Tuesday, January 31, 2012

LibreOffice CorelDraw Import filter - don't despise the humble beginnings

You might still remember some of my blogs about our new and shiny MS Visio import filter in the upcoming LibreOffice 3.5.0.

But what about 3.6.0? Is it going to be an exciting version too? Well, the answer depends on what kind of things excite you generally, but for sure, there will be a lot of goodness as usual to make the best free office suite even better.

In my free time, I have been working for some time already on the next graphics import filter for LibreOffice. This time it will be a CorelDraw import filter. The horse-power is a library, libcdr. In the same way as libvisio, libcdr reuses the API of libwpg and thus is easily pluggable into LibreOffice reusing all the ODG generator classes of the current writerperfect module. The importer is currently part of the git master tree.

You might be already shouting: "Where are the screenshots?" I know that a picture speaks louder then hundred words, and so here you are served:

Shapes in CorelDraw 7

Simple and more complex shapes in CorelDraw 7

Shapes in LibreOffice Draw

The same shapes imported into LibreOffice Draw.

As you can see, it is an initial implementation, which cannot but get better. If you want to participate in this adventure, you can drop around at our IRC channel #libreoffice-dev channel at irc.freenode.net where a community of smart and friendly developers can direct you.

Stay tuned for more nice pictures as this project advances.