Category: Development

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…

A few months ago, we announced an initiative to improve the support of PPT and PPTX files in LibreOffice. Lots of great work happened since then and the results are collected below!

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.

Import/export

Stephan Bergmann (Red Hat):

Speed up loading a PPT file with equation objects

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Noel Grandin (Collabora):

Speed up loading a PPT file with equation objects

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Miklos Vajna (Collabora):

Add PPTX import/export for semi-transparent shape text

PPTX import: don’t set shape fill from the style in case the background fill is already set

PPTX import: fixed duplication of math objects

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Tamás Zolnai (Collabora):

PPTX export: don’t change shape’s background transparency

PPTX export: don’t lose the gradient background fill of a slide

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Xisco Faulí (TDF):

PPTX import: display shapes with washout mode

PPTX export: handle image colour/graphics modes correctly

PPTX import: don’t lose text highlighting in table cells

PPTX export: save text highlighting

PPTX import: respect no fill colour for text

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Gülşah Köse (Collabora):

PPTX import: implement z-rotation of 3D text transformation

PPTX export: preserve textbox rotation attribute

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Tamás Bunth (Collabora):

PPTX import: custom date as custom XTextField

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Mark Hung (PPT/X team):

PPTX import/export: handle complex text properly

PPTX import: reset font settings, if necessary

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Luke Deller (PPT/X team):

PPTX import: Fix IsTransparent() for unloaded graphics

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Housekeeping

Julien Nabet:

Save/restore locking properly in ImplSdPPTImport::Import

sd: prefix members of SdrPowerPointImport

cppcheck: fix 2 funcArgOrderDifferent

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Various

Mike Kaganski (Collabora):

PPTX export: disable undo during save

Thanks to everyone for their great work!

Macros help users to automate common tasks in LibreOffice, and in September, we announced a new team in our community to work on macro support.

So, what has happened in the meantime? This article is a collection of the work done by the LibreOffice Macro Team in the past few months, as well as any other macro-related things in the project. 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.

Quality assurance work

Tomoyuki Kubota and Alain Romedenne reorganised the macro meta bug, creating several subcategories for macro issues and feature requests.

Wiki docs

Soon after the announcement of the macro team in early September, we were contacted by Nathan Ullberg, who promptly started contributing to the wiki documentation. Nathan is keeping notes on the progress of his work on his wiki user page. Alain is collaborating with Nathan on the wiki effort, which includes creating new articles with example macros, reviewing old ones and translating them from French to English.

Code contributions from macro team members

Tomoyuki Kubota:

• Optional macro parameter defined as Integer has type Variant/String causing type errors in the macro

Andreas Heinisch:

• Instruction Cint fails when converting Hex strings of a negative value to a 16-bit integer value

• Wrong type of function GetLastUsedRow (standard library Tools, module Misc)

• When opening a macro, allow searching a module/function name by typing the first letter

Alain Romedenne:

• Test case for Property Get/Let Basic Statement

Code contributions from honorary associate members

Mike Kaganski (Collabora):

• Only check closing parenthesis when in IDE

Stephan Bergmann (Red Hat):

• In checkUnoObjectType, check for derived-from types too

Samuel Mehrbrodt (CIB):

• Fix option to disable macros

• Infobar should have a UNO API

Help content

Improved by Alain Romedenne:

• LibreOffice Python Scripts Help

• Events

• LBound Function

• ThisComponent Object

• StarDesktop object

• GlobalScope specifier

• UNO Objects, Functions and Services

• Hex Function

• Type Statement

Improved by Olivier Hallot (TDF):

• VBA Properties

Added by Olivier Hallot (TDF):

• Calling Python Scripts from Basic

Finally, we have to highlight Alain’s presentation from the LibreOffice Conference 2019: Scripting LibreOffice Python macros, aka “Macros Well Kept Secrets”:

Big thanks to everyone for their contributions and special thanks to Alain for coordinating things and being a tireless macro educator! As mentioned, everyone is welcome to join our efforts to improve macro support in LibreOffice – you don’t need to be a developer. Help us with documentation, bug reports and more – and gain valuable experience on the way!

This year, LibreOffice was once again a mentoring organization in the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) a global programme focused on bringing more student developers into free and open source software development. We ran six projects – and all were finished successfully. Both students and mentors enjoyed the time, and here we present some of the achievements, which should make their way into LibreOffice 6.4 in early February!

Generating QR Codes in LibreOffice – by Shubham Goyal

The ability to print and display hyperlinks as quick response (QR) codes has been requested for many years (bug 62168), and eventually Shubham Goyal implemented this feature. You can insert a QR code at the current cursor position or the table cell per Insert > Object > QR Code… or edit the inserted object with the context menu. Learn more in the final report.

NotebookBar improvements – by Sumit Chauhan

LibreOffice introduced the optional NotebookBar user interface in version 6.2. Now, thanks to Sumit, users can customise the NotebookBar by changing the visibility of buttons, as shown here:

Users will be able to access this dialog from the menu: Tools > Customize, then go to the NotebookBar tab. Sumit explains some of the technical work behind this on his blog.

Another project Sumit worked on is extension support, which allows users to add extensions in the NotebookBar. There is an extension tab in all the NotebookBar interfaces where the added extension will be available (technical details here).

LibreOffice for Android (Online) – by Kaishu Sahu

In the last few years, LibreOffice for Android was lagging behind development of LibreOffice Online, because all the new features had to be re-implemented in Java. This year, a new approach to the LibreOffice Android app took place, reusing the Online work directly in the app. Kaishu Sahu’s code was important part of this effort – he has implemented features like inserting images, slideshows, save as, printing, sharing a document, dimming when inactive, and more.

Implement Chart Styles – by Gagandeep Singh

Previously, all chart formatting was directly applied. Chart styles allow users to quickly apply the same formatting presets to different charts and therefore make it easier to change them.

Wrapping up

Many thanks to all students who spent their summer time improving LibreOffice. You are awesome! And special thanks also to the mentors who always put some much love and energy into these tasks. That‘s what makes LibreOffice rock.

Now we are looking forward to next year’s GsoC. If you are interested, why not prepare early? Learn more at out wiki page where some ideas are listed.