OpenOffice.org
Development digest
19th January 2004

by C.P. Hennessy

• So whats currently being implemented for OOo 2.0?
• Other development news
• Release of developers snapshot m20
• OOo thesauri development
• Native Lang Translation Tools"
• The start of a grammar checker?
• The dev@api.openoffice.org newsletter
• Developers Guides in multiple languages
• Separation of icon set from build process
• Separate builds of 1.1.1 for Mac OSX 10.2 and 10.3
• Multiple-Inheritance Interface Types for UNO
• MinGW + tcsh build efforts started
• This weeks Issuezilla summary
• This weeks CVS highlights

So whats currently being implemented for OOo 2.0?

The next major version of OpenOffice.org is currently planned to be 2.0 and is hoped to be released sometime in early 2005.

So what features are planned for version 2.0 ?
There are alot of features planned, many of them to help with the compatability with MSOffice, many to improve performance (especially startup performance), more usability improvements, better desktop integration, easier administration, and some extra XML features. The general concept document giving more context and a bit more detail for all of this is available in the Product Concept Document (OOo 2.0 is also codenamed "Q" similarily to OOo 1.1 being codenamed "Geordi")

The OpenOffice.org Specification Project currently contains over 70 document which explain exactly how these concepts will be implemented.
Many of these documents contian very specific implementation details with proposed screen shots, shortcuts, and APIs. You can comment on all of these documents, but be aware (and have a look at the CVS digest) that many of these features are currently being implemented. The categories available are : Writer(24 documents), Application Wide(14), Calc(12), (data)Base(10), General User Interface(6), Globalization(3), Scripting Framework(1), and Installation(1). There are currently no specification documents available for the other projects.

In Other Development News

Release of developers snapshot m20

The developers snapshot m20 has been released. Changes in most areas including new controls, a dialog factory which will be used to improve performace by loading dialogs only when they are first needed, many improvements to controls, continues improvement in compatability for MSWord files and RTF files.

OOo thesauri development

Giuseppe Modugno has written an application (called thescoder) which creates the files needed by the thesaurus in OOo from a simple list of words in text format.

The advantages of thescoder in comparison to previous solutions are:

• it is possible to insert spaces among different synonymous
• if a synonym is not also present as word, such word
• is added automaticly without synonymous (it is displayed a warning for such operation)
• if a word is present without synonymous this is preserved (and also in this case a line of warning is displayed)
• the list of words doesn't necessarily have to be sorted

This tool is already being used by the Italian OpenOffice.org Lang Project

Native Lang Translation Tools

The translate.org.za project has been working on the localization for several South African languages including Zulu, and Africans. Many of these tools may be useful for other native-lang teams.

Some of these tools include:

• oo2po - converts gsi style translation files to the Gettext PO format. This makes it possible to use many of the rich featured PO editors such as Kbabel and POedit instead of a text editor.
• po2csv - converts PO files to comma seperated value (CSV). We needed this for translators running Windows so that they could edit the translations in a spreadsheet. Rather ironic doing OpenOffice.org translations using Microsoft Excel.

And of course tools to convert these back.

• checker - checks for various portential errors in translations including:
  • starting and ending punctuation
  • variables
  • simple capitalisation
  • accelerators
  • whitespace only translation, translation = original and very short translations
  • escapes and quoting

Dwayne Bailey writes:

"Currently checker only runs on PO files but the tests evaluate only the strings and are seperate from the input format. Checker is invaluable in idetifying some very silly mistakes and provide a nice approach to cleaning up translations."

The translate.org.za team also have started work on a portal to allow easier web-based translations and they have a preliminary patch againts OOo to allow it to use GNU Gettext for localisation. This makes OOo much more usefull and usable on a Linux in that new localisations can be easily installed and seperate from the main OOo build. Although this is not necessarily the direction that will occur in OpenOffice.org for 2.0 as this approach is seen as quite specific to Unix/Linux platforms.

The start of a grammar checker?

Many people request that a grammar checker be added to OOo, but as many would remain quite happy without it as they consider most languages to be much more complex than a grammar checker could really deal with. They say that in general grammar checkers give as many false warnings and many people also complain that they do not give warnings when they should.

