Status of OOXML support in Libre Office

[Michael Meeks]

Hi Aakriti,

On Thu, 2012-06-14 at 11:35 +0530, Aakriti Gupta wrote:
> I am currently interning at a company and my project is to
> find/improve a tool for exporting MS Office formats to PDFs. A huge
> number of documents would need to be converted to pdfs.
> 
> Could you suggest the approximate time in which this goal could be
> achieved, considering that I'm totally new to LibreOffice? 

	That depends in large part on your ability, application &
experience ;-) it's hard to predict. Even programmers with equivalent
experience differ by 10x in productivity.

> I have about 4 weeks to work on this project as part of the
> internship. Could you suggest which of these issues could be fixed in
> this timeframe?

	Some of them certainly. Let me give a rough estimate of time it (might)
take one of our guys to fix these. ie. someone who already had a compile
up and running & was ready to code.
 
> The feasibility of fixing a considerable number of issues in the given
> timeframe would help them decide the best option for this project. 

	Sure. Incidentally, using hybrid PDFs (ie. PDFs that contain the ODF
source document) is a really good choice for this sort of migration -
then at least you can load and edit the document later in (near) it's
original form - modulo any OOXML -> ODF migration issues.

On Thu, 2012-06-14 at 11:35 +0530, Aakriti Gupta wrote:
>         > These are certain obvious bugs which have been filed too:
>         > - The gradient in background colors, shapes, etc. is
>         exported
>         > incorrectly. (e.g. bug 45505 )

	I'm not sure it's as incorrect as all that, cf. the bug - but perhaps a
couple of man days to unwind what is going on.

>         > - The text effects, like shadow, soft edges, glow, etc. are
>         missing (e.g. bug 44135)

	Rendering transparency as grey (urk !) a man day perhaps; the other
text effects may simply not be imported and rendered a missing core
feature ? (not sure).

>         > - Embedded charts, etc. are missing

	Clearly we can save & load charts elsewhere, so some level of new
internal plumbing required; I'd say a man week; we could find a mentor
to help out with this piece quite easily I think.

	Stock prices may plummet as well as go down, your house may be at risk
of being swapped for a cup-of-coffee by your bank if you fail to
re-capitalise the bank - etc. etc. ;-)

	HTH,

		Michael.

-- 
michael.meeks at suse.com  <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot