Some Native GTK Dialogs in LibreOffice

When the GTK3 backend is active in current LibreOffice master (towards 6.1) some of the dialogs are now comprised of fully native GTK dialogs and widgetery. Instead of VCL widgetery themed to look like GTK, they're the real thing.

So for these dialogs this means f.e that the animated effects for radio and checkbuttons work, that the scrolling is overlay scrolling, and that the visual feedbacks that scrolling has reached its limit, or that available content is outside the scrolling region are shown. In the above demo, the GtkNotebook is the real thing.

I'm particularly pleased with the special character dialog because it has a custom character grid widget which comes with accessibility support which remains working when reworked as a native gtk widget with custom drawing and interaction callbacks.

native GTK3 message dialogs

In LibreOffice 6.1, when the GTK3 backend is in use, the message dialogs are now native GTK3 message dialogs rather than vcl message dialogs using GTK theming.

So they are now true GTK dialogs and they look like...

while before they looked like...

We have 475 message dialogs directly instantiated in LibreOffice and 89 indirectly instantiated via GtkBuilder .ui files.

We've changed the format our dialog, etc. translations are stored in from our own legacy custom format to the more commonplace gettext .mo format. In the case of a message dialog described via a GtkBuilder .ui file, we now use GTK's own GtkBuilder to load the .ui, and GTK's own gettext integration to localize it from our new .mo format translations.

gtk3 + broadway + libreoffice

Out of the box in Fedora 26 I see that our gtk3 version of LibreOffice mostly works under broadway so here's libreoffice displaying through firefox. Toolbar is toast, but dialogs and menus work.

broadwayd :5 &
firefox http://127.0.0.1:8085 &
GDK_BACKEND=broadway BROADWAY_DISPLAY=:5 soffice --nologo &

Discrepancy Report #107743

Short (1996) little article about a bug in the shuttle starboard manipulator arm display position.

Spoiler: A half-dozen pages of forms detail [the error] ... the most remarkable thing about the error and its paper trail. “There is no starboard manipulator arm”

Flickerless Gtk3 OpenGL Transitions

While I got OpenGL transitions working under Gtk3 at the end of last year basically matching the Gtk2/Generic OpenGL quality the transition into and out of the OpenGL sequence wasn't very satisfying. And with access to HiDPI it was clearly even worse with an unscaled image momentarily appearing before the correct one.

So here's the before and after of the improvements that landed on upstream master today. Just screen-recordings with built in ctrl+shift+alt+t under gnome3 and positioned side by side and clipped roughly together in pitivi

Impress LibreOffice OpenGL Slide Transitions under Wayland via GTK3

Impress LibreOffice OpenGL Slide Transitions under Wayland via GTK3 (GtkGlArea).

So I've implemented enough to get this working on my machine now. I've demoed "static", "glitter" and "honeycomb" above from my -O0 debugging build. I'll work on merging this to master now, patches are in our gerrit instance. Porting from glew to epoxy is a necessary step, I know it builds on Windows and Mac, but that's utterly untested.

Deckard and LibreOffice

LibreOffice reuses the same ui format that gtk uses. This suggests that deckard could be used to preview translations of them.

Testing this out shows (as above) that it can be made to work. A few problems though:

1. We have various placeholder widgets which don't work in deckard because the widgets don't exist in gtk so dialogs that use them can't display as something falls over with e.g. "Invalid object type 'SvSimpleTableContainer'" I had hoped I'd get placeholders by default on failure.
2. Our .po translation entries for the dialogs strings all have autogenerated msgctxt fields which don't correspond to the blank default of the .ui so the msgctxt fields have to be removed, then msguniq to remove duplicates, and the result can the be run through msgfmt to create a .mo that works with deckard to show web-previews