nothing ever happens.
And nothing ever happens, nothing happens at all
The needle returns to the start of the song
And we all sing along like before
-- Del Amitri, Nothing Ever Happens
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 be worth it though. So why wasnt it done?
It still can be tried in a follow-up, but speaking about regressions earlier:
This has some obscure regression risk, because if we change the order of
bookmarks starting at the same position from undefined to something ordered by the
end position it might impact a lot of code using bookmarks. The function in
question might actually be faster, but other functions (e.g. the inserting of
new bookmarks) might actually be slower. So ... this is left as an exercise to
the reader.
Comments? Feedback? Additions? Most welcome here on the fediverse !
General Activities
LibreOffice 24.8.0 was released on August 22
Olivier Hallot (TDF) continued with improvements to Calc function help pages, added help pages for Sidebar settings and graphics export via command line, improved help pages for Writer Status Bar, Calc’s Similarity Search and database ranges, updated menu item paths in Help, did lots of Help cleanups, added some extended tooltips, improved the dialog for easy conditional formatting in Calc and removed a misleading Restore Default button from Sidebar Settings
Alain Romedenne improved help for BASIC’s If statement and added unit tests for IF THEN statements in BASIC and VBA
Pierre F. made two dozen improvements to help, in areas such as Calc functions, word count, change tracking, BASIC, regular expressions, AutoRecovery and backup, and freezing of rows and columns in Calc
Dione Maddern added a help page for Quick Find Sidebar deck, updated the help for Writing Aids, reworked help pages for Navigator and Navigation toolbar and updated the instructions for enabling remote control in Impress Remote user guide
Adolfo Jayme Barrientos updated help pages about digital signatures after UI changes
Laurent Balland did cleanups in Resume Writer template and Beehive, Blue Curve, DNA, Blueprint Plans, Focus, Inspiration, Light, DNA, Midnightblue, Piano, Portfolio, and Progress Impress templates
Miklós Vajna (Collabora) made it faster to open DOCX files with many shapes and sections, and headers/footers activated, fixed a layout loop in a certain DOCX file with a complex full-page group shape, fixed losing paragraph styles with many numberings in DOCX export and made Writer layouting smarter, improving performance in LOKit
Sven Göthel, Skyler Grey, Hubert Figuière, Andras Timar, Michael Meeks and Áron Budea (Collabora) worked on LOKit used by Collabora Online. Michael also optimised loading times by reducing the frequency of progress bar updates
Jaume Pujantell (Collabora) implemented handling of firstHeaderRow attibute in XLSX pivot tables and fixed a crash seen when editing text in shapes in Collabora Online
Tomaž Vajngerl (Collabora) worked on the new histogram chart type
Julien Nabet fixed an issue preventing deletion of MySQL/MariaDB tables with spaces in their names and did some code cleanups
Xisco Faulí (TDF) fixed a PDF export crash, improved the contrast accessibility check and did many dependency updates
Michael Stahl (allotropia) improved some automated tests, fixed issues with hidden sections, made HTML pasting more robust when dealing with placeholder fields in Writer, fixed a wrapping issue with long index entries, simplified the code for JPEG quality levels in PDF export and made UA PDFs compatible with Adobe Acrobat Pro’s accessibility checker
Mike Kaganski (Collabora) worked around a bug in MS Access ODBC 64-bit driver preventing database table editing, fixed an issue in Insert Special Character dialog related to changing the font selection and made it possible to filter characters in the dialog by Unicode value, fixed an issue with Calc’s EXACT function when working in array context, improved stability by preventing the closing of a document while it is being layouted in the background, made anti-aliasing code more robust on Windows in the context of bitmap export, made the BASIC With statement implementation behave correctly, fixed an issue with BASIC for loop evaluation in VBA support mode, made it possible to deselect all tables in Base by clicking outside of the table list, fixed an issue with some Writer tables showing as collapsed, fixed some issues in the Unicode notation toggle command (Alt+X) and fixed a pasting issue related to document themes. He also fixed many crashes and did code cleanups
Caolán McNamara (Collabora) fixed an issue with not being able to rotate the page when printing labels on Linux, fixed embedded formulas not being shown completely when in edit mode and fixed an issue blocking chart data range editing. He also fixed many issues found by static analysers and fuzzers
Stephan Bergmann (allotropia) worked on WASM build, enabling WebDAV use
Noel Grandin (Collabora) improved loading time for DOCX files with lots of headers and footers and optimised the handling of Writer bookmarks
Justin Luth (Collabora) did many improvements to the handling of OOXML layoutInCell property controlling VML shape behaviour in tables, fixed an issue with inherited styles not updating after font size change in Writer, fixed incorrect object anchoring in DOC export and fixed a crash related to undoing header activation
Michael Weghorn (TDF) fixed detecting the default printer on Linux, worked on handling accessible object attributes, fixed an issue with font attributes in form control properties, fixed license text getting selected when installing an extension with certain Linux UIs, implemented support for reading whole documents from top to bottom in NVDA screen reader, made dark mode detection more robust in Qt/KDE UIs and worked on using native widgets in Qt UIs
Balázs Varga (allotropia) fixed an auto-fitted shape size issue in PPTX import and implemented support for uniform Glow effect for text in shapes
Patrick Luby improved the look of the active cell indicator in Calc on macOS, made the Tabbed UI centered on macOS and fixed a couple of crashes
Jim Raykowski fixed a visual glitch in the Animation Sidebar deck of Impress, made it possible to jump to a heading by pressing Enter in a read-only Table of Contents in Writer, made word count information of headings outline content show in Navigator tooltips, made it possible to delete all content of a content type via the Navigator (except headings), made the initially selected tracked change in Manage Changes dialog be the current or next one in the document, fixed a mouse wheel focus issue in the Sidebar and made it so the source paths of linked libraries are shown in Macro Organizer
