For the last three months, I’ve been working with Libreoffice, an open source organisation selected for the Google Summer of Code program. Working at LibreOffice has been a great experience for me. It has been really steep learning curve this summer under Google Summer of Code. This has further enhanced my interest towards open source.

Project Motivation and Overview

SmartArt is a nice feature that allows users to quickly add charts/diagrams to presentations. LibreOffice has a partial implementation as an experimental feature, my project was to implement as many features and to correctly render the smartart. Interested folks can click here.

All GSoC related Patches

In chronological order(Some of them are under review at this point of time):

1. Unit test for Line algorithm

2. tdf#117761 Corrected Snake Algorithm

3. Smartart: Corrected Line Algorithm

4. coverity#1436015 UNUSED_VALUE

5. Smartart : test documents

6. Unit test for Snake Algorithm

7. Unit test for Chevron Smartart and modified Unit test for Line algorithm.

8. Support txAnchorVert parameter

9. Node layout information

10. Support parTxRTLAlign parameter

11. Support ctrShpMap(Center Shape Mapping) Paramter

12. Smartart Pyramid: Support Inverted Pyramid

13. Unit test: Smartart-Chevron

14. Smartart Inverted Pyramid Unit test

15. Unit test: Smartart Pyramid

16. Composite algorithm: support parameter ar

17. Composite Algorithm: Adding constraint value support

18. Smartart Right to left Chevron

19. Unit test: SmartArt Chevron right to left

20. Smartart: Added Hierarchy Algorithm

21. Support autoTxRot parameter in Text algorithm

22. Support autotxRot

23. SmartArt Pyramid: Now lays out shapes

Future work

There is still a lot of features to implement to correctly render all the smartarts after which, creating of dialogue box to directly create smartart into the document can be done to ease users and increase the productivity.

There was so much to grasp during GSoC and I would like to thank the LibreOffice community for continuously helping and supporting me to complete the project.

Thank you Google for such an awesome summer program.

Quick Links

If you want to contribute to LibreOffice : Get involved

Summer of Code Project Page: https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/projects/#5390502426312704

Ideas Page: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Development/GSoC/Ideas#SmartArt_editing_in_Impress

Week wise reports: https://medium.com/@ekanshjha

Smartart Pyramid: Support Inverted Pyramid

I’ve worked to implement the support such that when powerpoint presentation imported from MS PPT 2007 it shows the inverted pyramid. If you want to test it you can go to libreoffice/sd/qa/unit/data/pptx and open smartart-invertedPyramid.pptx on libreoffice impress.

There are some parameters which needs to be supported and they can be done in followup patches.

Smartart Inverted Pyramid Unit test

This unit test is regarding the inverted pyramid which tests the parameters and appearance for example it’s rotation and text etc.

Unit test: Smartart-Chevron

This Unit test is regarding the smartart which relates to line algorithm but it was not implemented until now, it’ll test the linearity when spreading the children by asserting the number of shapes, Y position and text inside the shapes.

Support ctrShpMap(Center Shape Mapping) Parameter

It relates to the cycle algorithm. A value of none specifies to place nodes around a circle. A value of fNode specifies to place the first node in the center and the remaining nodes around the circle with default is none. In simple language it specifies where to place nodes in relation to the center circle.

Support parTxRTLAlign(Parent Text Right to Left Align) parameter

If the graphic is used with language settings that display text from right to left(like Hebrew), the text should align to the right. There are two parent text(LTR and RTL) alignment parameters that determine the value to use according to system settings. So for that graphic, we should also include parTxRTLAlign (parent text right-to-left align) with default is center.

SmartArt Pyramid

This algorithm was initially not implemented, because of that it was not able to show shapes which relates to pyramid, but with this patch, It rendered correctly except some minor adjustment values issues which can be fixed in the upcoming patches.

Node layout information

Added two cases in switch statement:

AnimLvl: This variable is used to indicate the animate by level string which is displayed to a user in the user interface. When animLvl is set to ctr. This is being defined in a radial type diagram which allows the user to specify that animation is to start at the center of the diagram.

AnimOne: This variable is used to indicate the string to use for one-by-one animation in the user interface. This is used primarily when defining hierarchical diagrams to specify different ways animations applies to different levels of the diagram.

Unit test: Smartart Pyramid

Added unit testing for Pyramid which tests the Y-position, text in shape and height of the child. But a error is creating problem for building it, tried rebase but it didn’t work, would be awesome if anyone can point to the cause of that error.

If the text is text is a bulleted list, it should be left aligned and top aligned. For the first level of text within a shape, the default is to center the text vertically and horizontally, so these behaviors are changed using the parameters parTxLTRAlign (parent text LTR align) and txAnchorVert (text anchor vertical), setting them to l (left) and t (top), respectively. I’ve submitted the patch regarding this.

I’m trying to support more features which will improve the algorithms.

However, I think the problem is solved and I have pushed the patch of Unit test for snake algorithm based smartarts, which tests the position of the child nodes in normal from left to right layout and from right to left layout, but I think it should show merge conflict as it is related to one of the patch which is not merged, but it’s not showing merge conflict.

