Stuff Michael Meeks is doing | |
This is my (in)activity log. You might like to visit Collabora Productivity a subsidiary of Collabora focusing on LibreOffice support and services for whom I work. Also if you have the time to read this sort of stuff you could enlighten yourself by going to Unraveling Wittgenstein's net or if you are feeling objectionable perhaps here. Failing that, there are all manner of interesting things to read on the LibreOffice Planet news feed. Older items: 2023: ( J F M A M J ), 2022: ( J F M A M J J A S O N D ), 2021, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004, 2003, 2002, 2001, 2000, 1999, legacy html
- Up early; walked to the venue; debugged the xmloff CustomShape engine feature - apparently not working; started to dig into it, eventually made my own engine & started building some shapes too. Series of talks on what had been achieved; had to leave early to get a train. Home to the family.
- The thing I worked on during the hackday was getting at least some start made to the problem of having a QR code engine built-in; courtesy of zint's backend (finding the best version of zint, which seems un-maintained, is remarkably hard - perhaps at some stage we'll want to replace it with a good internal solution). Anyhow - after some significant chew we have a custom-shape in the
feature/barcode branch that renders something like this: 
It was interesting to find & fix the functionality that allows you to enter:
<draw:custom-shape draw:style-name="gr1" ... draw:engine="org.libreoffice.draw.barcode" draw:data="QR code contents">
This apparently lets you create and associate arbitary (even say python) components as 'engines' to render the content of custom-shapes - which is interesting; although apparently not-used; I had to fix that first. Hopefully this can open up a world of pretty & fun new user-created functionality creating and embedding document elements in simple scripting languages.
Of course - lots still remains to be done before this can be useful - and most likely there is a better way of doing it. My hope is that the rest of the code there allows a fall-back to be serialized for users without the required plugin, but I imagine it will need quite some tweaking yet; why not come and play at FOSDEM or the LibreOffice hackfest immediately afterwards. Update posted some technical bits to the dev-list too.
My content in this blog and associated images / data under images/ and data/ directories are (usually) created by me and (unless obviously labelled otherwise) are licensed under the public domain, and/or if that doesn't float your boat a CC0 license. I encourage linking back (of course) to help people decide for themselves, in context, in the battle for ideas, and I love fixes / improvements / corrections by private mail.
In case it's not painfully obvious: the reflections reflected here are my own; mine, all mine ! and don't reflect the views of Collabora, SUSE, Novell, The Document Foundation, Spaghetti Hurlers (International), or anyone else. It's also important to realise that I'm not in on the Swedish Conspiracy. Occasionally people ask for formal photos for conferences or fun.
Michael Meeks (michael.meeks@collabora.com) 