Friday, June 10, 2011

LibreOffice Visio Import filter - first steps of a new baby

The Google Summer of Code started some weeks ago and we have some nice projects at LibreOffice too.

I am having again this year the privilege to mentor a brilliant student Eilidh McAdam working on a Microsoft Visio import filter. She got up to the speed very quickly to the point that she is now very intimate with any hexadecimal number of any width. And the first results of her diving into the binary world can speak for themselves.

This Visio document : Visio Document can be currently imported into LibreOffice Draw: LibreOffice Draw document.

For those that might be interested in such a detail as the source code of this endavour, the filter is developped as two elements, a shared library living here and an import filter based on this library living in the LibreOffice's writerperfect module.

For any question or encouragement, feel free to join our #libreoffice-dev irc channel at irc.freenode.net and ping tibbylickle (for encouragements) or Fridrich (for blames).