Printing comments in margins

Because a fellow RedHat employee requested it on Friday, LibreOffice Writer 4.3 will be able to print comments in the margin effectively as they appear on screen, which should take care of the old fdo#36815 feature request. There is now an additional "place comments in margin" option in the print dialog (and writer print options). On screen the comments are placed outside the real page area, so to actually get them onto the paper when printing, the contents of the page needs to be scaled down by approximately 75% of its original size to make space to fit the comments in.

Here's the additional comment place option in the print dialog

Here's some sample pdf output

700 conversion target reached

Pushed through the 700 widget conversion barrier this week. The FindDialogs wiki page has helped quite a bit. There remains quite a few blanks in there though, so help still needed to identify the route to launch those unknown dialogs and tabpages via the UI.

Of the newly identified ones I'm a little amused by RID_OFAPAGE_SMARTTAG_OPTIONS which (we think) can only be seen when a smart tags extension is installed. Is there a known working extension out there that enables this to be shown when installed ?

Trivia titbit: we have converted eight different passwords dialogs. And there remains one unconverted one whose route to being launched is currently unknown. 

Current conversion stats are:
706 .ui files currently exist
There are 67 unconverted dialogs
There are 68 unconverted tabpages
An estimated additional 135 .ui are required
We are 83% of the way through.

FindingTheBlastedLastBunchOfDialogs

I'm finding it a fairly slow process to find the last 175 dialogs/tabpages in the LibreOffice UI. I have the full list of identifiers, and it's generally not a difficult process to find how to activate any individual dialog from the UI but in the aggregate it takes time and breaks the development flow if I have to stop/start to find the next one to convert.

So, you can help :-) This FindDialogs wiki page contains the list of identifiers and some hints as to how to find them in the source and in the help documentation. That's generally sufficient to determine what dialog they describe and how to launch it.

Filling out those remaining blank "how to activate" entries will speed up the conversion process.

dialog conversion status, 190 to go

  Converting LibreOffice dialogs to .ui format, 190- conversions remaining

We've now converted 77% of LibreOffice’s classic fixed widget size and position .src format elements to the GtkBuilder .ui format.

Using the guesstimate tool ./bin/count-todo-dialogs the current status is:

666 .ui files currently exist
There are 96 unconverted dialogs
There are 93 unconverted tabpages
An estimated additional 189 .ui are required
We are 77% of the way through.

What makes this mini-milestone interesting to me is that there are less that 200 to go now, and there are less than 100 of each of the two categories of elements remaining.

The latest of this latest bunch of conversions is the conversion of the pivot table dialog which has the side effect that the pivot table dialog now fits into a 768 pixel tall netbook screen when in expanded mode.

FOSDEM2014

My FOSDEM2014 LibreOffice .ui format a11y notes for developers presentation is available now. Basic notes on the importance of setting mnemonics and how to migrate pre-existing accessibility relations out of explicit c++ code and into GtkBuilder a11y markup.

Long Writer Paragraphs

Now that the huge work of removing and replacing UniString is complete and LibreOffice 4.2 has branched off. Now is a good time to remove the 16bit limits in Writer that continued to limit its paragraph length to 65535 chars. So I pushed today to master (4.3) the final set of changes to remove that limitation. Above is a screenshot showing the result. A writer document with a single paragraph containing > 100,000 characters.

This improves compatibility with MSWord which had no 64k limit on its paragraph length, which forced the importer to split over-long paragraphs into two or more. And this also addresses the long outstanding feature request to support long paragraphs in writer in order to support the custom in some locales (Brazil, others?) where there is apparently a requirement to record minutes of certain classes of meetings in a single paragraph.

622 Conversions, 70% complete

Converting LibreOffice dialogs to .ui format, 600+ conversions milestone

In the ongoing Sisyphean rework of LibreOffice dialogs and other UI things, we’ve now converted 70% of LibreOffice’s classic fixed widget size and position .src format elements to the GtkBuilder .ui format.

Using the guesstimate tool ./bin/count-todo-dialogs the current status is:

622 .ui files currently exist
There are 130 unconverted dialogs
There are 104 unconverted tabpages
An estimated additional 234 .ui are required