Content controls in Writer Part 2: Half year later

FOSDEM 2023 (https://fosdem.org/2023/schedule/event/lotech_writercontent/), Brussels

Video record: e.g. https://ftp.heanet.ie/mirrors/fosdem-video/2023/H.1308%20(Rolin)/lotech_writercontent.webm

Transcript

1. Miklos Vajna
   Software Engineer
   vmiklos@collabora.com
   2023-02-04
   Content controls in Writer
   Part 2: Half year later
   

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2. 2
   About Miklos
   ● From Hungary
   ● More details:
   https://www.collaboraoffice.com/about-us/
   ● Google Summer of Code 2010 / 2011
   ● Rewrite of the Writer RTF import/export
   ● Then a full-time LibreOffice developer for SUSE
   ● Now a contractor at Collabora
   

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3. 3
   (Rich text) content controls
   Like an input field, but can have rich content
   ● Similar to inline SDT in Word
   ● Can cover multiple text portions, but not paragraphs (unlike
   fieldmarks)
   ● Support nesting
   ● Have a set of properties on them (no field instruction / result)
   

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4. 4
   Aliases & tags
   ● Alias / title is a human-readable identifier, it appears when you
   enter the content control:
   ● Tag is the same, but machine-readable
   

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5. 5
   Emit only one PDF widget for portions
   Writer’s rich content vs PDF’s widget rectangle
   ● Inherent conflict, Word resolves this by plain text export
   ● Can we do better?
   

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6. 6
   Editable in read-only sections
   Read-only sections to lock down by default
   ● But then content controls should be probably an exception
   

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7. 7
   UNO manager for content controls
   Building block for VBA
   ● Similar to e.g. Footnotes
   

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8. 8
   Dropdown with no list items
   By explicitly tracking combox and dropdown state
   ● Previously: has list items?
   ● Now: is combobox? Is dropdown?
   ● Allows having no list items:
   

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9. 9
   Fix RTL render of dropdowns
   SwContentControlButton needs improving:
   ● positioning
   ● rendering
   ● hit-testing
   

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10. 10
    Summary
    Lots of polish since LOCon 2022:
    ● Maps to Word’s primary way of form creation
    (since 2007): structured document tags
    ● ODF can now represent these, exports to PDF
    ● Various types
    ● More properties, editing improvements, better filters, scriptability
    

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11. 11
    Thank you!
    By Miklos Vajna
    @CollaboraOffice
    hello@collaboraoffice.com
    www.collaboraoffice.com
    Join the team: col.la/join
    

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