Category: Development

In March, we announced that LibreOffice will be participating in the Google Summer of Code (GSoC), a programme that connects students with free and open source software projects. GSoC helps students to implement new features, and provides them with financial support along the way.

Well, the projects have been selected, so here they are!

• Bayram Çiçek – 100 Paper Cuts: This aims to improve LibreOffice’s user interface, implementing enhancement requests and solving the most annoying UX (user experience) issues.

• Anshu Khare – Sidebar: It’s planned to revamp the current styles deck sidebar and to merge paragraph and character styles into one Text Style deck. Furthermore, the student wants to rework the filter workflow. Here’s a mockup (click for larger):

• Tushar Kumar – Implement an interface for external data source import in Calc: Currently, Calc’s back-end data provider supports CSV, HTML, XML and and Base’s data provider. This feature is not yet ready for production, however, so this project’s goal is to improve it. Here’s a mockup:

• Balázs Sántha – Implement table styles in OOXML (.docx) support: At the moment, table styles found in .docx documents are converted into direct formatting at at Writer’s core level. This project aims to take a step towards a solution for handling proper table styles.

• Panos Korovesis – Make the SVM format independent of the VCL metafile + tests for the format: This requires the completion of the tests regarding SVM, and then the separation of the read and write functionality of MetaActions to new distinct classes.

• Akshit Kushwaha – Tests for the VCL graphics back-end: Add more test cases to the pre-existing tests, running those tests in every back-end, and implement a usable UI for the users to test the graphic’s feasibility themselves. This should make graphics rendering smoother.

• Shubham Jain – Write missing unit tests: Extend the tests in Libreoffice. There are currently more than 1300 bugs fixes which do not have tests written for them, so this project aims to bring down that number.

Good luck to all the students – we appreciate their work on these important features and improvements! And thanks to our mentors for assisting them: Heiko Tietze, Xisco Fauli, lmari Lauhakangas, Olivier Hallot and Christian Lohmeier (The Document Foundation); Tomaž Vajngerl, Muhammet Kara, Luboš Luňák, Miklos Vajna and Mike Kaganski (Collabora); Thorsten Behrens (allotropia); László Németh and Markus Mohrhard.

From August 16 – 23, students will submit their code, project summaries, and final evaluations of their mentors. Find out more about the timeline here, and check out more details about the projects on this page.

LibreOffice’s native file format is OpenDocument, a fully open and standardised format that’s great for sharing documents and long-term data storage. Of course, LibreOffice does its best to open files made by other office software as well, even if they’re stored in pseudo-“standards” with cryptic and obfuscated contents. Compatibility with PowerPoint PPT(X) presentations is therefore a challenge, but developers are working hard on improvements…

In September 2019, we announced an initiative to improve the support of PPT and PPTX files in LibreOffice. A year has passed since the last review and it is time to summarise achievements again.

Everyone is invited to participate in the PowerPoint support initiative, either in development or testing. If you are interested in joining, please send an email to ilmari.lauhakangas@libreoffice.org.

Audio

Miklos Vajna (Collabora):
Added import and export support for slide narrations and their icons

Borders and fills

Miklos Vajna (Collabora):
Handle stroke properties of image shapes
Improve import of transparency in multi-step gradients

Regina Henschel:
PPTX: transparency gradient on solid fill is not considered in export
Add fill to fontwork in export to PPTX

Charts

Zhenhua Fong (PPT/X team):
Chart background is white instead of Automatic/No fill plot area

Custom shapes

Gülşah Köse (Collabora):
Handle greyscale effect on bitmap filled custom shapes (blog post)
Apply mirror property to custom cropped graphic (blog post)
Import support for custom stretch values (blog post)
Import crop position of bitmap filled shape (blog post)
Import graphics cropped into custom geometry as custom shapes (blog post)

Mark Hung (PPT/X team):
Export names of custom shapes

Miklos Vajna (Collabora):
Handle adjust values from both the custom shape and its placeholder

Tünde Tóth (NISZ):
Fix lost arcTo shape

Xisco Faulí (TDF):
PPT: export custom shapes as Bitmap

Hyperlinks

Tibor Nagy (NISZ):
Fix internal hyperlink to slide in PPTX
Fix lost direct hyperlink colors
Fix internal hyperlinks with PPTX export

