Field update --- preview for Windows.

I now have a preview for Windows available at http://download.go-oo.org/preview/oodemo.zip.

Simply download it and unzip it. To start execute soffice.exe in ooo2.3/program/.

Same features as the Linux Version. So no saving at this point.

And don't forget to give feedback :-)

Thanks,

~Florian

IBM's Symphony.

Downloaded IBM's Symphony today to follow up on some of the problems discussed at the ODF Interop Camp. (Btw. its sad that the ODF Camp people want to treat the problems as confidential.).

So back to Symphony. Why the hell did they crippled all the cool OpenOffice.org easter eggs?

So why is =game("StarWars") crippled?

And look what they done to the lovely picture of the Calc team:


I think that contradicts the SISSL :-)

After the release of Evolution/Exchange 2.12, I moved to one of the highly motivated, determined and focussed teams that extends the cutting edge technologies from other platforms to Linux.

using System;

class HelloWorld
{
public static void Main()
{
Console.WriteLine("Hello World !!!");
}
}

Yes, I am a proud Mono hacker now and will be working in ADO.NET. Presently, I am just finding my ways to understand the requirements and roadmaps of the component with the help of, my mentor and the maintainer of ADO.NET, Nagappan.

I will continue to be available in #evolution channel and answer any Evolution/Exchange related queries. Thanks to everyone that supported me during the development of Evolution/Exchange 2.12.0.

ATV will soon be running a channel on XM Radio (XM159).

They're saying that it will include live cricket coverage.

How's that?

Are you really interested about what is FreeBSD and how the FreBSD project works? I found a very nice presentation, about 50 minutes, talking about this, so, enjoy to listen:

Update on field work --- Early preview available for Linux.

In a previous post I talked about my field-proof-of-concept. I continued to work on the issue and I'm happy to give an update on that front.

You can download a preview version of my work here:

http://download.go-oo.org/preview/oodemo.tgz
(Linux only. Just untar the archive tar xzf oodemo.tgz and then cd oodemo/program and start ./soffice). This is a preview version. Do not use it for productive work! The preview demo shows

• the core enhancements (tabbing!), and


• .DOC import.

The work for .DOC export, ODF import/export is not done and not included in the demo.

For testing you can download the sample file formc1new.doc which is taken from issue 79720. It should look like this:


Again --- this is work in progress. So do not expect everything to work. However if you have issues please let me know. And remember “saving does not work yet :-)”.

I really hope I get some feedback,

~Florian

P.S.
I will make the patch available ASAP. It is the result of some weekend hacking --- it really needs some polishing first.

Mouse woke up from hibernation because we took him to Mamma Rosa with guardian angel sheep and poured some Ouzo down his throat. We had to do so as he soon has to go to the US and to Brazil. Without me.. hope he'll send me a postcard or two. Edith will carry him in one of her security gadgets. As soon as he's away, I'll start planning my own -shorter, and not so far away- holiday. Hope it goes beyond the stage of planning this time. Other news: Chief chicken got a veil and the clay animals are back. Christina went into production again.

Please bear in mind that this is not a review; it is just a few initial observations after installing openSUSE 10.3 and using it for an hour or so. I'm not a journalist, so even after using it for a week I wouldn't be able to write a well balanced review of openSUSE 10.3. And I'm biased, because I've been using SUSE for at least seven years.

I downloaded the openSUSE 10.3 yesterday and upgraded my laptop from 10.2 in the evening. The upgrade went reasonably smoothly, with just the usual problems: the wireless network couldn't be connected during installation so it couldn't find any online repositories, so I ended up telling it to remove quite a few packages which it couldn't upgrade, and after the installation it had got my hard drives the wrong way round in grub's menu.list - but that's my fault for booting from an external USB drive, which confuses things as the drives do get renumbered on boot.

After installing, everything still worked just as it did before, which was great. They've even put the intel graphics card hack into the boot scripts now so I don't have to have it in boot.local. I switched the graphics driver from i810 to the new intel one, and the wireless driver from ipw3945 to iwl3945, and now my wireless connection comes up reliably. I used to have to connect to a neighbour's unsecured network before it would allow me to connect to my secured one.

