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NeoOffice :: View topic - A few remarks
A few remarks
 
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Max_Barel
Oracle


Joined: May 31, 2003
Posts: 219
Location: French Alps

PostPosted: Sat Jul 26, 2003 2:50 pm    Post subject: A few remarks

Once again, I'm the last student of the class when it comes to dowloading. Always my slow bandwith. BTW www.planamesa.com is fairly strong.
So here are my 10 cents :
- As everybody here I'm impressed. Nice look, no X11, keyboard mapping, well, this is really something! My first try to Neo/J is with 0.0.1, so i got it in French right out the box. As Ed remarked somewhere I never saw any kind of OOo with automatic language setting.
- I used my usual trick to have the french help contents. Worked. As there was already a symlink for fr help I had only to change it.
- About the UI font size. I alway set OO to a scale factor able to display the page I'm working on at the true-real size. So an A4 page must be 21cm wide, and fonts are the same size as print output. On OOo/X11 its 106% because my display (PB 1280px) is 101.6 dpi and OOo is set to 96 dpi. On Neo and Neo/J this factor comes to 141% because tey are ruled to 72 dpi (why?). Then the UI font size is TOO BIG. Here I'm on the other side comparing to previous posts. I read carefully the thread about setting this UI font size but it appears that it can be done only in source files of Neo/J. So I'm out. I wish I could patch some resource. Possible?
- About keyboard mapping. It switch correctly to russian and typing is OK (with a cyrillic capable font as Lucida grande). The Romanian mapping is greyed in the keyboard menu, so it can't be used. This is not a NeoJ only point. I've seen this behaviour for other apps too. I presume this is a Carbon issue. Or it is Java? Or Java use Carbon?
- About the charset nightmare. NeoJ use isolatin1, like OOo, for open/save dialogs. Accented chars are messed. As NeoJ is OOo based it's expected behaviour. But it seems to be more issues around since some databases files in text format which display correctly in OOo/X11 do not in Neo/j. If it's useful I could test and try to be more precise.
- Two minor issues now:
- I didn't find a way to anchor tools windows on the main window edges. The ctrl-drag or ctrl-doubleclick don't work, nor the command equivalents.
- The new-item icon when click-and-hold should open a small menu to choose the file type or template. In fact it open the toolbar setting menu as if clicked in an empty part of the toolbar.

I'm conscious that theses remarks are about details when there is so much work already done and still to be done...

BTW, I didn't dare to post in the "Implementing printing" thread, since I'm surpassed. Anyway I'd like to know if, before implementing a true Cocoa/Java/Carbon printing, it would not be an easy temporary solution to use the standard postscript/pdf way ?
It's so frustrating to have FY on one side and NeoJ on the other and since beeing stuck to OOo/X11. Well I know you all do your best, this is not criticism but impatience.

Max
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OPENSTEP
The One
The One


Joined: May 25, 2003
Posts: 4752
Location: Santa Barbara, CA

PostPosted: Sat Jul 26, 2003 3:58 pm    Post subject: Re: A few remarks

Max_Barel wrote:
As everybody here I'm impressed.


Man, when I first looked at it my jaw dropped. I find it sad Patrick's genius cannot find expression within OpenOffice.org, but am determined to help provide it any outlet it needs.

Max_Barel wrote:
I used my usual trick to have the french help contents.


Are you copying in/symlinking the french help content files on top of the english "01" numered help files?

Max_Barel wrote:
I didn't find a way to anchor tools windows on the main window edges. The ctrl-drag or ctrl-doubleclick don't work, nor the command equivalents.


This will probably go away as soon as we move to OOo 1.1 as a sourcebase. One of the bigger changes I think (correc me if I'm wrong) is that the floating windows become full SystemWindows. From an end user's perspective, what this entails is that there's now one Stylist for all of the open documents instead of a single stylist per document, and that the stylists can be moved around outside of the document window. This is closer to Photoshop palettes.

Developers familiar with 1.1, am i completely off the mark here?

Max_Barel wrote:
I'm conscious that theses remarks are about details when there is so much work already done and still to be done...


Please dont' feel like these remarks are in any way detrimental or slightful to the project Smile In short, it's better to hear them from a tester and friendly user rather then as the first line of a first major press reivew Wink

Max_Barel wrote:
a true Cocoa/Java/Carbon printing, it would not be an easy temporary solution to use the standard postscript/pdf way ?
It's so frustrating to have FY on one side and NeoJ on the other and since beeing stuck to OOo/X11.


That's one I agree with and, as a devleoper, I don't know the best solution...Java printing on OS X is kind of a hydra. Then again, it's awful just on other platforms. That is an interesting thought, however, to recycle the PDF style printing engine from X11 into the Java version and continue to use the ghostscript functionality Dan added into OOo 1.0.x.

Patrick...any thoughts?

ed
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pluby
The Architect
The Architect


Joined: Jun 16, 2003
Posts: 11949

PostPosted: Sat Jul 26, 2003 4:29 pm    Post subject: Re: A few remarks

Max_Barel wrote:
Once again, I'm the last student of the class when it comes to dowloading. Always my slow bandwith. BTW www.planamesa.com is fairly strong.
So here are my 10 cents :
- As everybody here I'm impressed. Nice look, no X11, keyboard mapping, well, this is really something! My first try to Neo/J is with 0.0.1, so i got it in French right out the box. As Ed remarked somewhere I never saw any kind of OOo with automatic language setting.


Thanks! I am glad that you found this useful. It always annoyed me that you had to permanently pick one language when you installed OOo.

Quote:
- I used my usual trick to have the french help contents. Worked. As there was already a symlink for fr help I had only to change it.


Now if we could convince Sun to put their non-English help translations out in OOo instead of relying on volunteers to rewrite all of them from scratch, that would really enhance NeoJ's multi-language support.

Quote:
- About the UI font size. I alway set OO to a scale factor able to display the page I'm working on at the true-real size. So an A4 page must be 21cm wide, and fonts are the same size as print output. On OOo/X11 its 106% because my display (PB 1280px) is 101.6 dpi and OOo is set to 96 dpi. On Neo and Neo/J this factor comes to 141% because tey are ruled to 72 dpi (why?). Then the UI font size is TOO BIG. Here I'm on the other side comparing to previous posts. I read carefully the thread about setting this UI font size but it appears that it can be done only in source files of Neo/J. So I'm out. I wish I could patch some resource. Possible?


I think that you have found a bug in my code. Right now, I am doing all drawing to an off-screen buffer and, by default, Java sets an off-screen buffer to 72 dpi. Then, when I copy the pixels from the off-screen buffer to a window, Java scales the image to match your screen's dpi. There are some technical reasons that I cannot paint directly to a window. However, I should be able to adjust the dpi setting of the off-screen buffer to match your screen dpi.

Quote:
- About keyboard mapping. It switch correctly to russian and typing is OK (with a cyrillic capable font as Lucida grande). The Romanian mapping is greyed in the keyboard menu, so it can't be used. This is not a NeoJ only point. I've seen this behaviour for other apps too. I presume this is a Carbon issue. Or it is Java? Or Java use Carbon?


NeoJ relies on Java to translate your key strokes into a Unicode character. Java 1.3.1 uses Carbon. Surprisingly, even if you have Java 1.4.1 installed, NeoJ is using Java 1.3.1 so if Carbon applications are also affected by this limitation, NeoJ will too. BTW, I am working on enabling Java 1.4.1 support as I need it for font ligature rendering to work.

Quote:
- About the charset nightmare. NeoJ use isolatin1, like OOo, for open/save dialogs. Accented chars are messed. As NeoJ is OOo based it's expected behaviour. But it seems to be more issues around since some databases files in text format which display correctly in OOo/X11 do not in Neo/j. If it's useful I could test and try to be more precise.


OOo assumes that file names are encoded in your local encoding. While this is true on Windows, Linux, and Solaris (and has caused me immense hassles in a consulting job that I am doing), Mac OS X uses UTF-8 encoding for all local file names. When I get some time, I will look through the OOo code and see if there is some central place that the this decoding of file names is happening.

Quote:
- Two minor issues now:
- I didn't find a way to anchor tools windows on the main window edges. The ctrl-drag or ctrl-doubleclick don't work, nor the command equivalents.
- The new-item icon when click-and-hold should open a small menu to choose the file type or template. In fact it open the toolbar setting menu as if clicked in an empty part of the toolbar.


ctrl-drag probably does not work because I have not implemented the "drag" service. Right now, all drag operations do nothing. The ctrl-doubleclick I am not sure about. Have you tried command-doubleclick? In NeoJ, the command key is used instead of the ctrl key for all of the shortcuts.