Sarper Akdemir (allotropia) continued improving the UX of the encryption dialog
Armin Le Grand (allotropia/Collabora) worked on a renovation of graphics rendering with Cairo library
Oliver Specht (CIB) fixed an issue with tables having rows with “At least” height setting in imported Microsoft formats
Heiko Tietze (TDF) made comment background colours customisable in Writer, Impress and Draw, made it possible to toggle the display mode of the most recent documents list between current module and all modules, made it possible to customise the colours of non-printable characters and improved the luminance calculation for automatic colour setting alongside dark mode colour improvements
László Németh made it possible to adjust hyphenation settings via the Sidebar
Ilmari Lauhakangas (TDF) did some Python code cleanups, improved a build error message, unified API docs a bit and did some help page cleanups
Christian Lohmaier (TDF) worked on Windows Subsystem for Linux build improvements
Pranam Lashkari (Collabora) made it quicker to add new conditional formatting rules via the Manage dialog, implemented loading of comment author names from XLSX files and improved dark mode handling for text box content
Thorsten Behrens (allotropia) switched the MAR-based auto-updater to be on by default
Eike Rathke (Red Hat) made the Calc function search in the Sidebar more robust and made custom Add-In function names imported from OOXML be handled properly
Jonathan Clark (TDF) made numbering formats with repeated characters more accurate, fixed several issues related to diacritics and kashida characters, fixed incorrect output after editing Ruby base text, worked on reducing visible jittering when laying out right-aligned text and fixed an issue with RTL as-character anchored textbox positioning
Regina Henschel fixed a display scaling issue affecting crop markers on Windows
Tibor Nagy (allotropia) fixed a “Stack empty” error in tagged PDF export
Adam Seskunas worked on the GSoC project to port Java tests to C++
Ritobroto Mukherjee worked on the GSoC project to implement cross platform .NET bindings for UNO API
Devansh Varshney worked on the GSoC project for adding histogram charts
Ahmed Hamed worked on the GSoC project for improving the Functions Sidebar deck in Calc
Sahil Gautam worked on the GSoC project to implement themes
Rafael Lima made tooltips wrap properly in Qt-based UIs, fixed a layout issue when resizing the Comments Sidebar deck and improved the look of the active cell indicator in Calc
Hossein Nourikhah (TDF) worked on Windows Subsystem for Linux build improvements
Kira Tubo improved the grouping of styles in the Sidebar
Moritz Duge (allotropia) continued improving the UI of certificate handling and digital signing
Bayram Çiçek (Collabora) continued working on Excel Power Query round trip support
Jean-Pierre Ledure worked on the ScriptForge library
Vladislav Tarakanov finalised the support of audio files in PPT/X files
Kurt Nordback improved the alignment of pie-of-pie and bar-of-pie chart data labels and took the first steps in adding support for invertIfNegative in bar and bubble charts
Gülşah Köse (Collabora) added a command to invert document background colour to be used in Collabora Online
David Gilbert made it so PDF import makes use of clip paths
René Engelhard (Debian) fixed a build issue affecting armhf platform
Andreas Heinisch made it so Calc’s Manage names dialog checks, if a formula is a valid print range
Per99 made it so the user can choose which animation settings to use via accessibility options (related to hypersensitivity)
Kudos to Ilmari Lauhakangas for helping to elaborate this list.
Reported Bugs
436 bugs, 53 of which are enhancements, have been reported by 258 people.
Top 10 Reporters
Eyal Rozenberg ( 26 )
Mike Kaganski ( 19 )
Regina Henschel ( 12 )
Buovjaga ( 10 )
Justin L ( 8 )
Heiko Tietze ( 7 )
fpy ( 7 )
Jeff Fortin Tam ( 7 )
peter josvai ( 5 )
Gabor Kelemen (allotropia) ( 5 )
Triaged Bugs
424 bugs have been triaged by 67 people.
Top 10 Triagers
Buovjaga ( 92 )
m_a_riosv ( 38 )
Heiko Tietze ( 34 )
Mike Kaganski ( 23 )
raal ( 21 )
V Stuart Foote ( 19 )
ady ( 18 )
Dieter ( 17 )
Julien Nabet ( 13 )
Michael Weghorn ( 11 )
Resolution of resolved bugs
475 bugs have been set to RESOLVED.
Check the following sections for more information about bugs resolved as FIXED, WORKSFORME and DUPLICATE.
Fixed Bugs
213 bugs have been fixed by 45 people.
Top 10 Fixers
Mike Kaganski ( 21 )
Pierre F ( 16 )
Justin Luth ( 15 )
Caolán McNamara ( 13 )
Michael Weghorn ( 11 )
Heiko Tietze ( 10 )
Jonathan Clark ( 9 )
Olivier Hallot ( 6 )
Jim Raykowski ( 6 )
Miklos Vajna ( 6 )
List of critical bugs fixed
tdf#162589 LibreOffice doesn’t start on Windows (erorr messages about nss3.dll and nspr4.dll) ( Thanks to Xisco Fauli )
List of high severity bugs fixed
tdf#148367 EDITING MS Access through 64-bit ODBC doesn’t work and returns an Invalid Bookmark error ( Thanks to Mike Kaganski )
tdf#157851 FILEOPEN XLSX “Author” information about notes is not read ( Thanks to Pranam Lashkari )
tdf#161139 FILEOPEN DOCX SaxException when opening specific file ( Thanks to Justin Luth )
tdf#161705 LO crashes with undo/redo of page numbering wizard’s created bookmarks ( Thanks to Justin Luth )
tdf#161725 Add option to toggle module-specific file types in Recent Documents (MRU) menu ( Thanks to Heiko Tietze )
tdf#161741 LO crashes with undo/redo of new header + some other change ( Thanks to Justin Luth )
tdf#162065 can’t clone “format” of a shape anymore ( Thanks to Oliver Specht )
tdf#162586 Crash after exporting an odt document to pdf ( Thanks to Xisco Fauli )
tdf#61242 Customise comments background color in Writer ( Thanks to Heiko Tietze )
tdf#68274 provide better update mechanism — Mozilla ARchive (mar) based incrementals on all supported platforms ( Thanks to Thorsten Behrens )
List of crashes fixed
tdf#140061 Crash swlo!sw::WriterMultiListener::StartListening ( Thanks to Patrick Luby )
tdf#155459 Point to the relevant section of Privacy Policy from the Options->LibreOffice->General help, “Send crash reports to The Document Foundation” section ( Thanks to Ilmari Lauhakangas )
tdf#161705 LO crashes with undo/redo of page numbering wizard’s created bookmarks ( Thanks to Justin Luth )
tdf#161741 LO crashes with undo/redo of new header + some other change ( Thanks to Justin Luth )
tdf#162004 [CRASH] Enabling the Notes Pane and closing the document will crash LibreOffice ( …
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.
Motivation¶
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!
Results so far¶
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.
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:
cool#9735 sw lok: take LOK vis area into account when deciding idle layout
Related: cool#9735 vcl lok: add an AnyInput() callback
Related: cool#9735 sw lok: handle the AnyInput() callback during idle layout
sfx2: fix crash in SfxObjectShell::IsHelpDocument()
The tracking issue for this problem was
cool#9735.
Want to start using this?¶
You can get a development edition of Collabora Online 24.04 and try it out yourself right now: try
the development edition. Collabora intends to continue
supporting and contributing to LibreOffice, the code is merged so we expect all of this work will be
available in TDF's next release too (25.2).
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:Create a snippet for the AutoText with code example that has a special paragraph style (for example, with font name Consolas and font size 12pt) with name, for example too - 'Python_code'.Use this snippet to insert code examplesIn the end of book writing just use the new feature in the extension and highlight all code examples in only one action! 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 switch back and forth freely between them, but that's not the model, typically it's a one way journey. But namespaces can be stacked instead with a namespace where the original uid is mapped to (apparent) root then containing another namespace where the user is mapped back to the original uid again. So we do that, each forkit enters its initial namespace and is mapped to root, does the mounts, enters another nested namespace mapped back to the original uid, chroots and drops all of the capabilities gained on entering a namespace. Which aligns the namespace mode with the expectations of the non-namespaces mode as to what effective uid the kit appears to run as.The mounts that each forkit does are private to that forkit, so while in the non-namespace case the mounts are visible system-wide, in the namespace case the mounts are not visible either to other forkits or to the parent coolwsd. So how the document is provided by coolwsd to a child kit had to be adapted for the new mode of even less potential leakage between components.There was a glitch in mounting, because when we bind mounts dirs from our system template we want them to be readonly, which requires the typical Linux 2 step process of mount and remount with readonly flags. This worked for the non namespace case, but failed for namespaces even though the initial mount succeeded. Here we had an extra flag of MS_NOATIME when remounting to potentially shave a little time off use of the kit jail, but in namespaces removing that option from the underlying system mount isn't permitted.Despite that mount flag change giving working namespace-using kits directly inside toplevel OS, one of our lxc-using ci systems still refused to allow a readonly remount in a namespace to work. The catch here was that lxc is bundled with default apparmor rules which additionally restrict a readonly remount call to a certain set of arguments which our remount effort didn't match, so that had to be adjusted. Specifically the rather obscure MS_SILENT use.Performance-wise, an unexpected (to me at least) side effect of using namespaces is that the coolwsd measurement of the time to spawn a forkit on my hardware has reduced from an average of 39.63ms per spawn to an average of an average of 6.15ms per spawn, which wasn't the primary goal but is a nice benefit.Surveying distros where namespaces are available by default suggests:RHEL/CENTOS8.0+ works with namespaces out of the box7.9 (EOL) not enabled by default, possible withecho 10000 > /proc/sys/user/max_user_namespacesDebian 11+ (bullseye) works with namespaces out of the box10 (buster) EOL, not enabled by default, possible withsudo sysctl -w kernel.unprivileged_userns_clone=1Ubuntu16.04+ works with namespaces out of the boxUbuntu 24.04 however, while supporting namespaces out of the box, has restricted namespaces via apparmor rules, which complicates things again so Collabora Online .deb packages install an apparmor profile to enable it to use namespaces out of the box.
General Activities
LibreOffice 24.2.5 was released on July, 25
Olivier Hallot (TDF) did many improvements to Calc function help pages and added documentation for wildcards in the Find & Replace help content
Alain Romedenne added a help page for supported MS Office VBA object features and improved the help for IF Basic statement
Pierre F. did many improvements to Calc function help pages and clarified the help text on crash reporter
Dione Maddern reworked the help pages concerning Styles Sidebar deck and added a help page for Page Sidebar deck
Stanislav Horáček updated help for Calc’s XMATCH function
Gábor Kelemen (allotropia) did code cleanups in the area of warnings
Laurent Balland did cleanups in Yellow Idea, Candy, Freshes and Growing Liberty Impress templates
Miklós Vajna (Collabora) continued polishing support for content controls, improved the performance of working with documents having an unusually large number of bulleted lists, disabled export of form fields as PDF forms by default to match user expectations better and improved font fallback in DOCX import
Szymon Kłos, Jaume Pujantell, Attila Szűcs, Michael Meeks, Pranam Lashkari, Marco Cecchetti, Áron Budea and Henry Castro (Collabora) worked on LOKit used by Collabora Online
Tomaž Vajngerl (Collabora) continued refactoring and improving the code for Impress annotations
Julien Nabet fixed crashes and did code cleanups especially in Python code
Xisco Faulí (TDF) fixed an issue with deleting empty columns in Calc removing formatting from adjacent column, fixed a table copying crash, did simplifications in automated tests, added a dozen new tests, converted some tests from Java to Cppunit and upgraded Python to 3.10 alongside other dependency updates
Michael Stahl (allotropia) made document repairing code more robust and made it possible to remove autoformatting from a Writer table while adding a configuration option to disable automatic updates of autoformatting when editing a table
Mike Kaganski (Collabora) fixed rendering issues with GDI and EMF metafiles, made clipboard handling more robust on Windows, made UI tests more stable on Windows, fixed many issues related to database functionality, also making the Firebird integration better, made HTML/ReqIF export more robust and improved the performance of Calc autoformatting when applying to whole rows. He also did many code cleanups and optimisations
Caolán McNamara (Collabora) fixed incorrect font emphasis in Expert Configuration dialog, fixed an issue with a certain type of imported PDF appearing as blank after exporting, improved font fallback automated tests and fixed crashes. He also fixed many issues found by static analysers and fuzzers
Stephan Bergmann (allotropia) worked on WASM build, finishing the UNO bridge for it and enabling Start Center
Noel Grandin (Collabora) greatly improved the export time of complex XLS/X spreadsheets to ODS, made UI tests more stable by making them use a generic clipboard rather than the system one, improved the performance of rendering animated GIFs in Impress and improved the saving time of ODS files with lots of comments