Zhenhua Fong (PPT/X team):
Import hyperlinks from PPT

Tables

Gülşah Köse (Collabora):
Table row height improvement in Impress (blog post)

Miklos Vajna (Collabora):
Shadow for tables from PPTX in Impress (blog post)

Tibor Nagy (NISZ):
Fix vertical alignment in exported table

Text boxes

Attila Bakos (NISZ):
Fix exporting of placeholders

Gülşah Köse (Collabora):
Fix the placeholders priority order
Text box gets displaced by text coming from master page

Text in shapes

Gülşah Köse (Collabora):
Camera Rotation Improvement (blog post)

Miklos Vajna (Collabora):
SmartArt improvements in Impress, part 5 (blog post)
SmartArt improvements in Impress, part 6 (blog post)

Regina Henschel:
Text transformation “Deflate” is wrongly imported as “Inflate”
Wordart 3D is lost on round trip

Serge Krot (CIB):
Top-aligned text in imported PPTX becomes bottom-aligned

Various

Ahmad Ganzouri:
OOXML support for shadow blur

Bartosz Kosiorek (PPT/X team):
OOXML Fix storage of date in Custom Properties

Dániel Arató (NISZ):
Fix missing chart in exported PPTX

Gülşah Köse (Collabora):
Protect aspect ratio of graphic bullets
Import shadow size

Luboš Luňák (Collabora):
Load images in parallel
Implement PowerPoint ‘flash’ slide transition

Mike Kaganski (Collabora):
Support for transparency attribute of glow effect

Miklos Vajna (Collabora):
Crash fix for pyramid SmartArt import
Detecting 0-byte files based on extension in Impress and elsewhere (blog post)

Samuel Mehrbrodt (allotropia) and Piet van Oostrum:
Tab positions not being retained in PPT and being lost in PPTX

Tibor Nagy (NISZ):
Fix duplicated slide name with PPTX import

Vasily Melenchuk (CIB):
Support API-based MS-CRYPTO algorithms

Zhenhua Fong (PPT/X team):
Correct positions for group shapes
SmartArt caption text location is wrong

Macros help users to automate common tasks in LibreOffice. In September 2019 we announced a new team in our community to work on macro support. The last progress report was published in April 2020, so it is high time to look into what has happened since then.

If you are interested in contributing to the macro team (development, testing or documentation), we’d love to hear from you – please send an email to ilmari.lauhakangas@libreoffice.org and we’ll get in touch.

ScriptForge Libraries

The biggest single event was the introduction of ScriptForge Libraries in LibreOffice 7.1. ScriptForge and its documentation is a collaboration betwen Jean-Pierre Ledure, Alain Romedenne and Rafael Lima. You can read more about it in the January 2021 blog post and the work-in-progress Help content.

Wiki docs

Nathan Ullberg continued working on Impress macro articles.

Celia Palacios improved the Python guide and added new macro tutorials, such as populating spreadsheets with data from an SQL database.

Alain Romedenne continued adding syntax diagrams and improved and expanded the Python guide and macro articles.

Mauricio Baeza improved and expanded articles and added new ones, such as Insert a comment with custom presets, Copy content cell from Spreadsheet to other and Charts in Calc.

Steve Fanning added several new examples of Calc macros.

Code contributions from macro team members

Alain Romedenne:

• TypeName, VarType, TypeLen Basic QA test cases
• Unit test for Date() Basic function

Andreas Heinisch:

• MOD result is different for values passed as literals vs. using variables
• Fixed crash with replace function
• Unexpected result when executing ReDim statement on an array of structures
• Convert parameters to requested type so references are not lost
• Grant write access to the method used as a variable, so the name of the method can be used in all types of statements
• ReDim Preserve fails if array is filled by Split
• Fixed broken tests for cverr method
• With option base, arrays should start at index 1
• In order to prevent type conversion errors, reset a variable of type SbxERROR to not fixed
• Create variable with Variant/Type in StepLOADNC in order to prevent type conversion errors
• Support case-insensitive operation for non-ASCII characters in the Replace function
• Abort scan of a string beginning with a hashtag, if a comma is found
• VBA AutoFilter can’t compare strings
• Correct the behaviour of the Overwrite property
• Added possibility to sort macros via context menu
• ReDim Preserve fails if array is filled by Split

George Bateman:

• Kill copy+paste in VBA tests

Tomoyuki Kubota:

• More fixes to loading of basctl with –enable-mergelibs

Code contributions from honorary associate members

Compatibility fixes for Python 3.8 to 3.12 done by David Ostrovsky, Dante Doménech, Noel Grandin (Collabora) and Stephan Bergmann (Red Hat).

