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NeoOffice :: View topic - Astounded.
Astounded.
 
   NeoOffice Forum Index -> NeoOffice Testing
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Apricot
Pure-blooded Human


Joined: May 31, 2003
Posts: 38

PostPosted: Mon Sep 08, 2003 9:08 pm    Post subject: Astounded.

Hi folks,

I've just installed NeoOffice/J for the first time: I was inspired by today's Java 1.4.1 Update from Apple. I must say, this is beyond my wildest expectations. It looks beautiful, it runs smoothly (PB G4/1 GHz, but even looks good at reduced processing), it even prints all right. It was not obvious that printtest4 existed, but I noticed it mentioned in a post here, found it in the same directory as printtest3 and installed it anyway.

I'm already appreciating lots of little things. The native printing. The native fonts (welcome back, Optima). The drag-and-drop onto the icon.

The main showstopper is the lack of clipboard support.

The only glitches I've encountered so far are some problems with graphics in an OO .sxw document, which are displayed all messed up and don't print at all. (File can be provided for testing, if needed.) Also, "Mac" look and feel looks teeny and unusable.

Anyway, I'm going to use this full time for a while instead of the X11 OOO, and I'll check in if I find any more glitches.

- Apricot
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Apricot
Pure-blooded Human


Joined: May 31, 2003
Posts: 38

PostPosted: Thu Sep 11, 2003 8:29 am    Post subject: little update

Just an update on my use of NeoOffice/J, which I'm still jazzed about.

Workarounds
- for the clipboard issue, I've just been saving selections to files like /tmp/a and reading them in with NO/J

Bugs
- I think others have noted that graphics print at 72dpi (ugh). This is now the main showstopper for my work

- I can't get it to recognize embedded PNG images (it shows up as smeared garbage)

- I can't use Shift to select a range of text.

- I'm using a PBG4 with a USB Orbit trackball. It works fine until you unplug the trackball. From that point on, NO/J treats all mouse clicks as right-clicks, making it unusable.

- It appears that italic and bold are generated from the normal typeface and not loaded from actual font information. E.g. bold and italic in Gill Sans look completely different in NO/J and OOO or any other OS X app.

- NeoOffice.org keeps going down!! Smile

That's all for now,

Apricot
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pluby
The Architect
The Architect


Joined: Jun 16, 2003
Posts: 11949

PostPosted: Thu Sep 11, 2003 8:50 am    Post subject:

Thanks for the positive feedback! It is feedback like this that reminds why I started this project and motivates me to keep working on it.

I assume that you are seeing problems in lines and shapes. I found this same problem when I was debugging the "rotated text" problem that Jim Laurent posted in this forum.

I have not only fixed the rotated text problem but I have also fixed the line and shape drawing problems. Expect to see a post from me in the next week with instructions for installing a newer patch file.

Copy and paste is my next big item. Hopefully, if I have enough time, I can get a test file out there in the next few weeks.

BTW, whenever I post a new patch file, I always make the old patch file a softlink to the new patch. So, when you were downloading patchtest3.tar.gz, you were really downloading patchtest4.tar.gz.

Patrick
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OPENSTEP
The One
The One


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

PostPosted: Thu Sep 11, 2003 9:01 am    Post subject: Re: little update

Apricot wrote:
- NeoOffice.org keeps going down!! Smile


Blame Verizon for this one Wink My DSL flaked out on Monday sometime and it's taken them this long to try to fix it. Mysteriously, it came online sometime this morning, even without the repairman present. Of course, somehow my upstream bandwidth is now even worse then before, but I'm just stoked it's up again.

And they spend three days saying my DSL modem was the culprit. Bastards.

I hate the phone company.

ed
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OPENSTEP
The One
The One


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

PostPosted: Thu Sep 11, 2003 9:04 am    Post subject:

pluby wrote:
I assume that you are seeing problems in lines and shapes. I found this same problem when I was debugging the "rotated text" problem that Jim Laurent posted in this forum.


Patrick - don't know if this is relevant, but I noticed in the release notes for the recent Java 1.4.1 update that the thick lines may be due to a "bug" in the VM itself. The problem was that Java2D was resulting in drawing of invisible lines or something, so their solution was to add a minimum width for all lines, apparently. I'm unsure if this "fix" applies to 1.3.1 as well.

ed
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pluby
The Architect
The Architect


Joined: Jun 16, 2003
Posts: 11949

PostPosted: Thu Sep 11, 2003 9:30 am    Post subject:

Ed,

Nope. The problem was much simpler (but more work to implement).