Justin Luth (Collabora) implemented an option to the page number wizard that inserts headers/footers while fitting them into existing margins, fixed a style inheritance refresh issue after changing font sizes, implemented RTF export of different first header, fixed an issue causing headers/footers to be emptied after pasting RTF content into Writer, fixed an issue with images overlapping when separated by line breaks in DOCX files, fixed a content control regression causing extra characters to appear and fixed a visual glitch in content control dropdowns
Michael Weghorn (TDF) made vertical tab dialogs beautiful, implemented accessibility support for the spelling dialog, worked on the Android version and worked on using native widgets in Qt UIs
Balázs Varga (allotropia) worked on the accessibility checker
Patrick Luby fixed an issue with contour wrap clipping semi-transparent pixels, fixed several crashes and hangs, fixed content not being visible in exported WEBP images, made tabbed dialogs accessible on macOS, implemented support for accessing toolbar dropdowns via VoiceOver macOS accessibility software, made it so Command-w shortcut on macOS closes the currently active window and fixed an issue preventing pasting into the search field in Calc, when using a non-Western keyboard
Jim Raykowski added a feature for deleting all content of a certain type via the Navigator and made it so the actions applicable to a selected item show up as buttons in the top part of the Navigator. He also enhanced the Manage Changes dialog by fixing a focus issue, making the changes appear in the order they appear in the document and made it so clicking on a change in the document highlights the related change in the Manage dialog
Sarper Akdemir (allotropia) made the new Impress Notes pane searchable, improved the UX of the encryption dialog by making it modal and added an option to the Save dialog for easy digital signing with default certificate
Samuel Mehrbrodt (allotropia) expanded the coverage of ignored author data when exporting DOC files in privacy mode, made comment author initials handling more robust with PPT/X files, made it so changes in Bullets and Numbering dialog are not saved, if the user cancels, changed the bulleted list toolbar dropdown to display the customised bullet symbol and improved the UX of signing documents with password protected GPG keys
Armin Le Grand (allotropia/Collabora) worked on a renovation of graphics rendering with Cairo library and continued the rework of handling attributes and properties
Oliver Specht (CIB) implemented support for number formats in Writer tables when cloning formatting, fixed an issue with table cell widths in RTF import, fixed an issue with character properties not being applied to bullet symbols in RTF import, made it so paragraphs with empty mail merge fields are not hidden in Microsoft format imports, made the user field display in Edit Fields dialog harmonious, made VML shape visibility property be respected in DOCX import, made the handling of bullets in conditional paragraphs more robust in RTF import and corrected the calculation of paragraph heights in RTF/DOCX import with regards to tab stops and spaces
Heiko Tietze (TDF) added a donate button to Start Center and made shipped palette names translatable
László Németh added some Writer automated tests
Ilmari Lauhakangas (TDF) did many Python code cleanups
Christian Lohmaier (TDF) fixed several build issues
Thorsten Behrens (allotropia) improved the newly-added Impress Notes pane search
Eike Rathke (Red Hat) optimised the use of date & time calculations in the code, fixed an issue with database range keywords not being detected when using English function names in Calc and fixed function wizard breaking formula references to database ranges
Jonathan Clark (TDF) fixed an issue causing Writer textbox direction to change depending on zoom, made line breaking more robust in bidirectional text, fixed inconsistencies in proportional line spacing in Writer, improved the layout performance of Tibetan text in Writer, fixed a Hebrew spell-checking issue related to quotes, made Korean word counting work properly, fixed overlapping CJK characters in PDF export and fixed incorrect baseline adjustment for vertical bidirectional text
Regina Henschel continued working on angle unit import support and corrected the importing of Excel keywords like [#Data] and [#Totals] together with Eike Rathke
Tibor Nagy (allotropia) made connector adjustments work in PPTX import, fixed an accessibility issue with Figure tag placement attribute when exporting to PDF and added support for Windows touch gestures for panning and zooming
Adam Seskunas worked on the GSoC project to port Java tests to C++
Ritobroto Mukherjee worked on the GSoC project to implement cross platform .NET bindings for UNO API
Devansh Varshney worked on the GSoC project for adding histogram charts
Ahmed Hamed worked on the GSoC project for improving the Functions Sidebar deck in Calc
Rafael Lima fixed the rendering of Calc’s AutoFill overlay with certain zoom levels or after scrolling, made the new Calc active cell rectangle symmetric at any zoom level, made Calc’s column/row highlighting repaint when changing window size, gave better contrast for AutoFill handle, improved the look of vertical tabs in dialogs and fixed an issue with the newly-added translatability of palette names
Leonard Sasse did Python code cleanups
Hossein Nourikhah (TDF) did Calc code cleanups, made it so LibreOfficeKit headers and library files are now shipped with the SDK packages and added an ODK example for converting a file to PDF using LibreOfficeKit library
Kira Tubo added a couple of Writer cppunit tests
Stéphane Guillou (TDF) fixed infobar text colours not being adapted to background colour
Moritz Duge (allotropia) added a Python example to ODK for key and mouse handlers and listeners and did several improvements to the UI of certificate handling and digital signing
Peter Hagen optimised macOS clipboard handling code
Bayram Çiçek (Collabora) worked on Excel Power Query round trip support
Taichi Haradaguchi upgraded some dependencies
Jean-Pierre Ledure worked on the ScriptForge library
Jürgen Funk (CIB) fixed an issue with an unwanted empty page appearing in DOCX and RTF files with mirrored margins and made the placeholder text of fields reset to their defaults, if their content is deleted
Vladislav Tarakanov improved the support of audio files in PPT/X files
Vasily Melenchuk (CIB) continued working on the use of Windows attention-grabbing FlashWindow API
Kurt Nordback continued polishing the pie-of-pie and bar-of-pie chart implementations
Kudos to Ilmari Lauhakangas for helping to elaborate this list.
Reported Bugs
430 bugs, 64 of which are enhancements, have been reported by 245 people.
Top 10 Reporters
Eyal Rozenberg ( 25 )
Mike Kaganski ( 12 )
peter josvai ( 12 )
Daniele ( 11 )
Stéphane Guillou (stragu) ( 10 )
Regina Henschel ( 10 )
Gabor Kelemen (allotropia) ( 10 )
Xisco Faulí ( 9 )
Faisal ( 7 )
Telesto ( 7 )
Triaged Bugs
440 bugs have been triaged by 65 people.
Top 10 Triagers
Stéphane Guillou (stragu) ( 95 )
m_a_riosv ( 58 )
Buovjaga ( 54 )
Heiko Tietze ( 29 )
Mike Kaganski ( 23 )
ady ( 17 )
raal ( 16 )
V Stuart Foote ( 15 )
Xisco Faulí ( 14 )
Julien Nabet ( 9 )
Resolution of resolved bugs
403 bugs have been set to RESOLVED.
Check the following sections for more information about bugs resolved as FIXED, WORKSFORME and DUPLICATE.