Anshu Khare:

• Return correct values for IsNumeric(“+2”) and CInt(“+2”)
• Show protection icon in front of sheet name when protected via Basic

Arnaud Versini:

• Many cleanups and optimisations in Basic handling code

Arpit Bandejiya:

• Accept CCur with negative strings

Caolán McNamara (Red Hat):

• Fix for PYTHONPATH-related crash
• Hide macro organize dialog before launching macro editing
• Fixed crash deleting module in macro editor

John Turpish:

• Don’t double-initialize a Global … As New …

Maxim Monastirsky:

• Rework last item handling in NewToolbarController

Michael Stahl (allotropia):

• Dropped Python 2 support everywhere
• pyuno: uno.Char is UTF-16 code unit, not UCS-4

Mike Kaganski (Collabora):

• Use Unicode paths on Windows for pyuno
• Initialize method mapping table at compile time
• Unify tests
• Proper handling of For/For Each with On Error Resume Next
• Copy deep when there are multiple references to the old array
• Reimplement SbRtl_Replace to improve performance
• Fixed crash when inspecting an array after Redim Statement with option VBASupport 1
• Properly load arrays in user-defined types from image
• Use sheet-local named ranges for VBA’s Worksheet.Names
• Many cleanups and optimisations in Basic handling code

Noel Grandin (Collabora):

• pyuno: create instances with uno constructors
• Fixed shutdown crash in basic

Serge Krot (CIB):

• XDL import: missing empty combobox items

Shubham Jain:

• Wrote new tests for literals

Stephan Bergmann (Red Hat):

• Use the new single-instance=”true” attribute in pyuno

Tushar Kumar Rai:

• Invoking a Basic routine with ByRef Variant parameter returns wrong value type
• Invoking a Basic routine with ByRef Long or Double parameter does not return modified value

Xisco Fauli (TDF):

• Add unit test for iteration
• Add UI test wrapper for macro editor

Help content

Improved by Alain Romedenne:

• InputBox Function
• MsgBox Statement
• The Gimmicks Library
• Document Event-Driven Macros
• The Euro Library
• The ScriptBindingLibrary Library
• Type Statement
• Dim Statement
• Call Statement
• Deprecated tags for ChDir, ChDrive, CurDir
• Completed syntax diagram work
• Improvements in Basic Subroutines help pages
• Improvements in the Basic table of contents
• Improvements in all articles dealing with Basic Date/Time methods
• Improvements in all articles dealing with color functions

Added by Alain Romedenne:

• The ImportWizard Library
• The WikiEditor Library
• Compiler Options, Runtime Conditions
• Resume Statement
• Err Object [VBA]

Improved by Rafael Lima:

• Fixed all Basic examples using the Open statement
• Mod Operator

Improved by Olivier Hallot (TDF):

• All articles dealing with Basic string functions
• IIf Function
• Replace Function

Added by Olivier Hallot (TDF):

• Calling Calc Functions

New features in LibreOffice are made by volunteers, certified developers, and – during the summer – participants in the Google Summer of Code programme. This is focused on introducing students to open source software development, and last year LibreOffice received a bunch of new features thanks to the work of several students.

Well, we’re happy to announce that LibreOffice is part of this year’s Summer of Code (GSoC). If you’re a student, want to improve your programming skills and receive a financial stipend to implement new features in LibreOffice, take a look. Get in contact with us, show us that you’ve learnt the basics by working on an Easy Hack, and then propose your project(s). We look forward to meeting you!

Click here to get started

And to learn more about GSoC, check out this interview with Gautam Prajapati, who was part of the programme a few years ago: