• Up early; Violin practise with N. helping with B-major scales. Mail chew. Really encouraged by two announcements in the last days, first: Studio Storti is joining TDF's Advisory Board. This is great news, I'm looking forward to the postive impact their business experience of selling Free Software and services can bring to LibreOffice in Italy.
• Separately - it was also great to see the latest release of the popular VALO CD with LibreOffice 4.1.1 on the CD - the Best of FOSS for Windows.

• Up; mail chew, dug through documents; more mail; timecode setup. Fun, chased pieces for the conference. One of the fun pieces about working and collaborating on tons of documents, is that I finally start to use not only calc (for crunching stats) but writer too, and the interoperability code, and LibreOffice is encouragingly good; of course a few minor issues, but great stuff.
• Ran some calc import profiles. Team meeting, ESC call.
• Dinner, put babes to bed, back to work until late.

Berlin, September 19, 2013 – The Document Foundation (TDF) announces that Studio Storti is now a member of its Advisory Board. Studio Storti is the largest provider of open source solutions to the Italian Public Administration, and is launching a LibreOffice Division to support migrations from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice.

“We have been active in the open source environment since 1997, providing added value solutions focused on the needs of the Italian Public Administration. During the last three years, we have seen a growing demand for support of migrations to LibreOffice, and we have then decided to invest in this area by launching a LibreOffice Division”, says Paolo Storti, CEO of Studio Storti. “We want to leverage the conference in Milan, where we can meet the core of the community, to strengthen the connection with developers and other key stakeholders in the LibreOffice project”.

“Studio Storti will bring to TDF Advisory Board over 15 years of experience in migrating the Italian Public Administration to open source solutions”, says Italo Vignoli, Member of TDF Board of Directors. “The announcement is extremely important for the entire ecosystem, because it shows that TDF vision of an independent project can foster the growth of third parties investing in LibreOffice. In Italy, it will be a game changer”.

TDF Advisory Board has grown to 14 members, with six new additions in the first nine months of 2013 – AMD, CloudOn, Collabora, KACST (King Abdulaziz City of Science and Technology), MIMO (French Ministries) and Studio Storti – who have joined the former members: FRODEV (Freies Office Deutschland e.V.), FSF (Free Software Foundation), Google, Intel, Lanedo, RedHat, SPI (Software in the Public Interest) and SUSE.

About Studio Storti

Study Storti is active since 1997 in the field of software consultancy, and more specifically in the design and implementation of solutions and systems based on open source technologies for the world of Italian public administrations. Today, it has over 250 customers, and has migrated to free software over 200,000 desktops. Website: http://www.studiostorti.com.

• Up early; mail chew; crunched some stats, shuffled paperwork, call with Andrew. Lunch, poke into why liborcus is not building - turns out my path /opt/lo/... looks too much like an MSVC /o compiler option; urgh - chased it at length export V=1 is your friend it seems.
• Fantastic to announce that CloudOn has joined the LibreOffice advisory board - a hearty welcome to them, contributing so positively to the LibreOffice ecosystem.
• Built some developer and other stats for others at the looming conference. Loved to see Eben's demo of Wayland and LibreOffice - though sadly the video misses some of the live action.

[EN]

Merhaba,

This post is a detailed view of the my first GSOC process. I don’t post entries to the blogs often, so the ones I post are generally long posts. One of the reasons of the opening this blog was to provide information for the new contributors(like me). For better transition to being productive. I did a lot of small mistakes which are blocking the development. I thought telling these mistakes or some challenges to the others should be useful. I will publish them later. So anyway get ready to a long post.

Experience

I was hoping to get a boost on development and better understanding the LibreOffice Code when I first applied to the GSOC. I wasn’t have a great experience on coding. Most of the work I did before was some School projects. Biggest one was implementing  a graph algorithms visualizer with Python. So we can say I am not experienced at all.

Because of my lack of experience I wasn’t very productive during the project. Half of my time spent on learning things and the other half spent on implementing the things I learned. I was a learner mostly. It was enough for me to finishing the main goals of the project. I did lots of things first time in my life. I used a profiler first time, which is a cool thing in my friend group. Lots of things like that. So my personal goal is accomplished somehow. I get a great boost for understanding the code.

