Older blog entries for caolan (starting at number 193)

libreoffice help ported to clucene

From the things that make me happy department. Years ago our help documentation source was parsed with a bunch of java tools. At the time gcj was the only possibility for us in RHEL/Fedora and the build time for all localized langpacks that we included was about 26 hours in our build system.

Which was a bit depressing.

So I rewrote it in c++, taking super care to keep the same JavaHelp-derived format and so forth. Which brought build times down to about 10 hours.

Which made me happy.

At some stage though, then it was decided to then index our help with lucene, which brought back java as a build-time and run-time dependency for building help and searching it at run-time.

Which made me sad again, though openjdk was the default for us at this stage, so it wasn’t as much of a pain, though that’s why you have that perceptual lag when you first search for a term in help.

But now, for LibreOffice 3.6, Gert van Valkenhoef has ported our lucene code to clucene. helpcontent builds faster, and there’s no lag on searching for something in help.

Which made me happy.

Distro’s that want to use –with-system-clucene will need to build and install clucene’s contribs-lib

Syndicated 2012-03-08 12:21:41 from Caolan McNamara

cross-compiling LibreOffice for windows (mingw32) under Fedora

Dave Tardon’s new howto cross-compile LibreOffice under Fedora to target mingw32 under Fedora, http://dtardon.fedorapeople.org/mingw/

Syndicated 2012-03-06 11:55:37 from Caolan McNamara

syncfonts is handy

When debugging font related stuff its typical that the problem can only be triggered by a specific set of fonts. Here’s a rough-and-ready syncfonts script which when given the output of fc-list -v will try and install the fonts that are missing and remove the extraenous ones via yum, which works for the common case

Syndicated 2012-02-29 14:49:49 from Caolan McNamara

fakemail is handy

For debugging mail problem, e.g. when debugging some emailmerge stuff in LibreOffice recently, fakemail was really really handy when you have a bug which requires generating a couple of hundred emails in quick succession to trigger.

Syndicated 2011-11-21 13:00:05 from Caolan McNamara

libexttextcat 3.2.0

Released libexttextcat 3.2.0 (Extended Text Categorization used to guess the language that input text is written in). It can be found in this download dir. No code changes from 3.1.1, but adds a large collection of extra language signatures to nearly add the same language support to libexttextcat as LibreOffice supports, modulo languages that LibreOffice supports which don’t have a convenient UDHR translation to use as a basis to generate a language fingerprint.

Syndicated 2011-11-13 22:41:59 from Caolan McNamara

CTL/CTL format character previews

As Lior Kaplan demonstrated at LibreOffice 2011 Paris, our format character preview really sucks for CTL and CJK users. If no CTL/CJK text is selected then no CTL sample text is shown, and the CJK sample text is from the fontname itself. Many font names are just Latin text, so give no indication what they look like in the actual script/language that is being written in.

e.g. Old dialog for CTL, will only preview some Western text if no text is selected, no attempt to show any sample CTL text, or even the CTL fontname. For CJK it will additional show the fontname of the CJK font in the preview, which isn’t helpful if the CJK fontname contains no CJK glyphs.

Simply adding the CTL fontname wouldn’t help much, seeing as the fontname is David CLM. So, currently reusing the preview text used in the font-dropdown first stab at “doing the right thing” gives me…

Code for all this is mostly in svtools/source/misc/sampletext.cxx where there is now some hugely over-engineered set of heuristics to guess the best script a font is tuned for and various functions to generate suitable text when all we have is the font, versus the font+language vs just the language and if we want a short identifier to classify what script a font might be good to render vs a longer sequence of sample text for a font preview.

Probably best to drop rendering the fontname in the Western case for the text preview and use some sample text there too, at least for the mixed Western+CTL+CJK case as its confusing to have a font name rendered and some sample text in another font.

Syndicated 2011-10-21 10:59:53 from Caolan McNamara

PhagsPa and Tai Le, sample text ?

Looking through my fonts that are clearly tuned for a single specific script, there remain two scripts that niggle me as I don’t have suitable sample text for them. i.e. PhagsPa and Tai Le. I’m looking for a short snippet of sample text in those scripts which is suitable to stick into the font drop down preview. Ideally something fairly equivalent to “Alphabet”, “Script”, “PhagsPa/Tai Le” or “Tibetan/Tai Lü”.

Syndicated 2011-10-19 22:29:50 from Caolan McNamara

libexttextcat: text guessing feature

LibreOffice inherited a text language guesser, based on textcat from wise-guys.nl and extended by Jocelyn Merand to basically handle UTF-8 text. This is the thing that makes the suggestions as to what language your text might really be in when you right click on some misspelled text and chose set language.

We’ve now spun this off as a standalone libexttextcat and fixed up some conversion problems from the original selection of 8bit encodings and generated new language fingerprints in other cases, which should give better results for various languages, and allow us to enable checking for some languages which was disabled until now.

The current list of languages it attempts to detect can be seen here

Here’s a plausible process to add your favourite language to it, given git clone git://anongit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice/libexttextcat and bootstrapping from the insanely-translated UDHR using Abkhaz as an example.


cd libexttextcat/langclass/ShortTexts/
wget http://unicode.org/udhr/d/udhr_abk.txt
#skip english header, name result using BCP-47
tail -n+7 udhr_abk.txt > ab.txt
cd ../LM
../../src/createfp < ../ShortTexts/ab.txt > ab.lm
echo ab.lm ab--utf8 >> ../fpdb.conf

Then update the check target in src/Makefile.am to confirm the detection of ShortTexts/ab.txt as ab works using make check

I’ll remove the necessity of a configuration file in a later version, and convert the result to a BCP-47 tag. For the moment it remains a drop in replacement for the original solution which necessitates retaining the slightly odd language tag syntax.

Syndicated 2011-09-28 14:10:11 from Caolan McNamara

git, really nifty after all

Maybe there’s something to the cult-of-git after all :-) . vcl/unx/source/fontmanager/fontcache.cxx had some code which painstakingly constructed a string, only to do nothing with it. Clearly at some time in the past it was used, so when did its use go away. This is a file which has been moved around over the years from place to place, hmm, potentially tricky to scratch the itch of knowing when it happened ?, not at all…

git log --follow --oneline -S'suspiciously missing variable' /path/to/file.cxx

and 2 seconds later I have a list of 5 commits, there it is at the top of the list. Back in 2005, a rework of the font cache where the stat on a file was optimized out, while the constructed path to the file remained. No undetected nightmare merge bug then, just a missed micro optimization opportunity.

Syndicated 2011-09-19 23:57:25 from Caolan McNamara

all text rendered with cairo

So, as of today all LibreOffice (3.5 onwards) text rendering under X goes through cairo. This was already the case in practice for horizontal text for quite a while, the additional change is that its true for vertical text as well now.

before

after

Yes, I know it’s still rather sub-optimal. The current implementation is basically intended to be bug-for-bug compatible for now, though I couldn’t resist improving the positioning of 0x30FC.

Test-case at http://cgit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice/core/tree/qadevOOo/testdocs/vertical-testcase.odt

Syndicated 2011-08-19 11:56:02 from Caolan McNamara

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