Upon trying to play an mp3 file, a message popped up prompting me to install the mp3 codecs, so I followed the instructions, and it gave me a nice wizard which allowed me to choose a whole load of codecs and other 'restricted' stuff. It then proceeded to download it all, complain that all the files on the DVD were corrupt (thought they weren't - they installed fine later), installed the stuff which had worked, and I had mp3 playability. It was much easier than before, except for the spurious corruption messages.

The package management seems to have been overhauled considerably, but it still has the problem of not giving much feedback as to what is going on: instead of showing an overall progress bar and then working its way through all the sub tasks, it'll show a progress bar for one task, and when that has finished it'll show another progress bar. You have no way of knowing whether you have a minute left to wait or three hours. Also, if you move the dialog to the corner of the screen, when the next progress bar appears it'll be back in the default position, which is really annoying. I imagine I'll probably continue using Smart because it is so, well, smart.

The boot and login graphics are back to green, which I like because it means my computer looks different from most. And the graphics are much sharper and more professional-looking, in my mind at least. Especially the welcome graphic when you boot from DVD. I have switched my desktop wallpaper back to the openSUSE 10.1 one though, as I prefer a blue wallpaper to a green one. The icons in YaST have all changed - they don't look better though - they're all grey and nondescript.

I'd like to keep playing with openSUSE 10.3 today, but I have to go to the Grand Designs Live show now. Oh, what a hardship!

Yesterday, Alma and I went bike riding along some of Mexico City's largest streets. We were able to do this because they were closed to regular traffic during much of the day.

The route we took is barely visible at MUÉVETE EN BICI. Unfortunately, the map is very low res, and zooming in won't help.

We picked up the trail at the junction of División del Norte and Churubusco, went through a stretch of Patriotismo, and then went through parts of Condesa, Roma (where the stopped for a brunch of barbacoa), and the Zona Rosa. From there we picked up the Paseo de la Reforma towards the Centro Histórico, rode along the edge the Zócalo, skirted Merced, and went on to areas where I've never been on foot (and much less on a bike) and don't really know. When time ran out -- the streets were only closed from 7am till 2pm -- we were close to the Palacio de Deportes. There we got on the Metro and went home under someone else's power.

Along the route, there were police protecting every major intersection and most if not all of the minor ones too.

It was a great way to spend the day, although I wish we'd started earlier, or, better yet, that it went until later in the day. It was very nice to see Mexico City from a new perspective. It was kind of like being in a car, yet without the traffic and all that the traffic entails. And it was kind of like being on foot, except we were going much faster. I won't say that Mexico City would become paradise if everyone got out of their cars and started walking or cycling, but it sure would be a lot nicer. Seeing the surrounding mountains clearly would be a daily occurrence instead of a rare treat, and there would be much less noise. For many people, daily commutes would be substantially shorter. I am not joking about this last point.

Biking here is usually a harrowing experience. But not yesterday.



Here's a picture of me by the Ángel of Independencia.

Recently in OOoCon 2007, I made a talk about the CJK (Chinese, Japanese and Korean) functions what I have been working on. I think it is better to show the progress to the world. If you have any hot issue about CJK functions, please let me know.

Here is the main CJK functions.

CJK functions that have been done:

• Text grid enhancement

• CJK font relevant stuff

• MS Word compatibility options enhancement

CJK functions that I am working on:

• Character/Line measurement unit and ruler

• Paragraph style default settings for CJK

CJK functions that I will work on:

• Punctuation compress

• Bullets and numbering enhancement

OK, I will make a summary for each CJK function so that you could get more knowledge. :-)

Text grid enhancement (i76247)

One of the main CJK functions is text grid which is wildly used in CJK environment. For example, Chinese government document must use text grid with 22 lines per page and 28 characters per line.

However, there are two types of paper mode for text grid. One is "squared" paper mode which OOo supports currently, the other is "Standard" paper mode which most CJK versions of office suite (including MS Word) support.

