Thursday 24 January 2013

Converting LibreOffice dialogs to .ui format, 100 conversions milestone

We’ve now reached 100 dialogs and tabpages converted from LibreOffice’s classic fixed widget size and position .src format to the GtkBuilder .ui editable by glade format. I won’t repeat the full reasons for the conversion, but I’m particularly happy with the new accessibility support, both for the new containers and the .ui loaded.
The a11y stuff can now generally be describable in the .ui file rather than sporadic hard-coded calls here and there. And with the new mnemonic widget for label support, setting in the .ui explicitly what a label is a label for overrides the (eventually to be removed) ugly guessing short-cut code in vcl and sets the default a11y relationship between the label and labelee.
So setting mnemonic widgets in LibreOffice .ui files is now strongly indicated.
Here’s a hopefully helpful step-by-step tutorial for converting a simple dialog from .src to .ui