Caolán McNamara

LibreOffice now supports dark mode on its major ports. Apple and Microsoft effectively omitted to support dark mode in the various APIs LibreOffice was using to render its widgets, making this surprisingly difficult to implement.

Update on of the current state of the GTK4 port of LibreOffice with walk-through.

Native GTK Dialogs, current status and future work

We use american-fuzzy-lop for fuzzing various file formats that LibreOffice supports. Here I demo some amusing hackery to use afl to fuzz a stream of keyboard events in order to attempt to flush out unknown or difficult to reproduce bugs.

American fuzzy lop (http://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/afl/) is a security-oriented fuzzer that employs a novel type of compile-time instrumentation and genetic algorithms to automatically discover clean, interesting test cases that trigger new internal states in the targeted binary.

Typically its used for file format fuzzing. In this case the file format is a trivially serialized sequence of keystrokes, allowing afl to be an engine to drive the LibreOffice UI to generate test cases that crash LibreOffice via user events.

Notes for developers to get accessibility right in dialogs for LibreOffice when using the new UI format. How to convert existing accessibility relations in old code into the new XML descriptions. How to set mnemonics and why it is important. How to tweak containers to enhance accessibility.

Widget layout has landed in LibreOffice. By reusing the gtk builder format this means that LibreOffice dialogs can now be edited visually with glade with immediate results, instead of the traditional; blind-edit, compile, run and profuse swearing, development cycle of the legacy .src format. Here's a tutorial in how to convert an existing dialog to .ui format. Tip, tricks and common design patterns to help you get involved.