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By Cédric, January 18, 2012 4:05 pm

The Lord gave us a second cute little girl, named Clémence. She arrived on Saturday 14th in the afternoon. Everything went well and both the mum and the baby are in good health.

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By Cédric, November 9, 2011 11:07 am

In October, I attended to several good conferences:

• LibreOffice Conferences in Paris, France
• Google Mentor Summit in Mountain View, CA, USA
• fOSSa in Lyon, France

Meeting nice people, exchanging on interesting topics was fun… but I delayed my slides publication until now due to an important work load. Finally they are here:

LibreOffice Conference

• Google Summer of Code de LibreOffice panel ODP
• What’s next in Writer? ODP
• Lightning talk on CMIS in LibreOffice ODP

fOSSa

• Easy-to-go-live demo on CMIS in LibreOffice ODP

The next and last FOSS event of the year for me will be JDLL in Lyon where I will share a talk with Jean-Baptiste Faure on the end of the war between QA and developers inside the LibreOffice community. See you all in Lyon on November, 18-19th!

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By Cédric, October 3, 2011 1:04 pm

Last week at SUSE we had a hackweek… For those who don’t know what it is, the idea is to have us developers work during one work week on any project we want. Earlier in the year the idea has been raised to implement a LibreOffice connector for Alfresco as our documentation team uses it. We even had a meeting with Alfresco people, but the conclusion was obvious: LibreOffice needs to handle the CMIS interface… that’s what I started during that hackweek.

Of course I didn’t have time to have a feature-complete support of CMIS in only one week, but at least I managed to read some document on an Apache Chemistry InMemory test server at the end of the week. To make it easier, I started to write a C++ library to handle CMIS that can be found on http://sf.net/p/libcmis/. In order for LibreOffice to handle CMIS, I started writing a new Universal Content Provider (UCP) and created a fake URL scheme to access the documents. For example on master, you can open the content of the node #133 using the AtomPub CMIS binding with that kind of URL: cmis+atom://localhost:8080/inmemory/atom/?repo-id=A1&id=133.

The only way to get a CMIS document that works for sure at the moment is to provide the URL to the soffice.bin process… but of course this will need some more love to get a proper UI for it.

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By Cédric, September 16, 2011 8:42 pm

I was busy hacking a cool new feature the last weeks… and that I would like to show and will land in LibreOffice Writer 3.5: headers and footers editing has been greatly improved. The history of that feature is pretty simple: it all started with a customer document with a huge background picture that was selected every now and then instead of the main text over it. That lead me to a new header/footer editing mode in Writer, but Christoph Noack and a few others on the UX-advise mailing list pointed me to a few problems and helped me to make it even better.

Among the cool changes in the headers footers:

• Headers, footers and the body text are clearly separated by a dashed line and a label showing the page style name.
• This separation hides when editing the text body.
• The popup menu of the label give quick access to header/footer edition and removal: no need any more to go through the Format > Page Style menu.
• Leave the mouse over the area of a header or footer and it will show the header/footer indicators: this is convenient to quickly add a new header or footer.

The main body, header, footer, footnotes bounds indicators have been changed as well and are now indicating which area is being edited. Due to these changes, I also changed the way the manual page breaks are indicated (this is still not perfect any may change soon):

• The default color is now red
• A small text explains what that red line is meaning
• It’s shown only with the non-printing characters (which are shown by default now)

As usual, here are a few screenshots for you to see what happens, but you can also grab a daily build from the master branch (note that there were still some important fixes on Sept. 16th).

Editing Header/Footer

Mouse over header area

Popup menu on header/footer separator

New page break indicator

I would like to thank all the ones who helped me on that feature. First the customer for triggering this but also Christoph Noack and Astron for the UI improvements ideas and Cor Nouws and Jean-Baptiste Faure for their continuous testing and bug reporting.

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By Cédric, May 5, 2011 11:00 am

I was away when the news has been published by Google, so I’ll congratulate all our selected students now.

• Miklos Vajna: RTF tokenizer for writerfilter (rewrite of the RTF import)
• Anurag Jain: multi-line editing in the Calc bar
• Eilidh McAdam: first version of a Visio import filter
• Matúš Kukan: performance improvements
• Marco Cecchetti: SVG export filter enhancements
• Xisco Fauli: migration of Java wizards to Python
• Timo: conversion of the wiki help to platform specific files

The have until may, 23rd to get more deeply integrated in the community before coding. I wish them an intense summer hacking and good results at the end!