However, as we are dealing with open source software, if there is an itch it will get scratched. As reported on the native-lang list, in this case Kevin Patrick Scannell, the author of the myspell-ga package for openoffice, has written a GPL grammar checker for Irish called An Gramadóir (and for those of you who are unsure that is Gaeilge Irish).

The dev@api.openoffice.org newsletter

The dev@api.openoffice.org mailing list is used to ask questions about using the OOo object model and associated APIs. Michael Hoennig posted the December API newsletter to the list. Topics include:

• JVM Configuration for OpenOffice.org/StarOffice;
• Running Multiple Macros from the OOo Command Line
• Changing The Mouse Cursor
• Scripting Framework Evaluation Available
• Pitfalls with Large Database Query Result Sets
• How to Get C++ Header Files for IDL Types
• By Whom and When is XComponent::dispose() called
• UNO IDL services and their implementation
• Tracking Unanswered Questions on dev@api.openoffice.org
• Inserting Alien XML Attributes into OOo Documents
• How to Change Text Document Fonts Programatically?
• Updated Version of Developers Guide Available
• No API for the Gallery yet
• Thoughts and Questions Regarding a New Impress Viewer
• Programmatically Adding a BASIC Library.
• CodeSnippet to Delopy Arbitrary Files within AddOns

Developers Guides in multiple languages

The StarOffice 7 Software Basic Programmer's Guide provides an introduction to StarBasic and the API and provides a lot of useful hints for migrating from another well known Basic language to StarBasic/OpenOffice.org Basic.

This document is now available in : English | German | French | Spanish | Italian | Swedish | Japanese | Simplified Chinese | Traditional Chinese | Korean.

Separation of icon set from build process

On the installation project dev mailing list there was a short email on how to deal with different icon set in OOo in the future.
The idea is to separate the different sets of pixel graphics in a zip-archive. This probably also means separating these graphics from the build process. But this conversation is not finished yet, so stay tuned.

Separate builds of 1.1.1 for Mac OSX 10.2 and 10.3

Kevin B. Hendricks mentions that for Mac OS X we are going to need to have separate Panther and Jaguar builds in the long run anyway. Right now a build on Panther it will not run on Jaguar and a Jaguar build will probably not run on Panther either.
If you are an Apple developer and would like to see OpenOffice.org on Mac OSX why not contribute a small amount of time and see how you can help on the porting dev mailing list.

MinGW + tcsh build efforts started

The MinGW compiler is a "collection of GNU toolsets that allow one to produce native Windows programs that do not rely on any 3rd-party C runtime DLLs". With this work it be should be possible to compile OOo code on Windows without having to have the latest version of Visual .Net tools from Microsoft.
A few patches are currently needed and they are listed in IZ#24588. If you want to comtribute or to ask a question the porting project dev mailing list is the right place to ask.

Multiple-Inheritance Interface Types

On the UDK dev mailing list Stephan Bergmann wrote to tell us about the Multiple-Inheritance Interface Types for UNO APIs.

This weeks Issuezilla summary

Many bugs have been worked on and resolved (as of Monday Jan 19 2004 ):

	No this week	Change from last week
Issues which have the status UNCONFIRMED	390	-41
Issues which have the status NEW	952	+4
Issues which have the status STARTED	1035	+44
Issues which have the status FIXED	7585	+65

(a more detailed set of statistics is available here)

Some of the more interesting developments over the last week include:

week 3 (2004):

• change types for row, column and tab count in preparation of increaing limits beyond 32k
• MSWord compatabilities : new option to control line spacing cleanups,
• session management work
• lots of fixes for 1.1.1 more OS X fixes, SDK now uses port 2083 instead of 8100 NetBSD UDK bridge,
• more native widget fixes for buttons, combo boxes, list boxes, edit boxes, and spin buttons
• add python scripting to scripting framework
• start of XForms
• more hidden text compatability work
• dialog slimming continues
• merges for 1.1.1
• net(radar) chart changes
• introduced polarcoordinate system
• initial 3D code for charts