Fixed Bugs
162 bugs have been fixed by 39 people.
Top 10 Fixers
Mike Kaganski ( 13 )
Jonathan Clark ( 10 )
Patrick Luby ( 10 )
Caolán McNamara ( 9 )
Justin Luth ( 7 )
Heiko Tietze ( 6 )
Miklos Vajna ( 6 )
Michael Weghorn ( 5 )
Balazs Varga ( 5 )
Rafael Lima ( 5 )
List of critical bugs fixed
tdf#161865 Base’s Table Design View and Create View not editable anymore (Windows) ( Thanks to Noel Grandin )
List of high severity bugs fixed
tdf#114160 ZWJ shouldn’t be treated as breaking character ( Thanks to Jonathan Clark )
tdf#148647 LO pastes previous clipboard content instead of latest copied from other app, depending on apps opened (Windows; see comment 11) ( Thanks to Mike Kaganski )
tdf#152104 Long export to ods from xls / xlsx since 7.4.0beta1 ( Thanks to Noel Grandin )
tdf#156530 FIREBIRD: Copying a table from one database file to another gives wrong decimal numbers. ( Thanks to Mike Kaganski )
tdf#156689 Deleting empty column(s) removes styling / formatting of adjacent column ( Thanks to Xisco Fauli )
tdf#160139 Header/footer contents removed and cannot be restored after some paste actions (from shape; as RTF; Zotero refresh…) (steps in comment 2) ( Thanks to Justin Luth )
tdf#160976 FILESAVE RTF Footer content lost after saving from DOCX to RTF ( Thanks to Justin Luth )
tdf#161421 Not all hyphenation separators (hyphens) are displayed in app, but are visible in blue in PDF export / print ( Thanks to Heiko Tietze )
tdf#161568 VIEWING: Message for “no Search Results” sometimes not visible in Toolbar ( Thanks to Heiko Tietze )
tdf#161653 The numbering toolbar dropdown no longer can select from the 8-block of options ( Thanks to Samuel Mehrbrodt )
tdf#162174 Crash when opening Bullets and Numbering dialog a second time ( Thanks to Julien Nabet )
tdf#162180 CRASH: copying table from document, or selecting it with 2 …
Various functionalities of the LibreOffice are available through its programming interface, the UNO API. Here I discuss how to extend it.
What is UNO API?
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.
Example UNO API: FullScreen
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
C++ implementation basically consists of two functions to set and get the FullScreen property:
sal_Bool VCLXTopWindow::getFullScreen() {
SolarMutexGuard g;
if (auto const win = VCLXContainer::GetAsDynamic()) {
return win->IsFullScreenMode();
}
return false;
}
void VCLXTopWindow::setFullScreen(sal_Bool value) {
SolarMutexGuard g;
if (auto const win = VCLXContainer::GetAsDynamic()) {
return win->ShowFullScreenMode(value);
}
}
Final Words
Some APIs are much more complex. The one that was discussed here was only an example to show the required things to extend UNO API. You can browse the API documentation in api.libreoffice.org for more complex APIs:
Reference documentation for the UNO IDL API.
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.
Motivation¶
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.
Results so far¶
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.
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:
tdf#162002 DOCX import: ignore subsetted embedded fonts for editing
tdf#162002 DOCX import, font embed: only discard subset fonts with few glyphs
tdf#162072 vcl, fontconfig: consider font-family-generic for substitute
Related: tdf#162072 DOCX import: handle font family for characters
tdf#162280 vcl: consider font family type for glyph caching
Want to start using this?¶
You can get a development edition of Collabora Online 24.04 and try it out yourself right now: try
the development edition. Collabora intends to continue
supporting and contributing to LibreOffice, the code is merged so we expect all of this work will be
available in TDF's next release too (24.8).
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.
Maintaining 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 LibreOffice
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#
Issues Found with Fuzz Testing
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:
Chromium Bug Tracker – LibreOffice Issues
Fixing the Issues
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 the fixes found through oss-fuzz:
commit d30ecb5fb07f005ebd944e864f0a15678289a4ed
ofz#69809 Integer-overflow
--- a/filter/source/graphicfilter/icgm/cgm.cxx
+++ b/filter/source/graphicfilter/icgm/cgm.cxx
@@ -227,7 +227,7 @@ double CGM::ImplGetFloat( RealPrecision eRealPrecision, sal_uInt32 nRealSize )
else
{
sal_Int32* pLong = static_cast<sal_Int32*>(pPtr);
- nRetValue = static_cast(abs( pLong[ nSwitch ] ));
+ nRetValue = fabs(static_cast(pLong[nSwitch]));
nRetValue *= 65536;
nVal = static_cast( pLong[ nSwitch ^ 1 ] );
nVal >>= 16;
As you can see, using abs() first, and then casting to double is changed in this commit to cast to double first, and then using fabs(). The reason of this change lies in the data type of some variables.
pLong is an array of sal_Int32, which is 32 bit signed integer. It can take values from -2,147,483,648 to 2,147,483,647. As you can see, the smallest negative 32-bit signed integer can not be stored in the same 32-bit signed variable if abs() is used to remove sign from that.
As the result is stored in nRetValue, a varible of type double, it is possible to first cast the array item to double, and then use floating point version of absolute function, fabs() over it. In this way, “integer overflow” will not happen anymore.
This patch was one of the smallest examples of what a fix can be. There are many bugs that are more complex, and require more careful examination to provide a fix.
Further Reading
You can read more in the TDF Wiki article around fuzz testing in LibreOffice. Also, OSS-Fuzz documentation is a good place to look into:
TDF Wiki – Fuzz testing
OSS-Fuzz documentation
In the previous blog post, I provided a brief introduction to LibreOfficeKit API which one can use for accessing LibreOffice functionalities in an external application. Here I discuss in detail how to use LibreOfficeKit for converting an ODT to PDF, or from/to virtually any other format that LibreOffice supports.
LibreOfficeKit C++ Headers
For this example, you only need one header: LibreOfficeKit/LibreOfficeKit.hxx. Include it, and that is enough. This header will be available in the future versions of LibreOffice community. But for now, you may need to download LibreOfficeKit headers folder from LibreOffice core source code, and put it alongside your source code.