What's the difference between these two types of paper mode.

For "squared" paper mode, as shown in Figure 1, the page is divided in a fixed numbers of lines , and each line is divided into square cells . The number of lines per page depends on the line height ( i.e., the sum of grid base and ruby height), and the Asian characters per line also depends on the line height.

In this type of paper mode, if we change the "Lines per page" setting in the "Text Grid" tab page, the type are of the page will be changed. This type of paper mode is only used in limited case. Most CJK users have habit to the “standard” paper mode.

Figure 2 illustrates the "Standard" paper mode. As we can see, the lines per page depends on the base text size, while the characters per line depends on the character width. The ruby text is unavailable anymore. Moreover if the lines per page is changed, the type area is not changed yet.

Now, both types of paper mode are supported in ooo-build. In order to ensure only one type paper mode is used in the whole document, as shown in figure 3, a global setting option is provided in Writer tab page (Tools -> Options -> OOo Writer -> General).The codes are also up-streamed which is under QA so far.

CJK font relevant

There are some issues about CJK font in OOo.

Asian font list box ( i73003 )

The Asian font list box in the character property dialog lists all the available fonts even if they are not Asian font in OOo currently. It is better to only list the available CJK fonts.

CJK mess font ( i73003 )

The issue in current OOo is that the selected western font is applied to the CJK text even if the selected western font doesn't support CJK language. So I extend the usage of fontconfig to check whether the selected font supports CJK language before applying the selected font to the CJK text.

Chinese font size (i54603 )

China has his own unit to measure font size such as "五号". Of course, there is a conversion map between Chinese font size unit and western font size unit.

Font substitute (i54603 )

The fontconfig library is extended to use to find more suitable font when the desired font is missing. The patch is initialed by Caolan. We make it more better support Chinese.

Microsoft Word compatibility options enhancement (i78591 )

As we know, in MS Word, there are quite a lot of compatibility options which are used to control layout for different versions.

Now, OOo only supports a few of compatibility options. Most of them are not handled in WW8 filter, which may cause layout different when do .DOC-> OOo -> .DOC converter.

Of course, this is a common issue not just for CJK.

Actually, it is not necessay for OOo to handle all the compatibility options. But in order to improve the interoperability with MS Word, one alternative way is to store the unhandled compatibility options in document model when import a .DOC document, and save them out when export to .DOC document again.

Character/Line measurement unit and ruler (i72655 )

Character/line measurement unit and ruler is another important CJK function that OOo doesn't support now.

As shown in Figure 7 from MS Word 2003, character is used to measured the indentation of the paragraph, and the line is used to measure the paragraph spacing.

Also as shown in Figure 8 from MS Word 2003, the horizontal ruler can be measured by character, and the vertical ruler can be measure by line. Character/line ruler is always used in a document with text grid.

Paragraph style default settings for CJK (i54320 )

Currently, the paragraph style default settings are set for western users, some default values of the paragraph properties don't need the habit of CJK users.

For example, the default font size of western font size is 12pt, while it is 10.5pt for CJK. The current default tab spacing is 1.25cm, while it is too big in writing Chinese. It is better to use about 0.74cm in writing Chinese.

As shown in Figure 9, the current default setting of Asian typography is not suitable for CJK users yet.

Another example is the default value of automatic text indent. The automatic text indent is used to specify the leave spacing for the first line of a paragraph. The current default value is one-character while it is better to use two-characters in writing Chinese as shown in Figure.

Punctuation compress

As shown in Figure 10 , if two Chinese punctuation are close, the first one should be compressed to occupy only half spacing of a Character, not full spacing of a character.

Butters and numberings (i70031 , i69855 )

I have heard many CJK users to complaint that the bullets and numbering are not so good.

For example, OOo can only automatic recognize Arabic numbers or alphabets. Most CJK numbers can not be automatic recognized.

In the end, some important CJK functions are listed in the following wiki. http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/CJK_Group
If you have any good idea or suggestion about CJK functions, you are welcome to discuss in the wiki.