libwpd-0.8.2

Just to tell the world that libwpd-0.8.2 was released today.

This release is the "bestest" ever since libwpd-0.8.1 and features mainly a huge improvement of WP5 extended characters handling. Nevertheless some other bugs were fixed in this release too. For more details, consult the release notes.

Those that build OpenOffice.org with system libwpd are kindly encouraged to upgrade, those that use internal libwpd will have to wait for the integration of CWS fs01.

 

N.B.: I am nowadays editing my blogs in pure html directly without using any kind of GUI help. It is my prayer and hope that this time I will not break Planet Go-OOo.

How to switch off the automatic bidirectional support ?!

WordPerfect is not really a BiDi wordprocessor. At least the versions released in Europe and America. If you want to include an Arabic or Hebrew text, you have to enter it litterally backwards, so that it shows correctly.

Once the WordPerfect document converted by libwpd, the characters from the special Hebrew and Arabic character sets become normal UTF-8 encoded characters. Some logic inside OOo detects that the characters are from unicode range that normally belongs to RTL languages and renders them right-to-left by default. This means that all Arabic and Hebrew text that shows correctly in WordPerfect is reversed in OOo.

I would not mind to have someone with clue explain me how to force OOo to render ALL characters left-to-right, independently from the unicode range they belong to.

Thanks, Smokey!

Thank to Smokey Ardisson of NeoOffice/J fame, libwpd is now converting Arabic characters inside WordPerfect documents.

After a bit of additional polishing of the conversion of other charsets, this improvement (and many others) is likely to land in the SRC680 tree in time for the 2.0 release.

Evolution on Windows

It is nice to see that tml managed to make run evolution on Windows. It means that besides a fine opensource office suite, there will soon be a fine opensource groupware client for Windows. All this without a need to put on glows :-)

Blog Entry No 1.

I was wanting to start my blog some time ago, but between the decision and the achievement is always a big gap :-) Nevertheless, it is here.

Since some time, I have been hacking on enhancing the mapping of WordPerfect character sets to unicode inside libwpd. Not really very exciting job, but quite necessary since libwpd is used by OpenOffice.org 2.0 and any problem will be seen by a huge amount of people.

After that, I will continue in some of my libwpd refactoring. Again, basically not really exciting work, but I do not see how to implement the funny WP tabs (flush right, hard tabs, etc.) without proper implementation of paragraph boundaries.

That's all folks!