That’s enough trash talk I think. Let’s talk about the project.

Project Details

First, screenshots(because we love screenshots , aren’t we all?):

So,

The page is now handles about 25K lines of options. It shows all of them and edits them back. Libreoffice has a about:config utility as expected from the GSOC project. Yes it is working but it is not in enough quality I think. At least not enough for me. I will continue to work especially on this page.

Current situation with technical details.

• Page is currently a tab page.(SfxTabPage)
• Takes the options using UNO API with a recursive function. Basically it is a tree traversal algorithm.(it is named preorder depth-first traversal as I remember)
• Uses  “OptHeaderTabListBox” for showing the options. It is basically a “SvSimpleTable”.
• Edit button opens a new dialog(value dialog) and checks the given string according to the type of the option. If it is correct stores it in a vector for saving it later.
• value dialog handles list types as comma separated string.(i.e if list is has “0,1,2”, it will show them to you as “0,1,2,”. Expects new value as same format.)
• boolean types are toggled with edit button no new dialog opens.
• If you try to enter a string instead of a integer type(short,long,hyper) you simply cannot. It controls the key inputs for integer types.
• If you write a number which exceeds the range of the number it is controlled for integers. But if you do this for float,double or in a list type the value will be 0. Need some work on there a little more.
• Page loads about 6 seconds. It was 20 minutes on first working load. Still not perfect but I can definitely say better .
• Page don’t have a filterbar yet. Which is important when you talk about 25K lines of options.
• Page has visual problems. Values are so long, tab page is not enough for that long. Thinking to move it as a Dialog to advanced page.
• There is a default button which doesn’t work for now.
• Value dialog has a custom edit widget. I planned to use a custom multi edit but couldn’t make it work. So for the time being I used a custom edit.

So yes, It works but also need more work for quality. Which I plan to make the page better in following weeks.

Thats it for now.

[TR]

Yazı çok uzun. Daha sonra ayrı bir girdi olarak göndereceğim. İngilizcesinden takip etmeye çalışabilirsiniz şimdilik.

Saygılar.

Berlin, September 18, 2013 – The Document Foundation (TDF) announces that CloudOn is now a member of its Advisory Board. CloudOn is a productivity platform that allows users to create, edit and share documents in real time across devices.

“We fully support The Document Foundation’s core values and are honored to be part of this esteemed group,” says Jay Zaveri, VP, Products for CloudOn “This collaboration with the outstanding LibreOffice development team is fully aligned with the CloudOn vision and part of our constant drive to offer tools that enable people to work smarter.”

“It is fantastic to have CloudOn’s depth of mobile experience and development muscle to work with. I particularly like their emphasis on execution,” said Michael Meeks, VP Productivity at Collabora and TDF Board Member, “We are thrilled to be working alongside CloudOn, and are pleased to see the smooth way they have integrated into the community, with code already included, and their participation in Engineering Steering Committee meetings.”

With the addition of CloudOn, the Advisory Board of The Document Foundation now has 13 members: AMD, CloudOn, Collabora, FRODEV (Freies Office Deutschland e.V.), FSF (Free Software Foundation), Google, Intel, KACST (King Abdulaziz City of Science and Technology), Lanedo, MIMO (French Ministries), RedHat, SPI (Software in the Public Interest) and SUSE.

About CloudOn

CloudOn is a leading mobile productivity platform that allows users to create, edit and share documents in real time across devices. With proven technology already trusted by over five million registered users globally, CloudOn is platform-agnostic and completely optimized for iOS, Android devices, as well as the web. It also offers seamless integration with Box, Dropbox, Google Drive and SkyDrive.

About The Document Foundation (TDF)

The Document Foundation is an open, independent, self-governing, meritocratic organization, which builds on ten years of dedicated work by the OpenOffice.org Community. TDF was created in the belief that the culture born of an independent foundation brings out the best in corporate and volunteer contributors, and will deliver the best free office suite ever. TDF is open to any individual who agrees with its core values and contributes to its activities, and welcomes corporate participation, e.g. by sponsoring individuals to work as equals alongside other contributors in the community. As of June 30, 2013, TDF has 159 members and over 3.000 volunteers and contributors worldwide.

Media Contact CloudOn
Jenna Richard (based in San Francisco, California, UTC-7)
Phone: +1 (415) 277-4927 – Email: CloudOn@allisonpr.com

Today we are happy to announce that the final schedule of the LibreOffice Conference 2013!

Very quickly, the first day -the 24th- will be dedicated to board and community meetings such as the Localization meetup and the Engineering Steering Committee session. Then for the ongoing three days 2 tracks, community and development will take place continuously in two rooms, while a third one will be dedicated the first day to the ODF track, sessions on migrations on the second, and the final day the room will be dedicated to devops.

Let’s not forget both the touristic activities, the keynotes and the hackathon sessions that will take place on the 25th and the 26th. While there are many interesting talks I would just like to point out one with a special focus for me and for this blog: the marketing strategy workshop that is scheduled on Wednesday the 25th at 2 pm, in the Sala Alfa (Community Track). I’ll report on the proceedings of the workshop just like last year. I won’t go over all the talks I find interesting, nor over my other talks. The interesting features this year are aside an ODF track a Migrations track that will also be used for the establishment of the Migrations Protocol for LibreOffice consultants and practitioners eventually leading them on the path of the LibreOffice Certification.

One last thing: there’s a Google + event just to keep up to date during the conference of news and special announcements if you can’t reach our conference mailing list. See you in Milano!

• Up, mail chew; poked at writer auto-styles briefly; dug at contract pieces. Lunch, built ESC agenda, reviewed Matus' nice linkoo killer patch.
• Suffered WebEx, what an appalling experience; the access code presented was not the access code - but instead the (unusually different) attendee ID was.
• Lydia over for dinner, Vlad over for bible study in the evening. Got back to work until late.

Go, Greased Lightnin’
You’re burnin’ up the quarter mile

– Greased Lighting, Grease

So the conference schedule for the LibreOffice conference in Milan has just been published. The talks, workshops and sessions on the schedule encompass only the so far officially registered sessions. If you have another exciting and urgent topic that you want to share with the others at the conference, you may still get to present a lightning talk in the session on Thursday after lunch!

For that, just send a email to lightningtalks@libreoffice.org right now containing:

• your name
• the title of your talk
• the length/format you want to use:
  • freeform 5 minutes ^(*) lightning talk
  • Pecha Kucha talk (20 slides, 20 seconds each = 6 minutes 20 seconds)

Its LibreOffice conference time again!

Excited to see you all in Milan next week!

^(*) changed from 15 minutes earlier as there has been more demand for 5 minutes freeform than for 15 minutes sessions.

IMPORTANT: THE OPENING SESSION ON WEDNESDAY, FROM 9:30AM TO 1PM WILL TAKE PLACE IN THE UNIVERSITY MAIN BUILDING, LOCATED IN VIA FESTA DEL PERDONO. TRACKS HAVE BEEN INCLUDED IN THE PROGRAM FOR EASE OF ACCESS, BUT WILL NOT TAKE PLACE IN AULA BETA.

• Early to rise, packed babes off to school; mail chew, GSOC mentoring, code review & cleanup. Artur's updated Android remote looks and feels much better.
• Planned and booked travel to Mountain View for the Mentor Summit for October, with a return to LinuxConEurope in Edinburgh, fun - I wonder whom I should meet with in the Valley.
• Dinner, partner/customer calls in the evening.

As for iPad, users can swipe to their desired timing widget during the presentation.

A latest beta-test version has been uploaded to testflight. As a reminder, if you want to volunteer to beta-test the app, there is the link to go: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1XXpZWnPoIZEsyVG9Q-9TuvinjvjtuzeirEFY0WwRrJA/viewform. All your help&feedback are appreciated!

Cheers,
Siqi

Hi,

Following are things in which I was involved in the last week:
+ Patch1 https://gerrit.libreoffice.org/#/c/5652/  which was related to parsing of ‘master presentation objects’ got merged into master.So it helps the user to modified even master objects.

+Patch2 https://gerrit.libreoffice.org/#/c/5910/ which was related to using ‘macro expansion function’(i.e expansion of “vnd.sun.star.expand:” ) and it is too merged in master.The macro expansion function which was defined in the ‘comphelper’ module helps in removal of the existing duplicated codes.And here it was later modified to make it usable in various different places.Basically it returns expanded file path of config files.

+Patch3 https://gerrit.libreoffice.org/#/c/5926/ which is related to code-clean up work (using the above mentioned ‘macro expansion function’) and it is on verge of completion.And hopefully it should be merged by monday or tuesday.

+Also,I am in discussion with my mentors about the plan of providing user an option of ‘editing existing layouts’ & ‘creation of new slide layouts’ as well.We think this project needs a bit of more time & attention ,so we plan to extend the project by few of numbers days  and I have discuss the plan related to it with my mentors.

Here the glimpses of my plan to achieve this work:

(1) For Creation of new placeholder objects : Look for the methods which will draw ‘Rectangles’ on the “Slide Master” interface (similar to ones which is used for current “Slide Layouts”).

(2) For saving mechanism : Get the ‘width’ & ‘height’ of Rectangles (by using aRect.getWidth() and aRect.getHeight()). And calculate the relative parameters(like height ,width,position) of that Rectangle (and save ‘relative parameters’ to XML file).
And also use a global counter to keep track of number of new placeholder objects in layouts.

(3) For creating new layouts : Transfer all relative properties of ‘placeholder objects’ to an “output filter”(which can be used to open as ‘Slide Templates’).And decide the type of file format which is best suitable for this work.

The LibreOffice project use a Plone site with a self developed add-on for the conference organisation. I worked on this add-on today and added a new type for breaks (lunch-break, coffee-break etc.) to the list of allowed types of a track.

I created this new type already but it was not available at tracks. I fixed this bug / missing feature today.

I read about the work and collection of data that the intelligence services NSA and GCHQ do and I wonder if they are killing our parlamentary democracy. They are doing their work with the money of the citizens and with the vote of the government.

If I remember the story of the novel nineteen eighty four of George Orwell I think we might some steps further yet. The services collect nearly all data from the internet to try to control everything.

This is a real issue because every citizen have the right to decide on the personal data and what he or she want to give away (publish) the services violate the basic rights. It doesn’t matter where they do it in the internet, because nobody could secure that his data go only inside the network of his country. Thus every government has to insist that the violation of his citizens stops. And the work doesn’t stop once the services tell they are white hats now. The government has to investigate the whole situation and work on actions to stop the violation of citizen rights immediately. They misjudge their job, which they get time-limited from the nation, if they declare the subject for finished or if they make the nation responsible for the violation.

The topic is not finished and if the government and the services will not stop the violation of the basic rights and the fundamental right to freedom of expression (without fear) the legitimation of democracy will finish to exist.

Life is always a bit risky. The same counts for freedom

Milan, September 9, 2013 – LibreOffice Conference will officially open in less than three weeks at the University of Milan, on Wednesday, September 25. The opening session will be held in the historic Ca’ Granda building, while all technical sessions and tracks will be hosted by the Department of Computer Science. The conference is sponsored by Canonical and Collabora, while Google and CloudOn sponsor the live hackatons happening on Wednesday and Thursday evening, and Lanedo the food for the breaks. The conference will close on Friday, September 27, with the traditional Q&A session, where project members can ask questions to the Board of Directors.

Tracks will cover the Open Document Format (ODF); LibreOffice Development; Community Development; Best Practices for Deployments and Migrations; and Building a Business with LibreOffice. For the first time during a conference, there will be a chance of sitting together with LibreOffice developers to hack the code, or just discuss the next feature.

“LibreOffice Conference comes to Italy at the right time, as during 2012 and 2013 there have been several migrations to LibreOffice in the public administrations, at regional and local level”, says Italo Vignoli, a member of the board of directors of The Document Foundation and the leader of the conference team. “Meeting with the project members will encourage other public administrations and enterprises to undertake the migration to LibreOffice”.

LibreOffice Conference 2013 is hosted by the Department of Computer Science of the University of Milan (http://www.dsi.unimi.it/) and sponsored by Canonical (http://www.canonical.com) and Collabora (http://www.collabora.com), while Google (http://www.google.com) and CloudOn (http://site.cloudon.com/) sponsor the hackatons, and Lanedo (http://www.lanedo.com) the food for the breaks.

