Jan Holesovsky

Come and hear about how LibreOffice can be used by other applications via its C++ API called LibreOfficeKit. Its primary use is for document conversion or editing the documents in Collabora Online.

We are extending the LibreOfficeKit as necessary, and this presentation will talk about the recent developments there.

Come and hear about the developments in LibreOffice that were triggered by a need in the Collabora Online.

The most notable examples are the Notebookbar improvements, but there are other, like async dialogs in the core, new parameters to various .uno: commands that improve scripting capabilities, and many others.

The LibreOffice Android app consists of the LibreOffice core as the native code and Java part that takes care of compositing of the tiles, input handling, etc. It is hard to maintain, because everything that has been implemented in LibreOfficeKit for the Online has to be ported to Java - which is a huge amount of work.

For the Collabora Office Android app, we have tried a new approach - to build on top of work pioneered by Tor Lillqvist for iOS: Using the native code for the rendering, the Online JavaScript for the composition of tiles, input handling, etc. and only a thin Java layer to instantiate a WebView where the JS lives.

Come and see the current state! And don't worry, all the work is contributed back to the LibreOffice code too :-)

Come and hear how we are bringing the advanced LibreOffice desktop functionality to the Online!

LibreOffice on the desktop is very feature packed office suite. One of the complaints that power users make in Online is that it lacks many of them: they cannot add colored borders in their paragraphs, manage tracked changes/comments, correct the spelling and grammar in the document, etc. The question is how do we bring these functionalities to the cloud at your disposal in your browser tab?

We at Collabora decided to come up with a plan to just tunnel all the hard work that developers have done for the past couple of decades: come up with appropriate infrastructure to open the dialog in headless mode, paint it as a bitmap in the backend, and tunnel the image to you in the browser. And then add life to them by tunnelling your mouse/key events back which will invalidate and update the new image you see in the browser. Of course we are not sending the whole dialog image back to your browser every time - only the part that needs updating in the dialog is sent back to the browser saving us precious time and network bandwidth improving your UX.

Come and hear how you can integrate LibreOffice Online into your webservice!

Come and see LibreOffice Online in action. You will hear about the internals too - how do we use LibreOfficeKit, what's happening during the client and server communication, and how we designed the server to scale. This actually presents work of many people, so I hope to credit them in the presentation too.

LibreOffice 4.4 has got many user interface improvements - come and hear what we have done to make it more usable & more beautiful, and how you can speed up the changes by getting involved!

LibreOffice 4.4 has got many user interface improvements - but there's still much more to do. Come and hear how you can get involved, and can help make LibreOffice more usable & more beautiful!

Witer internals: How are the pages rendered?

One major problem that is hard to fix with the current core data structures of Writer is anything that relates to tracking of changes - undo and change-tracking (redlining) itself. It is because the data structures use naive approach to the document - there is one array of 'nodes' (BigPtrArray), and additional data structures that take care of the changes. There are editors that use different data structure, so called "piece table", that has the advantage that it contains the change tracking information in the data structure itself, so it is trivial to traverse the changes. But, it is unusable for us because it would mean a complete Writer core rewrite. But - is there a possibility to upgrade/rewrite BigPtrArray so that it would contain the change tracking information in itself in a git-like fashion? ;-) That would allow us to do the changes incrementally - first upgrade the BigPtrArray without affecting the current functionality, and then do the rest.

If you are a Linux developer, but need to check your LibreOffice code on Windows from time to time, this is the session for you! Cross-compiling LibreOffice for Windows using MinGW is trivial, and you can even directly run the result on your Linux machine without having to upload the results to a virtual host, or to a Windows machine. You can use your familiar environment during development, and also the build times are shorter than on real Windows. This How-To session will help you to set up the environment for cross-compilation, and will show few tricks you should learn.