It has been a long time since I last time blogged about the LibreOffice Visio import filter. My silence did not prevent a pretty cool code from falling gradually into our git repository. To the point where now we are working on the last 5% of features that normally take the 95% of development time. But, let us see what happened since my July blog:
First of all, Eilidh was busy as a bee and, in the second half of the Google Summer of Code, implemented support of stylesheets, stencils and basic text. She also debugged and fixed quite a number of imperfections that Valek found. Frankly speaking, this Google Summer of Code was by far the best from my point of view. We managed to achieve a very good fidelity of import only in about 3 and half months. Impressive.
During the LibreOffice HackFest weekend in Munich, I had a time to add a support for uniform splines in libvisio and to implement the actual import in text on the side of LibreOffice.
The next highlight was the fact that the whole team met in Paris during the LibreOffice Conference 2011. It was delight to meet in person Valek and Eilidh. There is even a photo witnessing this meeting:
 | Valek, me and Eilidh from left to right |
This conference was not only an occasion to know each other a bit better, but also to improve and add some new features to libvisio. During boring parties full of non-developer talk, we withdrew with Eilidh to some corner and improved together the text import: paragraph and span properties, text box properties, etc. Later on, Eilidh added initial support for line markers (aka arrows). Recently we implemented emulation of the last Visio primitive that we did not handle before - Infinite Line.
For those that have big piles of Visio documents on their disks, but cannot read on their favourite Linux distribution: Your pain is coming to an end. The LibreOffice Visio Import filter will be part of LibreOffice 3.5 release, which will be the next major release early next year.
And since images speak louder then thousands of words, here are some pics to illustrate our achievements:
| OrgChart.vsd in Visio | OrgChart.vsd in Draw | |||
 |  | You can see the achievement by comparing with the pictures from my June blog |
| DNetwork.vsd in Visio | DNetwork.vsd in Draw | |||
 |  | Compare with the picture from this libregraphicsworld.org article. |
| Calendar.vsd in Visio | Calendar.vsd in Draw | |||
 |  | This picture shows a good mix of the complicated features likestencils with NURBS, text fields, gradients, stencil text, etc. |
If you are impatient and cannot wait anymore, just grab one of the daily builds uploaded by our tinderboxes here and enjoy all that goodness on your own.