Conference sessions will be broadcasted online, and also recorded and made available on the conference website.

As pointed out previously by Mirek, a countdown timer might be useful for presenters. After going through various design mock-ups, here is the one that got adopted. 

When the sidebar is revealed, users can swipe on the first cell to switch from a stopWatch to Timer. And whichever is on top will take the ownership of the “00:00:00″ in the navbar and show the time left/seconds passed accordingly.

The switching between timer/stopwatch is paged, it always lands on one of the two blocs. Also, the cell section title got “Pushed away” and the navigation dots reflect the currently activated block as well on each switch. 

This only works for iPhone for now, I will work on the iPad version in a day or two. 

The “pencil down” day is approaching, so is the LibO conference, so excited that I got something that works now ^^

As always, let me know what you think in terms of the new design. I will push it to beta-test once I finish the iPad version (as most of the beta-testers are on their iPads )

Cheers, 

Siqi

The LibreOffice templates site uses Plone with some add-ons. Because I want to make the process to provide a template for LibreOffice easier I began to work on a new add-on for Plone with a more flat structure.

The new add-on should also provide the option to rank a template. I use the already available add-on cioppino.twothumbs for this. But I got the newest version (1.7) not to work. I tried it with older versions today and this solved my issue. The versions 1.5 and 1.6 displayed the portlet with the two thums (up and down) to vote on a template. Thus the feature is implemented now. But there are some remaining tasks to finish the add-on for a first public beta test.

Hi all,

The iOS remote control app now features an in-app How-to guide

On first launch, a pop-up will take users to an array of screenshots which will guide users through the connection/pairing/control stages of the app.

Also, the documentation is updated to the current version, which includes recently added commands. Android app may also consider adding these functionalities to the existing app:

# As of gsoc2013, these commands are extended to the existing protocol, since server-end are tolerant with unknown commands, these extensions doesn't break backward compatibility
* pointer_started // create a red dot on screen at initial position (x,y)
initial_x // This should be called when user first touch the screen
initial_y // note that x, y are in percentage (from 0.0 to 1.0) with respect to the slideshow size
* pointer_dismissed // This dismiss the pointer red dot on screen, should be called when user stop touching screen
* pointer_coordination // This update pointer's position to current (x,y)
current_x // note that x, y are in percentage (from 0.0 to 1.0) with respect to the slideshow size
current_y // unless screenupdater's perfomance is significantly improved, we should consider limit the update frequency on the
// remote-end

# As of gsoc2013, these commands are extended to the existing protocol, since remote-end also ignore all unknown commands (which is the case of gsoc2012 android implementation), backward compatibility is kept.
* slideshow_info // once paired, the server-end will send back the title of the current presentation
Title

The news are out and while they do not concern the LibreOffice project directly (insofar as this does not represent a change within the Document Foundation) I thought I’d be explaining a bit what these news are about and what they mean for the LibreOffice project. First, the announcement, as well as Michael Meeks’ blog post on the subject. (Caveat Emptor: I dont’t work for Suse and this is a personal blog, expressing my views only, although I’ m obviously a member of the Document Foundation’s board of directors which makes me anyway speak from a different point of view from the guy next door) Essentially, the story can be summarized in this sentence: Suse wants to focus on its core business (server and cloud computing) and has decided to spin off part of its LibreOffice development team over to Collabora.

What this means is that the Document Foundation has won a new strategic partner, Collabora, and that it has now a seat at the Advisory Board. What this also means is that Collabora has joined the ecosystem of LibreOffice service providers and that it will de facto stand as one of the very best companies making money on LibreOffice. Of course this does not automatically ensure their business success, this is why we wish them all the best.

Some readers might be surprised by the way I’m describing the announcement. It might be tempting to see these news as the sign of the upcoming demise of the LibreOffice project. This is very far from being the case  and there are two good reasons for that.

