Aarhus: Presentations & the Table Styles in Writer

It is already a week since I am back from the great LibreOffice Conference in Aarhus. I enjoyed it a lot - talked to lots of people [eg. met Heiko for the first time in person - after having spent quite some time with him over hangouts :-)], listened to many nice presentations, gave my talks, and - even managed to find some time for the late night's hacking. Oh, and the train there and back was a good choice too - I have travelled with Stanislav who's translating & managing the Czech translations; and on the way back we have also met Jos.

Before I tell you about the Table Styles in Writer, the feature I was working on, let me share the slides from my presentations. First of all, I presented work of my GSoC students, Nathan Yee and Krisztian Pinter, during the GSoC panel:

Click the slide to see the presentation.

Then I talked about the recent achievements & plans of the LibreOffice Design team:

Click the slide to see the presentation.

Then on Thursday, I talked about what we have done in VCL, our graphics toolkit, to be able to make our rendering double-buffered:

Click the slide to see the presentation.

 

Table Styles in Writer

And now - the Table Styles in Writer. It is a feature that we have missed for a long time. In LibreOffice, we have the Table -> AutoFormat..., but applies the formatting only once; after you modify the table (like insert rows / columns) later, you basically destroy the look of the table.

During summer 2013, Alex Ivan was working on implementing the table styles as GSoC project. I rebased his work to the current master, and made it to work again. Unfortunately, the approach there turned out to be very aggressive - the changes first destroyed the Table AutoFormat feature, and then started building the Table Styles. This means that we could merge that only after we have the import and export for Table Styles - but the GSoC work did not get that far.

I reconsidered the approach, and tried to find a way that implements the core of the Table Styles functionality without destroying the Table AutoFormat - and it worked :-)

I have pushed the results to master. Now, when you apply the Table AutoFormat in Writer, it behaves as a Table Style: When you insert more rows/columns, they still keep the correct formatting, similarly deleting, or splitting tables keeps the table formatted. Direct formatting is applied over the style too, and you can clear it via "Clear Direct Formatting".

 

Further work

Loading/saving is not implemented though, so once you save the table with Table Style, it turns into a "normal" AutoFormat - the next time you open it, you see the formatting, but it is "static", ie. works as before the Table Styles work.

I hope to get the load/save done before 5.1; and there's also lots to be improved in the UI of Table Styles - but I believe the current state is already an improvement, and a step in the right direction.