C++ Example
The example is relatively short. Here it is:
#include <iostream>
#include <LibreOfficeKit/LibreOfficeKit.hxx>
int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
if(argc < 2)
{
std::cout << "Usage: lokconvert \n";
return 1;
}
const char *input = argv[1];
const char *output = argv[2];
lok::Office * llo = NULL;
try
{
const char lo_path[] = LOROOT "/program/";
llo = lok::lok_cpp_init(lo_path);
if (!llo) {
std::cerr << "Error: could not initialize LibreOfficeKit\n";
return 1;
}
lok::Document * lodoc = llo->documentLoad(input, NULL /* options */);
if (!lodoc) {
std::cerr << "Error: could not load document: " << llo->getError() << "\n";
return 1;
}
if (!lodoc->saveAs(output, "pdf", NULL /* options */))
{
std::cerr << "Error: could not export document: " << llo->getError() << "\n";
return 1;
}
}
catch (const std::exception & e)
{
std::cerr << "Error: LibreOfficeKit exception: " << e.what() << "\n";
return 1;
}
std::cerr << "Success!\n";
return 0;
}
The example is simple. Input and output file names are passed via command line arguments, and are received via argv[1] and argv[2], if argument count, argc, is at least 3. First one is the program name itself, which we don’t use here.
LibreOffice binary folder is needed here, so you should set OO_SDK_URE_BIN_DIR environment variable, or you may even set that in your program itself.
This part of the code is for LibreOfficeKit initialization:
llo = lok::lok_cpp_init(lo_bin_dir);
And after that, it is the time to load the document:
lok::Document* lodoc = llo->documentLoad(input, NULL /* options */);
Having the lodoc pointer is necessary for converting the document using saveAs function:
lodoc->saveAs(output, "pdf", NULL /* options */)
As you can see, relevant code is inside a try/catch block. In case some exception occur, you will see relevant error information on the console. Also, in each step, from initializing LibreOfficeKit, to loading and in the end generating the output, there are error handling mechanisms to make sure that the work goes forward smoothly.
In the end, if everything is successful, you will see this message on the screen:
Success!
Build with cmake
You can use cmake to build this example. Here is an example CMakeLists.txt which also provides LO_ROOT and LO_SDK_ROOT to be used inside C++ file, as an alternative to setting it via an environment variable, or putting it manually in the code.
cmake_minimum_required(VERSION 3.5)
project(lokconv LANGUAGES CXX)
set(CMAKE_CXX_STANDARD 17)
set(CMAKE_CXX_STANDARD_REQUIRED ON)
add_executable(lokconv main.cpp)
include(GNUInstallDirs)
set(LOVERSION 24.2)
if(WIN32)
set(LOROOT C:/Progra~1/LibreOffice)
set(LOSDKROOT ${LOROOT}/sdk)
add_definitions(-DWIN32)
elseif(APPLE)
set(LOROOT /Application/LibreOffice.app/Contents/Frameworks)
set(LOSDKROOT /Application/LibreOffice${LOVERSION}_SDK)
add_definitions(-DMACOSX)
else()
set(LOROOT /opt/libreoffice${LOVERSION})
set(LOSDKROOT ${LOROOT}/sdk)
add_definitions(-DLINUX)
endif()
add_compile_definitions(LOK_USE_UNSTABLE_API)
target_compile_definitions(lokconv PRIVATE LOROOT="${LOROOT}")
include_directories(lokconv PRIVATE
${LOSDKROOT}/include
)
Final Words
There are many nice things that can be done with LibreOfficeKit, but you may have to enable LOK_USE_UNSTABLE_API to be able to use those functionalities. This symbol is visible in the above cmake file. But, in the C++ example I did not use any of such functions. I will discuss about these functionalities in later blog posts.
A while ago, Simon Phipps, member of the Board of Directors at The Document Foundation, shared the idea to introduce a peer-to-peer collaboration built in to desktop LibreOffice without the requirement for a cloud provider. This idea has received a lot of attention inside the organization and the design team has started to outline the project now.…
LibreOffice 24.8 will be released as final at the end of August, 2024 ( Check the Release Plan ) being LibreOffice 24.8 Release Candidate 1 (RC1) the third pre-release since the development of version 24.8 started at the beginning of December, 2023. Since the previous release, LibreOffice 24.8 Beta1, 243 commits have been submitted to the code repository and 120 issues got fixed. Check the release notes to find the new features included in this version of LibreOffice.
LibreOffice 24.8 RC1 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.
…
Writer now has improved support for toplevel line shapes when you import those from DOCX.
This work is primarily for Collabora Online, but the feature is
fully available in desktop Writer as well.
Motivation¶
As described in a post from 2014,
Writer reads the drawingML markup for shapes in DOCX files, including line shapes. While
investigating a simple-looking problem around a horizontal vs vertical line, it turns out that there
is a deeper issue here, and it looks like now have proper fix for this bug.
Results so far¶
Imagine that your company template has a nice footer in two columns, and the content in the columns
are separated by a vertical line shape, but when you open your DOCX in Writer, it crosses the text
of that footer instead:
Bugdoc, before: reference is red, Writer result is painted on top of it
While researching how line shapes are represented in our document model and how ODT import works, it
turned out that the proper way to create a line shape is to only consider size / scaling when it
comes to the individual points of the line, everything else (e.g. position / translation) should go
to the transform matrix of the shape, then the render result will be as expected:
Bugdoc, after: reference is red, Writer result is painted on top of it
It was also interesting to see that this also improved other, existing test documents, e.g. core.git
sw/qa/extras/ooxmlimport/data/line-rotation.docx looked like this before:
3 rotated lines, before: reference is red, Writer result is painted on top of it
And the same fix makes it perfect:
3 rotated lines, after: reference is red, Writer result is painted on top of it
Just stick to the rule: scaling goes to the points -- translation, rotation and horizontal shear
goes to the shape.
For now, this is only there for toplevel Writer lines, but in-groupshape and Calc/Impress lines
could also follow this technique if there is a practical need.
The "after" screenshots show ~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... :-)
The bugfix commit was tdf#161779 DOCX import, drawingML: fix handling of translation for
lines.
The tracking bug was tdf#161779.
Want to start using this?¶
You can get a development edition of Collabora Online 24.04 and try it out yourself right now: try
the development edition. Collabora intends to continue
supporting and contributing to LibreOffice, the code is merged so we expect all of this work will be
available in TDF's next release too (24.8).
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.
