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Released: Apache OpenOffice 4.1.15

OpenOffice.org
Development digest
9th February 2004

by C.P. Hennessy

Spanish translation available thanks to Alexandro Colorado.

New Canvas API status

I asked Thorsten Behrens about the status of the new Canvas API and he wrote to tell me :

The new 2D graphics output API, dubbed the 'Canvas API', is a candidate to replace VCL's OutputDevice as OOo's standard rendering facility. The API was designed with contemporary graphic subsystems like Java2D, Windows GDI+ or Cairo/XRender in mind, and should support most modern concepts like paths, affine transformations and alpha compositing now standard across graphics APIs (and lacking in VCL). Since the Canvas API is based on UNO, it is more or less a runtime-choice which implementation to use: if you as a developer are dissatisfied with speed or quality or what else of one of our default canvas implementations, it's simply a matter of downloading the SDK, implementing the fraction of the API we're currently using, and registering your component with OOo as the new instance to use for canvas rendering.

Speaking of, we currently have working canvas implementations based on VCL, Java2D and, for Windows, a native GDI+/DirectX version. You will notice that native implementations for X11 and MacOS are missing from this list, so this would be an opportunity for volunteers to help out: MacOS X should probably map directly to Carbon; for X11, I would give Cairo/XRender a try, which is comparably high-level and gives you anti-aliased rendering for free.

You can browse the new Canvas APIs here.

Second pre-release of 1.1.1

Martin Hollmichel on the releases@openoffice.org mailing list announced the next pre-release of OpenOffice.org, 1.1.1b. There are about 90 more bugs fixed in this pre-release compared to 1.1.1a.

It is hoped that the next pre-release will be available within 2 weeks and that it should be very close to a final version ready for the official 1.1.1 tag.

Native Language News

Catalan version of 1.1.0

Alexandro Colorado (the translator of these digests into Spanish) forwarded an email from the Catalan users mailing list which informs us that Sun Microsystem and the Open University of Catalunya have release OpenOffice.org 1.1.0 in Catalan.

Lao native-lang site now live

On the dev@native-lang.openoffice.org Anousak Souphavanh wrote to tell us that the
Lao team his finally completed the translation and we uploaded files to the server: http://lo.openoffice.org. It's now live and fully functional.

224 page users document available in Japanese

Yutaka Kachi emailed the dev@native-lang.openoffice.org list to inform them about the release of a 224 page user document for Writer, Calc, Impress, Draw, and data sources.
You can download sxw-file and pdf-file from [Documents & files] section of ja.openoffice.org.

In 2002, I wrote a guidebook titled "OpenOffice.org 1.0 StartKit" to describe an older version of OpenOffice.org. "OpenOffice.org Open Manual 1.0.0" is an improved version of this commercial guidebook.

Creation of this document is sponsored by IPA(Japan Information-technology Promotion Agency). I had the cooperation of AIST(National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology), Good-day Inc and mokuba-sha. I would like to say thank you to everybody who gave me a chance and support me to create this document.

Yutaka release the document under the PDL license and will be maintaining this document. He also welcomes translations of this user document.

In Other Development News

GDB weekly snapshot now contains support for pending breakpoints

Caolán McNamara wrote to tell the dev@openoffice.apache.org mailing list about
the latest gdb weekly snapshot which now contains support for "pending breakpoints", aka future-breakpoints, aka deferred-breakpoints. So you can place breakpoints on methods and lines in sourcefiles which cannot be resolved at insertion time.
The gdb tool is used by developers to debug programs and this feature is very helpful when trying to debug a program with a lot of shared libraries, as currently you have to wait until the library you want to examine is loaded before you can insert a breakpoint. This new features means that you can insert the breakpoint before the shared library is actually loaded.

Thessalonica: a new package for multilingual word processing in OOo

Alexej Kryukov emailed the users@openoffice.apache.org mailing list to announce a tool for multilingual word processing he migrated from MSWord to OOo so that he could work completely with OOo.
Thessalonica provides 2 main functions: it allows to easily input foreign (e. g. accented) characters using custom input methods, and also to convert texts from various non-standard 8 bit encodings to Unicode and vice versa. Currently all this functionality is oriented mainly to classical Greek, but Thessalonica may be adapted for other languages, e.g. it also includes an input method for accented Latin letters.

Since Thessalonica for OOo is written in Python, it may be of interest also for OOo programmers as an example of a large project based on PyUNO.

If you find Thessalonica useful, please consider supporting some issues mentioned in the documentation. Of course any submissions like new conversion tables, input methods,translations of interface strings and/or help pages to other languages are very welcome.

Opening Open Formats with XSLT

Bob DuCharme in XML.com wrote an article explaining how he used XSLT on Impress slides to produce speaker notes:
Once I saw the XML that its slide presentation program created, it took me less time to write a stylesheet that did exactly what I wanted than it took to download OpenOffice over the conference hotel's T1 line.
As well as describing the exact XSLT used, Bob, finishes with:
OpenOffice's ability to read PowerPoint, Word, and Excel binary files and to then save them as XML means that XSLT developers can take advantage of vast new sets of data. You can also create documents using OpenOffice instead of Word, Excel, or PowerPoint, and add XSLT stylesheets to your workflow to let coworkers do new things with their documents, spreadsheets, and presentations.

Faire-part - Announcement Tool

Laurent Godard one of the macro experts announced on the dev@native-lang.openoffice.org a new tool to
It is a draw document that let you build some announcements by folding a sheet (something that i used long time ago in a "published" commercial application
The document is available here.

Mailing list problems

OpenOffice.org mailing lists were again severely affected by the MyDoom virus. It is hoped that new hardware for the http://openoffice.org site will help the situation.

This weeks Issuezilla summary

Many bugs have been worked on and resolved (as of Monday Feb 09 2004):

 No this week  Change from last week
Total issues submitted in the week 257
 -117
Issues submitted in the week resolved or closed 55
 -50
Issues which have the status UNCONFIRMED 310
 -40
Issues which have the status NEW 991
 +20
Issues which have the status STARTED 1073
 +5
Issues which have the status FIXED 7803
 +53
(a more detailed set of statistics is available here)

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

week 6 (2004):

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