Older blog entries for caolan (starting at number 227)

scrolling the sidebar with the scroll-wheel

The sidebar comes with a vertical scrollbar for when content doesn't fit in the available space. But the mouse pointer has to be right over the scrollbar to use your scroll wheel, it doesn't work to hover over the content of the sidebar and move the wheel there.

Which is annoying, but on trying to fix that I realized the snag with allowing the wheel-scroll over the sidebar. If you scroll the sidebar down and a widget contained in it ends up under the mouse pointer then if it is a widget which accepts the wheel-scroll it's very easy to accidentally make a change to the widget that has scrolled under the mouse pointer. Spin Buttons for example.

As an aside, this is the exact same problem that I have in glade where I scroll down the property pane with the scroll-wheel and accidentally end up over the "Ellipsize" listbox and inadvertently change it from None to Middle. So if you find labels in LibreOffice with "..." in the middle of them for no good reason, this is why.

Anyway, I still want to scroll the sidebar, but I don't want to end up with this conflicting target-location widget wheel-scroll conflict, so my solution is to continue to send the wheel-scroll events to the previous target so long as the position of the mouse pointer is at the same place as the last wheel event and the time between events is <= the default timeout for raising help tips, i.e. 1/2 a second.

Seems to work well for me, scrolling the sidebars "just works" on master (LibreOffice 4.4) with the scroll wheel without random changes to any scroll-wheel sensitive contents but you can still use the scroll-wheel to modify those widgets on moving to them or when the little timeout completes.

Syndicated 2014-06-27 15:57:00 (Updated 2014-06-27 15:57:58) from Caolán McNamara

18 Jun 2014 (updated 18 Jun 2014 at 16:15 UTC) »

dialog conversion status, 99 to go

 Converting LibreOffice dialogs to .ui format, 99 conversions remaining

We've now converted all but 99 of LibreOffice’s classic fixed widget size and position .src format elements to the GtkBuilder .ui format. This is due to the much appreciated efforts of Palenik Mihály and Szymon Kłos, two of our GSOC2014 students, who are tackling the last bunch of hard to find or hard to convert ones.


Current conversion stats are:
741 .ui files currently exist
There are 46 unconverted dialogs
There are 53 unconverted tabpages
An estimated additional 99 .ui are required
We are 88% of the way through.

Syndicated 2014-06-18 15:17:00 (Updated 2014-06-18 15:29:38) from Caolán McNamara

selected and unselected slides with mouse over

It will be possible in LibreOffice Impress 4.3 to distinguish between selected and unselected slides when the mouse over highlight activates.

I mean, in previous versions, slide 2 here is drawn the same, when the mouse is over it in the slide pane, regardless of whether it is selected or unselected

 While in 4.3 the two modes are drawn respectively as

There's also a little subtle gradient added in for good measure.

Syndicated 2014-05-12 13:57:00 (Updated 2014-05-12 13:57:27) from Caolán McNamara

fit slide to window statusbar icon

LibreOffice 4.3 Impress now has a "Fit slide to window" icon in the statusbar alongside the zoom slider.

Additionally when you change zoom the slide now automatically centers itself. Hopefully the addition of the one-click to fit slide to window and the automatic centering on zoom-change will successfully address some of the complaining I've heard about the suffering that scrolling a slide causes.

Syndicated 2014-05-08 13:47:00 (Updated 2014-05-08 13:47:12) from Caolán McNamara

format all comments

As part of our series of trying to solve in-house needs LibreOffice 4.3 will have a "format all comments" feature to change the character properties of all comments in a document.


Syndicated 2014-04-23 11:12:00 (Updated 2014-04-23 11:12:25) from Caolán McNamara

Printing comments in margins

Because a fellow RedHat employee requested it on Friday, LibreOffice Writer 4.3 will be able to print comments in the margin effectively as they appear on screen, which should take care of the old fdo#36815 feature request. There is now an additional "place comments in margin" option in the print dialog (and writer print options). On screen the comments are placed outside the real page area, so to actually get them onto the paper when printing, the contents of the page needs to be scaled down by approximately 75% of its original size to make space to fit the comments in.

Here's the additional comment place option in the print dialog


Here's some sample pdf output

Syndicated 2014-04-16 10:16:00 (Updated 2014-04-16 10:16:17) from Caolán McNamara

700 conversion target reached


Pushed through the 700 widget conversion barrier this week. The FindDialogs wiki page has helped quite a bit. There remains quite a few blanks in there though, so help still needed to identify the route to launch those unknown dialogs and tabpages via the UI.

Of the newly identified ones I'm a little amused by RID_OFAPAGE_SMARTTAG_OPTIONS which (we think) can only be seen when a smart tags extension is installed. Is there a known working extension out there that enables this to be shown when installed ?

Trivia titbit: we have converted eight different passwords dialogs. And there remains one unconverted one whose route to being launched is currently unknown

Current conversion stats are:
706 .ui files currently exist
There are 67 unconverted dialogs
There are 68 unconverted tabpages
An estimated additional 135 .ui are required
We are 83% of the way through.

Syndicated 2014-03-28 20:54:00 (Updated 2014-03-28 20:54:44) from Caolán McNamara

FindingTheBlastedLastBunchOfDialogs

I'm finding it a fairly slow process to find the last 175 dialogs/tabpages in the LibreOffice UI. I have the full list of identifiers, and it's generally not a difficult process to find how to activate any individual dialog from the UI but in the aggregate it takes time and breaks the development flow if I have to stop/start to find the next one to convert.

So, you can help :-) This FindDialogs wiki page contains the list of identifiers and some hints as to how to find them in the source and in the help documentation. That's generally sufficient to determine what dialog they describe and how to launch it.

Filling out those remaining blank "how to activate" entries will speed up the conversion process.

Syndicated 2014-03-05 13:32:00 (Updated 2014-03-05 13:32:33) from Caolán McNamara

dialog conversion status, 190 to go

  Converting LibreOffice dialogs to .ui format, 190- conversions remaining

We've now converted 77% of LibreOffice’s classic fixed widget size and position .src format elements to the GtkBuilder .ui format.

Using the guesstimate tool ./bin/count-todo-dialogs the current status is:

666 .ui files currently exist
There are 96 unconverted dialogs
There are 93 unconverted tabpages
An estimated additional 189 .ui are required
We are 77% of the way through.


What makes this mini-milestone interesting to me is that there are less that 200 to go now, and there are less than 100 of each of the two categories of elements remaining.

The latest of this latest bunch of conversions is the conversion of the pivot table dialog which has the side effect that the pivot table dialog now fits into a 768 pixel tall netbook screen when in expanded mode.

Syndicated 2014-02-13 16:13:00 (Updated 2014-02-13 16:13:14) from Caolán McNamara

FOSDEM2014

My FOSDEM2014 LibreOffice .ui format a11y notes for developers presentation is available now. Basic notes on the importance of setting mnemonics and how to migrate pre-existing accessibility relations out of explicit c++ code and into GtkBuilder a11y markup.

Syndicated 2014-02-05 11:09:00 (Updated 2014-02-05 11:09:09) from Caolán McNamara

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