Miklos Vajna

LibreOffice was capable of handling form filling in Writer for a while already. In the meantime, the competition introduced Structured Document Tags, which is their default since 2007, and our fields and form shapes model them poorly. Writer Content Controls are meant to perform a great handling of this third type of form filling. Some recent developments also happened in this are in the past half year: PDF export, combo boxes, titles and aliases. Come and see how this now starts to work in Writer, what still needs doing and how you can help.

LibreOffice was capable of handling color palettes on its UI for a while already. In the meantime, the competition introduced document themes, which are a fixed set of 12 colors, to be attached to various parts of documents. This allows referring to those colors by name, and apply color filters. These color filters are maintained even if the source theme changes. Come and see how this now starts to work also in Impress, what still needs doing and how you can help.

LibreOffice was capable for handling PDF signatures since 2016 already. There have been recent improvements in the past year, namely creating visible PDF signatures and reworking the underlying PDF signature verification functionality to use PDFium for tokenization. This means that PDF signature verification (which happens implicitly, during opening any PDF files) now uses much more battle-tested code to provide this feature. Come and see how this work is implemented, where are the still rough edges and how you can help.

LibreOffice Impress was capable of importing your SmartArt graphics from PPTX files for a long time. Today this is a popular feature, and we only do a good job of rendering this shape type when the file has a fallback rendering included. LibreOffice 6.3 will contain a long series of small, incremental improvements in this area, resulting in a large step forward when it comes to laying out SmartArt document models. This will be a major improvement for documents which don't have a pre-rendered layout included. The result affects both desktop LibreOffice and the Online. Come and see how this work is implemented, where are the still rough edges and how you can help.

LibreOffice Writer was always capable of exporting your document in a portable way in the form of the PDF filter. Today in the age of tablets, smart phones and e-readers, many users read reflowable content in EPUB, which is the new PDF to some extent. LibreOffice Writer 6.0 has now basic and 6.1 will have improved EPUB export support. This work is done by integrating the libepubgen Document Liberation library and by improving both the library and LibreOffice itself along the way. Come and see how it's implemented, where are the still rough edges and how you can help.

LibreOffice Writer was always capable of mass-sending mail using mail merge, but setting it up is far from easy. One obstackle there is having to create three different documents: a Writer one, a Base data source and e.g. a Calc document containing the real data. LibreOffice 5.1 has a new feature to allow embedding the data source definition into a Writer document, meaning you can get along with e.g. a Writer and a Calc document. Come and see how it's implemented, where are the still rough edges and how you can help.

Come and hear about what we had to do to get LibreOffice on the Android platform - how we stripped down Fennec (Firefox for Android), combined it with the LibreOfficeKit, and still got an .apk that fits the 50M limit of the Play store.

LibreOffice Writer was always capable of handling complex content in a floating TextFrame, which allows fields, tables, embedded objects and similar features. But what about non-rectangular shapes? Or even rectangular ones, but with rounded corners? TextBoxes is a new concept that allows attaching complex Writer content to a drawinglayer custom shape: having both custom geometry without being limited to simple editeng content. Come and see where we are, what still needs to be done, and how you can help.

LibreOffice Writer's ODF filter was always capable of remembering attributes of elements which it does not understand, so after a load and save, such attributes were not lost. But what about the rest of the file formats? InteropGrabBag is a new API we have been creating over the past few months that lets foreign filters store their unhandled attributes, so such information is not lost during such a round trip. Come and see where we are, what still needs to be done, and how you can help.

Did you see a Writer feature that is not imported or exported correctly to ODT/DOC/DOCX/RTF? In most cases the problem can be fixed with little effort. We won't give you fish, but we'll teach you how to fish.