Quote:
I'm conscious that theses remarks are about details when there is so much work already done and still to be done...


Comments are good. I am particularly interested in the language/encoding/font issues. Although I can read and write (and barely speak) Spanish, it is good to have people who can really test the non-English languages in NeoJ.

Quote:
BTW, I didn't dare to post in the "Implementing printing" thread, since I'm surpassed. Anyway I'd like to know if, before implementing a true Cocoa/Java/Carbon printing, it would not be an easy temporary solution to use the standard postscript/pdf way ?
It's so frustrating to have FY on one side and NeoJ on the other and since beeing stuck to OOo/X11. Well I know you all do your best, this is not criticism but impatience.


Surprisingly, Java makes the actual printing part really easy. In Java, drawing to printer page is exactly the same as drawing to a window. In fact, we won't have to write any new drawing code to do printing.

The only hard part is forcing OOo to display its own printing dialog box so that we can have Java display its printing dialog box. This is tedious work, but not terribly difficult.

Patrick
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Max_Barel
Oracle


Joined: May 31, 2003
Posts: 219
Location: French Alps

PostPosted: Sun Jul 27, 2003 6:14 am    Post subject: Re: A few remarks

The One wrote:
Max_Barel wrote:
I used my usual trick to have the french help contents.

Are you copying in/symlinking the french help content files on top of the english "01" numered help files?

No, I switch the whole directory instead. In OOo/X11, I rename "<OOo dir>/help/en" to "en.org", then put in place a symlink named "en" and pointing to the help directory that I have imported from Linux and saved out of OOo install for it to survive to our frequent erase/install process. In Neo/J the help dir already have a bunch of symlinks pointing to the default "en" dir. I just changed the "fr" link to point to my help dir.
pluby wrote:
Now if we could convince Sun to put their non-English help translations out in OOo instead of relying on volunteers to rewrite all of them from scratch, that would really enhance NeoJ's multi-language support.

In a post (on OOoDocs forum I think, can't check since it's down) Ed gave a link to the place where those localized help files are stored on openoffice.org, after he eventually find them Confused You migth consider to include them but it will lead to a huge package.
pluby wrote:
ctrl-drag probably does not work because I have not implemented the "drag" service. Right now, all drag operations do nothing. The ctrl-doubleclick I am not sure about. Have you tried command-doubleclick? In NeoJ, the command key is used instead of the ctrl key for all of the shortcuts.

Command-doubleclick doesn't work either. I cheated Neo/J by copying Views.xml from OOo/X11. Worked. Really a minor issues.

Two more :
• The right mouse button does not work in Neo/J. It works in other Java apps like Limewire, so it's probably only a matter of setting. A click-and-hold do the trick and allow to get context menu (scale choice, database management...).
• Postscript fonts do not seem to work. Are they supposed to? Probably not, since I don't think they are known to Java. Nevetheless OS X rendering has a display postscript layer, isn't it? If this feature can stay without much work it's a plus, I think.
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OPENSTEP
The One
The One


Joined: May 25, 2003
Posts: 4752
Location: Santa Barbara, CA

PostPosted: Mon Jul 28, 2003 11:16 pm    Post subject: Re: A few remarks

Max_Barel wrote:
In a post (on OOoDocs forum I think, can't check since it's down) Ed gave a link to the place where those localized help files are stored on openoffice.org, after he eventually find them Confused


Yeah, they're up on the stardiv.de ftp site. I'll poke around and find them again, or try to figure out why ooodocs is hosed. I never got an admin pass to the database there and have no backups, so I'm not sure what I can do to fix OOoDocs Sad

All of the help files combined for 1.0.x came up to about 130 MB zipped. That didn't count the various localized resource files. It's a rough call when faced with something that large. I suspect that there's quite a bit of redundancy that isn't being used in the current way that the online help is structured. For example, I'm pretty sure that an image that is identical in all versions of the help is actually copied once for each version and not in a shared "all-languages" style location.

ed
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