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.…
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:
Before: reference is red, Writer result is painted on top of it
After: reference is red, Writer result is rendered on top of it
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:
tdf#160984 sw continuous endnotes: introduce an endnote section
tdf#160984 sw continuous endnotes: add a way to find the endnote section start
tdf#160984 sw continuous endnotes: fix testContinuousEndnotesMoveBackwards
tdf#160984 sw continuous endnotes: fix CppunitTest_sw_layoutwriter3
tdf#160984 sw continuous endnotes: switch to a section-based layout
tdf#161083 sw continuous endnotes: fix layout with a section at doc end
tdf#160984 sw continuous endnotes, DOC import: enable this unconditionally
tdf#160984 sw continuous endnotes: enable DOCX import
tdf#160984 sw continuous endnotes: fix the endnote container's top margin
tdf#160984 sw continuous endnotes: fix the endnote separator position
tdf#160984 sw continuous endnotes: fix the endnote separator length
tdf#160984 sw continuous endnotes: fix crash on loading forum-mso-en-7731.docx
tdf#160984 sw continuous endnotes: DOCX: import <w:endnotePr> pos == sectEnd
tdf#160984 sw continuous endnotes: DOCX: export of <w:endnotePr> pos == sectEnd
tdf#160984 sw continuous endnotes: fix the endnote continuation separator len
tdf#160984 sw continuous endnotes: hide not functional UI in this mode
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: 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).
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 !
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::Sequence<T> class template; we can only have individual Embind mappings to specific class template instantiations. As a hack, for every UNO sequence type that appears somewhere in the LibreOffice UNO API, we generate a specific JavaScript Module.uno_Sequence_.... The naming is Module.uno_Sequence_boolean, Module.uno_Sequence_byte, Module.uno_Sequence_short, Module.uno_Sequence_unsigned_short, Module.uno_Sequence_long, Module.uno_Sequence_unsigned_long, Module.uno_Sequence_hyper, Module.uno_Sequence_unsigned_hyper, Module.uno_Sequence_float, Module.uno_Sequence_double, Module.uno_Sequence_char, Module.uno_Sequence_string, Module.uno_Sequence_type, and Module.uno_Sequence_any for the simple UNO component types; Module.uno_Sequence_... followed by the UNO type name in dollar-separated notation (e.g., Module.uno_Sequence_com$sun$star$uno$XInterface) for enum, struct, and interface component types; and Module.uno_SequenceN_..., with N greater than 1, for sequence component types (e.g., Module.uno_Sequence2_long for the UNO type “sequence of sequence of LONG“). That means that there currently is just no way to come up with e.g. a JavaScript representation of the UNO type “sequence of interface com.sun.star.frame.XDesktop“, as that sequence type happens to not be mentioned anywhere in the LibreOffice UNO API. (But for those sequence types that are used as interface method parameter or return types, corresponding JavaScript representations are provided. That should hopefully cover all relevant use cases for now; a future overhaul of this part of the mapping is likely.) These JavaScript sequence objects have two constructors, one taking a JavaScript array of member values (e.g., new Module.uno_Sequence_long([1, 2, 3])) and one taking a size and a Module.FromSize marker (as Emind does not allow to have multiple constructors with the same number of arguments) whose members will have default values (e.g., new Module.uno_Sequence_long(3, Module.FromSize)). Additional methods are resize (taking the new length as argument), size (returning the current length), get (taking an index as argument and returning the member at that index), and set (taking an index and a new member value as arguments). (The naming of those resize, size, get, and set methods is modelled after Embind’s emscripten::register_vector.)
UNO enum types are mapped to Embind-provided enums named Module.uno_Type_... followed by the UNO type name in dollar-separated notation (e.g., Module.uno_Type_com$sun$star$uno$TypeClass).
Plain UNO struct types and UNO exception types are mapped to Embind-provided value objects named Module.uno_Type_... followed by the UNO type name in dollar-separated notation (e.g., Module.uno_Type_com$sun$star$beans$NamedValue, Module.uno_Type_com$sun$star$uno$Exception). Polymorphic UNO struct types face a similar issue to sequence types, in that Embind does not allow to directly map their corresponding C++ class templates. It would be possible to do a similar hack and add specific mappings for all instantiated polymorphic struct types that are mentioned anywhere in the LibreOffice UNO API, but that has not been implemented so far. (And, similar to sequence types, a future overhaul of this part of the mapping is likely.)
UNO interface types are mapped to Embind-provided classes named Module.uno_Type_... followed by the UNO type name in dollar-separated notation (e.g., Module.uno_Type_com$sun$star$uno$XInterface). Null references are mapped to JavaScript null. The special com.sun.star.uno.XInterface UNO interface methods queryInterface, acquire, and release are not exposed to JavaScript client code.
UNOIDL single-interface–based service constructors are mapped to JavaScript functions named Module.uno_Function_...$$... followed by the service’s name in dollar-separated notation, followed by the constructor’s name set of by two dollar signs (e.g., Module.uno_Function_com$sun$star$beans$Introspection$$create). Like with other UNO language bindings, those functions take the com.sun.star.uno.XComponentContext as an additional first argument.
UNOIDL service-based singletons are mapped to JavaScript functions named Module.uno_Function_... followed by the singleton’s name in dollar-separated notation (e.g., Module.uno_Function_com$sun$star$frame$theDesktop). Like with other UNO language bindings, those functions take the com.sun.star.uno.XComponentContext as their (sole) argument.
Starting Points
To make all this work, the Embind mapping of the LibreOffice UNO API needs to be set up first. This is done by a call to
const uno = init_unoembind_uno(Module);
which also returns a wrapper object uno that allows for more natural access to all the UNOIDL entities whose mappings use that dollar-separated notation: Instead of Module.uno_Type_com$sun$star$uno$XInterface one can write uno.com.sun.star.uno.XInterface, and a call to uno_Function_com$sun$star$beans$Introspection$$create(context) can be written as uno.com.sun.star.beans.Introspection.create(context). If you want to cut down on the common uno.com.sun.star prefix even further,
const css = uno.com.sun.star;
lets you reduce that to just css.uno.XInterface and css.beans.Introspection.create(context).
The starting points to access the LibreOffice UNO API from JavaScript are Module.getUnoComponentContext() (returning the central css.uno.XComponentContext, through which all the services and singletons are reachable) and a Module.getCurrentModelFromViewSh() convenience function (returning the css.frame.XModel of the currently showing document). The gitlab.com/allotropia/lowa-demos repository is a growing site of example code showing all of this in action.
