LibreOffice CorelDraw Import filter - text support hatches out

Uff, it is done!!!

We started to work on the text support inside libcdr already before the Libre Graphics Meeting in Vienna. We worked hard during the talks and the long evenings after having eaten some portions of Wienerschnitzl.

Now we are proud to announce that we managed to release yesterday libcdr-0.0.8 with "basic initial primitive [u]ncomplete" (further BIPU) text support. At the moment, we are supporting only a couple of parameters as a font face and font size and we are able to detect the encoding and produce a corresponding utf-8 string. Far from being perfect, it is nonetheless a milestone, because in the FOSS world, there was no support for CorelDraw text before.

We know that you prefer to look at nice pictures instead of reading bad text. So, this gives your heart's desires.

A simple document with text in CorelDraw 7:

The same document opened in a build of LibreOffice from yesterday:

At the moment, libcdr is able to convert text in CorelDraw documents from versions 7 to 16. Nonetheless, we know already roughly how to read it in files of lower versions and we will add the support for next release. In the same way, we will extend our support of other text properties, like font colour, transparency, effects, paragraph alignments, character positions, etc.

How can I test it? All this goodness will be part of LibreOffice 3.6.0 release. You will be able to test the text support in the 3.6.0 beta2 pre-release. For the brave, any of the daily builds that are built from a code checkout after June 11th also include libcdr-0.0.8 and thus the text support in CorelDraw files.

As usual, this is a free and open source software project and, as such, it delights in developers that want to help. So, if you feel the itch, patches can be sent to libreoffice-dev mailing list. And, do not forget to find a way to join the #libreoffice-dev channel at irc.freenode.net in order to meet other developers. We can promis you that you will feel at home in the LibreOffice community.

LibreOffice MS Publisher Import filter - young but strong baby

As Sophie Gauthier announced in the language of Voltaire, LibreOffice was branched for the beta phase in view of the 3.6 release. This is a major step in order to bring the features we were working on during the last half a year to the end users. But, it is also oportunity to bring to the main codebase all the nifty nice features that were developed in feature branches and targeted for the next big release, presumably the 3.7.

It is this way that the first version of our new Microsoft Publisher import filter landed to the master. This filter is developed by Brennan Vincent from the University of Arizona in the frame of the Google Summer of Code. Although being a work in progress and supporting for the while only the Publisher 2003 file-format, the progress is spectacular. Brennan has been busy like a bee even long before the start of the program. After only two weeks from the official kick-off, we have a first (non-)release, libmspub-0.0.0.

And as the careful readers of this blog already know, an image speaks louder then thousand words, here are the pics:

A random document from the Internet opened in Microsoft Publisher 2003:

The same document opened in LibreOffice master build from yesterday:

With Valek Filippov, we have a lot of fun mentoring this project. If anybody of the distinguished readership wants to join this effort, the code of libmspub lives in LibreOffice freedesktop.org repository. The patches can be sent to libreoffice-dev mailing list. And, do not forget to find a way to join the #libreoffice-dev channel at irc.freenode.net in order to meet other developers.

You will never regret the decision to get involved in LibreOffice.