First, Suse is NOT dumping LibreOffice developers away. The same developers basically went in a new company and there working on LibreOffice development there. In American parlance, this is called a spin-off. Second, and perhaps more importantly, the Document Foundation has precisely been created to prevent not  just a take-over from one company of the entire project, but actually to ensure that any company or any developer leaving the LibreOffice project would not jeopardize the project, the community and their independence. Just as an example, today the Document Foundation has its own release engineering team and has its own infrastructure. We do  not rely on third party sponsors or on the benevolent will of one company for any of this. This simply means that if the sky falls tomorrow, we will still be up and running no matter what change in affiliations could happen then.

If anything, what has been announced today by Suse and Collabora is the perfect illustration of why the LibreOffice project is needed and why the Document Foundation has been created. I am thus thrilled to welcome Collabora to the Advisory Board and I would like to send my deep and sincere thanks to Suse for their past and continuing support, and last but not least, wish good luck to Michael Meeks and his team for their new roles at Collabora. The journey is going to be exciting.

Hi,
I was able to complete following things last week:
+Consolidate XML config parser code into ‘comphelper’ module.So that to avoid duplicate codes in ‘sd’ module.
+And made corresponding changes to parse out “master presentation object” from ‘objectlist.xml’.
+Mostly the above work should be merged into the master by today.

So this week : I am planning to make further development on output filter of ‘slide layouts’ as per the advise of my mentor.

<iframe class="youtube-player" frameborder="0" height="385" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/r-mKLjq4Lzk?version=3&amp;rel=1&amp;fs=1&amp;showsearch=0&amp;showinfo=1&amp;iv_load_policy=1&amp;wmode=transparent" type="text/html" width="630"></iframe>

Hi,

Just found an old video: How to Parallel installation @ Ubuntu 12.04

In less than four weeks, the LibreOffice Conference 2013 will take place in Milan, Italy.
LibOCon is the global and annual event for the whole LibreOffice community and ecosystem, with creators, adopters and users meeting and gathering, exchanging ideas and thoughts. Dates are September 25-27 – see the conference site.

After the Call for Papers has been finished, we are currently working hard to prepare the schedule out of those many great proposals we have received.

In order to help the organizers with their plannings, we today ask you to register if you want to take part in this year’s conference. This helps us in estimating the amount of attendants and ensuring that enough capacities are available for everyone. We also need this information to send you last-minute updates via e-mail.

Registering is easy – just send an e-mail to

conference@libreoffice.org

and state:

1. your first and last name
2. your e-mail address
3. your organization/affiliation, if applicable
4. your IRC nickname, if you want

Participation at the conference will cost 10 € per person, payable directly at the venue, which helps the organizers in producing required material.

Looking forward to seeing you in Milan!

The LibreOffice conference website is driven by the Content Management System (CMS) Plone with a self developed Dexterity type add-on. I’ve reworked this add-on for the Milan conference site a bit.

I meet with a Plone core-developer last weekend and I got some hints to improve the add-on. I committed this improvements to the github-repository today and they are via a rerun of buildout available on the LibreOffice-Milan-Conference-Site now: http://conference.libreoffice.org

Hi,

Pictures says it all, so please have a look at the gallery. What’s your favorite? Please comment

This year the LibreOffice Conference will take place in Milano, Italy. Come and join us for this excepional event from the 25th to the 27th of September 2013. Learn about migrations to LibreOffice, LibreOffice existing deployments, writing extensions and much more. Participate in  hacking sessions and community workshops and most of all, meet the LibreOffice community face to face for a few days of exchange and fun!

Register and stay up to date with the conference schedule and programme on our dedicated conference web site.

Hi,

Last week I was able to complete following things:

+I have almost completed the work related to:Parsing the properties of presentation object used in master page(e.g Header & Footer Objects) from XML.

+Also, the current slide layouts are parsed from XML and it has been pushed to the master code.

So this week ,I will be looking forward  to : The work related to export filter as per the advise of my mentor.

Hi,

In yesterdays program of the Austrian channel ORF 2 (German) there was some advertisement of Linux (especially Ubuntu), which is ought to be better than Windows as well as LibreOffice being (for most people) as good as Word, maybe even better)

Have a look yourself:

<iframe class="youtube-player" frameborder="0" height="385" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/gTeuvVGlgW4?version=3&amp;rel=1&amp;fs=1&amp;showsearch=0&amp;showinfo=1&amp;iv_load_policy=1&amp;wmode=transparent" type="text/html" width="630"></iframe>

Here is another performance improvement that just landed on master.