Summing this up, here is some example code that iterates over all the paragraphs of a Writer document and gives each of them a random foreground text color:
const uno = init_unoembind_uno(Module);
const css = uno.com.sun.star;
const model = Module.getCurrentModelFromViewSh();
const document = css.text.XTextDocument.query(model);
const text = document.getText();
const access = css.container.XEnumerationAccess.query(text);
const paragraphs = access.createEnumeration();
while (paragraphs.hasMoreElements()) {
const paragraph = css.text.XTextRange.query(
paragraphs.nextElement().get());
const props = css.beans.XPropertySet.query(paragraph);
const color = new Module.uno_Any(
Module.uno_Type.Long(),
Math.floor(Math.random() * 0xFFFFFF));
props.setPropertyValue("CharColor", color);
color.delete();
}
Cleanup
Embind is built on the concept that whatever C++ objects you reference from JavaScript, you manually and explicitly need to declare those references as no longer needed once you are done, by calling delete() methods on the corresponding JavaScript objects. (Or else, you risk memory leaks.) This can be quite cumbersome and would pollute the code with tons of such delete() calls. Luckily, JavaScript grew a FinalizationRegistry mechanism that allows code to be executed when the JavaScript garbage collector finds an objet to be unused and reclaims it. (And that code can thus transparently do the delete() call for us.) Embind implements such FinalizationRegistry-support for some types (those that are modelled based on some “smart poiner”) but not for others.
That means that (besides all the primitive types) JavaScript mappings of UNO string, type, enums, sequences, exceptions, and interfaces all do not need explicit delete() calls, while the mappings of UNO any and UNO sequences, and the various Module.uno_InOutParam_... all need explicit delete() calls.
Even though we expect that the JavaScript engines that we target do support the FinalizationRegistry mechanism, Embind is prepared to work with older engines that do not support it. Therefore, whenever an object is transparently cleaned up, Embind logs a somewhat unhelpful warning to the JavaScript console, stating that it “found a leaked C++ instance” (and that it will “free it automatically”).
Interfaces
For each UNO interface type there is a JavaScript class method query taking any JavaScript UNO object reference (in the form of the common com.sun.star.uno.XInterface base interface) as argument (and internally using UNO’s queryInterface to obtain either a correspondingly-typed reference to that object, or a null reference). There is also a JavaScript helper function Module.sameUnoObject, taking two interface references as arguments and returning whether both are references to the same UNO object.
UNO interface methods taking out or in-out parameters need special treatment. There are Module.uno_InOutParam_... wrappers (with a val property carrying the actual value) that need to be set up and passed into the UNO method. Such wrappers have a constructor taking no arguments (creating a dummy object, suitable for pure out parameters) and another constructor taking one argument of the wrapped type (suitable for in-out parameters). For example, to read data from a com.sun.star.io.XInputStream:
const stream = ...;
const input = css.io.XInputStream.query(stream);
if (input) {
const data = new Module.uno_InOutParam_sequence_byte;
input.readBytes(data, 100);
for (let i = 0; i != data.val.size(); ++i) {
console.log('read byte ' + data.val.get(i));
}
data.delete();
}
Exception Handling
Support for throwing and catching exceptions between JavaScript and C++ is rather rough: JavaScript code can use try ... catch (e) ... to catch a UNO exception thrown from C++, but all the information it can get about that exception is e.name stating the exception’s type. Also, for technical reasons, the catch block needs some increment– and decrementExceptionRefcount boilerplate,
try {
...
} catch (e) {
incrementExceptionRefcount(e);
//TODO, needed when building with JS-based -fexceptions,
// see
// <https://github.com/emscripten-core/emscripten/issues/17115>
// "[EH] Fix inconsistency of refcounting in Emscripten
// EH vs. Wasm EH"
if (e.name === 'com::sun::star::uno::RuntimeException') {
...
}
decrementExceptionRefcount(e);
}
To throw UNO exceptions from JavaScript code, there is a helper function Module.throwUnoException that takes a UNO (exception) type and an instance of that type:
Module.throwUnoException(
Module.uno_Type.Exception(
'com.sun.star.lang.IllegalArgumentException'),
{Message: 'bad argument', Context: null,
ArgumentPosition: 0});
UNO Objects
The JavaSript-to-UNO binding is a full mapping, so you can even implement new UNO objects in JavaScript. This requires quite some boilerplate, though. For example, the below obj implements com.sun.star.lang.XTypeProvider and com.sun.star.task.XJob:
const obj = {
// Implementation details:
implRefcount: 0,
implTypes: new Module.uno_Sequence_type([
Module.uno_Type.Interface(
'com.sun.star.lang.XTypeProvider'),
Module.uno_Type.Interface(
'com.sun.star.task.XJob')]),
implImplementationId: new Module.uno_Sequence_byte([]),
// The methods of XInterface:
queryInterface(type) {
if (type == 'com.sun.star.uno.XInterface') {
return new Module.uno_Any(
type,
css.uno.XInterface.reference(
this.implXTypeProvider));
} else if (type == 'com.sun.star.lang.XTypeProvider') {
return new Module.uno_Any(
type,
css.lang.XTypeProvider.reference(
this.implXTypeProvider));
} else if (type == 'com.sun.star.task.XJob') {
return new Module.uno_Any(
type,
css.task.XJob.reference(
this.implXJob));
} else {
return new Module.uno_Any(
Module.uno_Type.Void(), undefined);
}
},
acquire() { ++this.implRefcount; },
release() {
if (--this.implRefcount === 0) {
this.implXTypeProvider.delete();
this.implXJob.delete();
this.implTypes.delete();
this.implImplementationId.delete();
}
},
// The methods of XTypeProvider:
getTypes() { return this.implTypes; },
getImplementationId() {
return this.implImplementationId;
},
// The methods of XJob:
execute(args) {
if (args.size() !== 1 || args.get(0).Name !== 'name') {
Module.throwUnoException(
Module.uno_Type.Exception(
'com.sun.star.lang.IllegalArgumentException'),
{Message: 'bad args', Context: null,
ArgumentPosition: 0});
}
console.log(
'Hello, my name is ' + args.get(0).Value.get());
return new Module.uno_Any(
Module.uno_Type.Void(), undefined);
},
};
obj.implXTypeProvider
= css.lang.XTypeProvider.implement(obj);
obj.implXJob
= css.task.XJob.implement(obj);
obj.acquire();
// ... pass obj to UNO here ...
obj.release();
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