[GSoC 2015 - Dynamic Text Chaining in Draw] (Re-)Introductions

[Matteo Campanelli]

Hi all,
TL;DR: just wanted to say hi :) ; I'm working on a continuation of a
project on Draw from last year; some parts of the project will be messy and
in the next days I'll contact this mailing list for further help.

I'm Matteo and I've recently been accepted at GSoC 2015 to work on text
features in Draw. In my work, Thorsten Behrens and Fridrich Strba will be
my official mentors and will take (I'm sure) good hackery care of me and
the project.
For those of you who hung around the GSoC conversation last Summer, yes,
this project is a follow up on a prototype developed last year.

If anyone were interested, my proposal for this Summer can be found here
<http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/proposal/public/google/gsoc2015/matteocam/5700735861784576>
and
here
<https://matteocam.github.io/output/announcing-chained-text-in-draw-a-prototype-implementation.html>
is a short post on the current prototype (note however that there was
fortunately some progress since and some details of the post are somewhat
outdated).
In a nutshell, this year I plan to completely implement dynamic text
overflowing among Draw's text boxes and add hyphenation features. The first
task turned out  to be quite a challenge last year and still requires  much
more work. The first part of the summer will be dedicated to finish that.

The goal for this week is to dive into old code and get a technical sense
of the main current issues, then ask for specific help and ideas on them.
An informal description of the situation is that now: 1) text can be moved
only "as paragraphs" (whereas it should be broken in arbitrary pieces), 2)
there is no edit-mode code for chaining, everything happens after user
edited, 3) my current code is not merge-able to master yet  (in particolar
it breaks  an older patch to fix #i119885# and yields some occasional, hard
to replicate SIGABRT-s).
Since I failed last year in this respect, I am also planning to start a
blog _now_ about technical aspects of the work, so that it is easier for
anyone who wanted to jump in (now and later) to have both a global as well
as awareness of details of the project and I can reference to that in my
posts on the list.

That said, it is great to be back on the LibreOffice ship.
Happy hacking, everybody.

Cheers,
Matteo
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/libreoffice/attachments/20150504/81d759f4/attachment.html>