Background

It was brought to our attention that the performance of saving documents to ODF spreadsheet format had been degrading quite noticeably. This was especially true when the document contained lots of what we call rich text cells. Rich text cells are those cells that contain text with mixed format spans, or text that consists of multiple lines. These cells are handled differently from simple strings internally, and have slightly more overhead than the simple string counterparts. Because of this, saving a document full of such texts was always slower than saving one with just numbers and simple strings.

However, even with this unavoidable overhead, the performance of saving rich text cells was clearly going in the wrong direction. Therefore it was time to act.

Long story short, after many days of code reading and writing, I brought it to a state where I can share some numbers.

Measuring export performance

I measured the performance of exporting rich text cells in the following steps.

1. Create a new spreadsheet document.
2. Type in cell A1 3 lines of ‘libreoffice’. Here, you can hit Ctrl-Enter to move to the next line within the same cell.
3. Copy A1, select A1:N1000 and paste, to replicate the content of A1 to all cells in the range.
4. Save the document as ODF spreadsheet document, and measure its duration.

Results

I performed the above measurement with 3.5, 3.6, 4.0, 4.1, and the latest master (slated to become 4.2) builds, and these are the numbers.

It is clear from this chart that the performance started to suffer first in version 3.6, then gradually worsened over 4.0 and 4.1. The good news is that we have managed to bring the number back down in the master build, even lower than that of 3.5 which I used as the point of reference. Not just slightly lower, but much, much lower.

I don’t know about you, but I’m quite happy with this result.

We had this before, but still I had ideas how to simplify things more, and that’s why I did minor changes to the UI (okay… Changed size of the main form + added one button + changed size of 2 areas (Shortcut and bootstrap.ini)

As always I am interested in your opinion and feedback

Here are the screenshots:

So and now some other news I am really happy about:

• The rework of the help seems to be finished soon (Thanks to Ken Biondi)
• I am at the LibO conference in Milan
  • As I am too late to send in my proposal I really hope to get a “lightning talk” slot –> Talk about SI-GUI

That’S it for today

A new patch of Autocorrect feature allows the text replacement before or after arbitrary affixes depending on the starting or ending wildcard character * in the Autocorrect Replace pattern. This is a small, but useful enhancement in word processing, especially for affix rich languages, but I will show a nice improvement for French typography, too, using this feature.

For example, with the “i18n*” → “internationalization” item Autocorrect will find and replace i18ns with internationalizations, too. Hungarian spelling dictionary handles two thousand suffixes of a given noun, dozens of them are quite frequent, simply exceeding the limitations of the old Autocorrect feature. With the new patch and the modified Autocorrect list LibreOffice will be able to handle all forms of serious misspellings and common abbreviations, that is a real innovation for Hungarian and similar languages. But the following examples help the word processing in English and other languages, too:

• Typographic correction of ellipses (with the precomposed ellipsis character U+2026): *… → …, eg. word… → word… (see below on the screenshot)
• The same combined with quotation marks: “…* → “… and *…” → …”, eg. “…and a quote…” → “…and a quote…”
• Simplified input for special symbols: *%o → ‰, eg. 7%o → 7‰
• French punctuation. LibreOffice has got only a poor man’s input method for French typography, inserting full long (“typewriter”) spaces before question and exclamation marks, colon and semicolon, and before and after guillemets (only Graphite fonts Linux Libertine G and Biolinum G support French typography well). With the new Autocorrect patch and with the following replacements, it’s possible to get better spaces in the case of Unicode fonts with narrow no-break space (U+202F): *! →  ! (U+202F !), * ! →  ! (a replacement for the same sequence to avoid multiple insertion of narrow no-break space) etc. It seems, this could be a general method, because missing narrow no-break spaces are replaced by normal spaces (like in the recent poor man’s method). But fonts with narrow no-break spaces, like DejaVu Serif, Liberation Sans and Serif, Linux Libertine and Biolinum (also not Graphite versions) give better French typography (to use the new method, switch the French poor man’s method off in the Localized options of Autocorrect settings):

I’ve got the power.

– The power, Snap

So, Im back from vacation. One of the things I did was reorganizing my hardware, and for doing so, I bought a wattmeter to measure what my machines and toys actually consume. A lot of the stuff was what I expected, but there where a few nasty surprises:

From this set a few surprising takeaways:

• The wimpy Ideapad S12 with its Atom CPU eats more power when idling than the Thinkpad W520 with its beefy i7 Quad-Core and 16GB of RAM (13 Watts vs. 10 Watts).
• My TV doing nothing but waiting for the remote to tell it to turn itself on eats more power that each of my notebooks (15 Watts vs. 10/13 Watts).
• Just opening Firefox with one tab google plus and one tab google mail eats 4 extra Watts on my notebook and 32 extra Watts on my desktop. It seems all that JavaScript voodoo does not come free at all: ~6 Euros per month when I leave it open on my desktop all the time.
• Running my desktop (Bertha) as an tinderbox for LibreOffice 24/7 would cost me ~1.000EUR per annum. Doing it with three of those boxes would a very expensive and noisy alternative to what others sell as a room heater.
• My TV eats 30 Watts more when displaying the black screen of a disconnected HDMI signal than with normal TV display. Maybe its expensive to search for a signal?
• Compiling LibreOffice without ccache on my Notebook kicks the power consumption to 90 Watts — but only for a few minutes. Then the thermal controls throttle the machine down to 70 or even 35 Watts, which seems all the machine can disperse over sustained periods.

My electricity is 100% from water power, btw. Admittedly — its unlikely to come from the Hoover dam, though (Image copyright CC BY 2.0 by Gordon Wrigley)

And then there where these leftover pieces to measure, no surprises there, just a confirmation of my suspicion that the old Asus notebook I run as a home server is eating way too much power:

My tentative conclusions are:

• replacing my old “home server” with something ARM-based like a Raspberry Pi or a Pandaboard breaks even after one year — I should do that.
• Even when under load, a ARM-based Pandaboard has a modest power consumption.
• I will completely turn off my TV on principle as the standby consumption is just pure impudence. As a bonus it prevents my BluRay player from kicking on the 100 Watt TV when I throw in a audio CD (Thanks Panasonic, for providing this excellent and “useful” integration).
• A cheap Netbook might be less powerful, but it hardly consumes less than a high-end Notebook when idling. You get what you pay for.
• I bought a cooler for my Notebook, hoping to unlock it from choking itself with thermal restriction. It should be a good idea in general as the logs not only talked about throttling, but also about more scary MCEs.
• Buying a wattmeter is a good decision, when you run nontrivial amounts of hardware.

Addendum: The 2.5 Watts for Bertha when off may seem bad — but its not at all, if you consider it is running a lights-out management on that.

Just a service announcement for those that might have around still SXW files generated from WordPerfect documents by the wpd2sxw tool version 0.6.x or earlier (years 2004 and before). Those files used to open fine in early OpenOffice.org versions, but they miss a crucial element. That is the reason why LibreOffice, the OpenOffice.org modern successor, will refuse them. Nevertheless, they are not lost!

LibreOffice development team, in its constant quest of increased user satisfaction, has a workaround for you!

First grab the zip file with the required manifest. Then get the zipmerge tool that comes with libzip, and merge the manifest into the corresponding SXW file. As an example, this command line could work:

for i in <sxw-file-list>; do zipmerge temporary_sxw.sxw /path/to/sxw_manifest.zip $i && mv temporary_sxw.sxw $i; done

This way you assure that if the original SXW file already had a manifest, it will not be overwritten by the one from sxw_manifest.zip, which would not be a desirable outcome. Nonetheless, if you only have to repair one SXW file and you checked already that manifest is missing in it using tools like zipinfo, you can quietly use:

zipmerge <original-sxw-file>.sxw /path/to/sxw_manifest.zip

In order to merge the manifest directly into that file. Naturally, you can merge the manifest from the sxw_manifest.zip into the SXW file using any other zip-manipulation tool you prefer.

Enjoy and continue using LibreOffice, the free and open source office suite of reference.