I’ll be including more unit tests in order to check the smartart features, smartart documents, and will fix some of the issues in the upcoming week.

I plan to write unit tests for various smartarts, such that when they are fixed we can find out by the unit test if anything is wrong or not.

Moreover, I am trying to fix some issues regarding smartart-pyramid and working to fix the issues where visibility of the bullets is off.

I got information about the Coverity error in my submitted patch “Corrected Line Algorithm” : “*** CID 1436015: Code maintainability issues (UNUSED_VALUE)”.

I’ve fixed that in this week. Moreover, child width and height doesn’t depend on nIncX and nIncY, so I’ve removed that code, it relates only to the position of the child. I’ve submitted the patch with the name “coverity#1436015 UNUSED_VALUE” and it has been merged.

There is no such significant change in the rendering of the smartart but it was important for future changes.

I have also submitted the unit test for the Line Algorithm which asserts the position of the child nodes as well as it asserts that the child nodes are in the same horizontal level.

I’ll submit more unit tests in the coming week with some major changes in the smartarts, and will be adding the test documents to test the rendering of the shapes.

P.S. I passed my first evaluation. Thanks to the whole community.

I’ve learnt a lot this month and have solved issues regarding smartart import.

Quick Review

I started by adding the number of Microsoft Powerpoint 2007 test documents which were unable to load correctly in LibreOffice and pushing them.

Later on, I worked on Snake algorithm and first, I corrected Snake algorithm as it was not able to render the diagrams properly and then implementing the support to the same Direction and Reverse Direction. The algorithm works quite well. Now it displays correct position of child layout nodes along a linear path in two dimensions, with the correct number of rows and columns and aspect ratio, this algorithm is for smartarts like Basic Block List — grouped blocks of information. It also specifies the behaviour of the direction that additional nodes are added to new rows or columns in the snake algorithm.

I then changed my concentration to Line algorithm as it was also incorrectly rendered, I fixed the aspect ratio related problem, earlier it displayed odd height of the children nodes as compared to their width.

I have added the unit test for Line algorithm in that, TestMaxDepth test checks the linear (lin) algorithm such that it arranges child layout nodes along a linear path.

Present Week Work

I’ve added support to autoTxRot parameter in Text algorithm it specifies how text is oriented relative to the shape, according to values: none, upright(default) and gravity.

I’ve changed just a bit in upright value as it rotates the text negative to the rotation of the shape.

Future Work

For autoTxRot: I’ll be creating a document that shows the various possibilities of the rotation, and a unit test that asserts that they are fine after the patch (and fail without it) — in a follow-up commit.

For Line Algorithm: will be creating a unit test that asserts that the shapes are at the same positions as in PowerPoint.

Test Documents: Adding more test documents to test the features of the shapes.

For Snake Algorithm: Adding unit tests for these changes & also for the revDir and sameDir.

There is a lot of work in improvement like rendering of pyramid shapes. I’ll be fixing more issues in the next month.

P.S. Please read my previous blog for project description and week-wise report.

In Week 1 and 2, I added new methods to Snake Algorithm which is for Basic Block list smartart types. Please Click here if you want to read the previous Blog.

This Week I started with Line Algorithm which displays odd ratio of height and width.

Changed some code so that Smartart displays Satisfying height to width ratio, will improve height to width ratio if asked by mentors.

I’ve written a unit test for Line Algorithm, particularly for Smartart MaxDepth, such that the child spreads across the x-axis.

Last Week, I mentioned about adding some new Style to Snake Algorithm with reverse Direction.

When we pass reverse Direction(revDir) parameter in the code it should behave as mentioned above, but it was not implemented until now. I’ve added support to this feature as the child nodes will be displayed in the snake manner described above. Please see the below image for a more clear idea.

‘Test’ is the first node and ‘a’ is the second node and normally will be spread along the x-axis, but when smartart changes row, third node ‘b’ should be placed below the second node and this pattern will continue until the last node.

Below is the behavior when Basic Block list is applied to 8 nodes.

I have learnt a lot, thanks to the whole community. I’ll be fixing more issues in the upcoming week.

My Project is on Smartart Editing in impress.

I’ll be describing my project in a separate blog.

There are so many smartarts which require proper rendering in LibreOffice and hence, I started with Snake Algorithm which is for basic block List.

Here is the layout which LibreOffice render.

As it is clear the number of rows and columns were different from the Microsoft office designed layout as well as the last node position also differ from the original. I made some changes which fix this issue and I am happy to see the results.

I have corrected the Snake Algorithm: Now it displays correct position of child layout nodes along a linear path in two dimensions, with the correct number of rows and columns and aspect ratio, this algorithm is for smartarts like Basic Block List — grouped blocks of information. It also specifies the behaviour of the direction that additional nodes are added to new rows or columns in the snake algorithm.

I have implemented for the same Direction and submitted it, waiting for the review:

To Do: If this patch got merged then, in the upcoming week I’ll be implementing this algorithm for the reverse direction:

I have learnt a lot, thanks to the whole community. I’ll be fixing more issues in the upcoming week.