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

guess the architecture

Mostly finished moving office today. Stacked up here is 9 of the machines involved in the move and representing 7 different architectures. Middle column is all just stock x86/x86_64. C is an Apple Mac Mini and the only one not running Linux. D is an old Dell case hosting some AMD chip I forget the specs of and was my previous main box while E is an I7 and the current main box.

The holiday quiz is: Can you can correctly identify the architectures of the remaining six. Maybe tricky on the F and G netbooks I guess, but given that all run Linux, all remaining six are different archs, and have LibreOffice ported to them should help.

500conversions

Converting LibreOffice dialogs to .ui format, 500 conversions milestone

We’ve now reached 500 dialogs and tabpages converted from LibreOffice’s classic fixed widget size and position .src format to the GtkBuilder .ui format.

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

500 .ui files currently exist
There are 213 unconverted dialogs
There are 127 unconverted tabpages
An estimated additional 340 .ui are required

Digging down a little there is just 1 tabpage + 2 dialogs in draw/impress (sd) and 6 tabpages + 8 dialogs in writer remaining to convert from the old format. The remainder are in calc or in the various shared modules.

The How to conversion guide is still relevant, and help is always appreciated.

UniString

Death of UniString

It's always been a source of frustration for me that LibreOffice and its predecessors had two different String class families. A "new" set in sal and an "old" set in tools, where "new" is > 13 years old. Each set had a string for 8 bit characters and one for 16 bit UTF-16. The old classes are limited to 64k characters while the new ones use a 32bit length.

So, one of the oldest easy hacks we had on launching LibreOffice was
Removal/Replacement of the String/UniString with OUString once and for all. We managed quickly enough to remove the old 8 bit "ByteString" class, but the UTF-16 UniString class lingered on.


Now finally, after being painstakingly chipped away one method at a time and incrementally brush-clearing one file, one dir, one module of the enemy string, UniString is gone. I think this commit is the one that removes the last stray UniString usage from LibreOffice.

While a load of people worked on this, Noel Grandin put in an awesome effort to convert  a staggering amount of code over to finish this.

Now we just need to
a) update our wiki pages to root out all mentions of UniString
b) audit and remove the uses of the 64k STRING_MAXLEN limit define and remove that length limitation in places like max paragraph size allowed to be imported from .doc and .html files

New Menu Placement

Traditionally if a menu can't fit in the available desktop space in LibreOffice it gets rearranged to some other location where it does fit. So first attempt is underneath the menu entry, then above, then left, then right. Which can give this type of placement.

Which is rather undesirable. For Libreoffice 4.2 for menus from menubars we will just attempt placement under or above and on failure to fit, then pick which has the most space and place there anyway and instead scroll. Like so:

Which means that you can always just move left and right after activating a menu to navigate to the next one without a poorly placed menu getting in the way.

context menu to switch sheets

Due to popular demand within Red Hat calc now has a new right-click context menu on its bottom left scrollbar arrows to switch sheets.