The main problem was that Java2D does not support XORing for line drawing. It only supports XORing for filling shapes. So, I had to implement my own XORing code. What a pain! And I assume that my code is very inefficient since I use the brute force approach for XORing diagonal lines.

The other problem, line width, is due to Apple's Java2D implementation drawing lines a little think when you turn anti-aliasing off for line drawing. The solution for this was to turn anti-aliasing back on and now lines look much smoother. I still turn off anti-aliasing when drawing gradients as drawing with anti-aliasing causes gradients to have ugly lines where the semi-transparent pixels overlap.

Patrick
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Apricot
Pure-blooded Human


Joined: May 31, 2003
Posts: 38

PostPosted: Thu Sep 11, 2003 2:36 pm    Post subject:

Thanks for the positive feedback! It is feedback like this that reminds why I started this project and motivates me to keep working on it.

Excellent. More cookies for the cookie monster. There have always been so many 'this is not ready for use' messages on NO/J that I didn't expect it to be so well done. Also, frankly, I expect Java stuff to be slow, ugly and crashy. Confused

I assume that you are seeing problems in lines and shapes. I found this same problem when I was debugging the "rotated text" problem that Jim Laurent posted in this forum.

I converted my graphics to GIF, since PNG was getting mangled. The GIFs print as weirdly jagged pictures. The pictures were indeed line art, but they were an embedded GIF, not a vector file. Do you want me to mail you a test file?

As soon as I have the graphics printing working, I can use it to make my class assignments (I'm a teacher).

Q: any chance of merging in 1.1 changes? Smile

More little nits:
(1) I've got a hack, (DoubleCommand, I think) that makes shift-delete a forwards delete. NO/J ignores that, OOO X11 doesn't.

(2) Bullets in lists show up as blank squares. I assume this is some font name issue with the move to OSX, but I can't figure out how to alter the bullet font.

(3) Something else escaping me right now.

- Apricot
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pluby
The Architect
The Architect


Joined: Jun 16, 2003
Posts: 11949

PostPosted: Thu Sep 11, 2003 3:58 pm    Post subject:

Apricot wrote:
Excellent. More cookies for the cookie monster. There have always been so many 'this is not ready for use' messages on NO/J that I didn't expect it to be so well done. Also, frankly, I expect Java stuff to be slow, ugly and crashy. Confused


Most of the Java window and painting code is really native Carbon or Cocoa. Java is merely a thin wrapper around that code. There is one area that NeoOffice/J is slow and that is the XORing code that will be in the next patch. This is not Java but mostly due to untuned code.

Apricot wrote:
I converted my graphics to GIF, since PNG was getting mangled. The GIFs print as weirdly jagged pictures. The pictures were indeed line art, but they were an embedded GIF, not a vector file. Do you want me to mail you a test file?


Yes, please send it to me. I saw something similar when we demo'd NeoOffice/J at Apple's WWDC conference but I have been unable to replicate it. Send it to patrick.luby@planamesa.com.

Apricot wrote:
As soon as I have the graphics printing working, I can use it to make my class assignments (I'm a teacher).


FYI. You will need Mac OS X 10.2 to run any new NeoOffice/J patches or versions that I put out. This is not due to technical reasons, but due to the fact that my ancient PowerBook finally died and I had to get a new machine. Since my machine came with 10.2, I have been building NeoJ with that.

Apricot wrote:
Q: any chance of merging in 1.1 changes? Smile


Someday. That will take several weeks of dedicated work to do. Since I have to go chase down consulting work every so often to pay the bills, I am trying to finish the missing pieces in the current NeoJ while I have the time to do so.

Apricot wrote:
More little nits:
(1) I've got a hack, (DoubleCommand, I think) that makes shift-delete a forwards delete. NO/J ignores that, OOO X11 doesn't.


How do you set this up? I tried using the standard [Ctrl-Delete] (well, really its [Command-Delete] in NeoJ) shortcut and in my latest code it properly deletes to the end of the word. I am hopeful that, once I know how to set it up, I will find that my latest code has fixed the problem.

Apricot wrote:
(2) Bullets in lists show up as blank squares. I assume this is some font name issue with the move to OSX, but I can't figure out how to alter the bullet font.


The problem was due to XORing bugs. In my latest code, the bullets appear.

Patrick
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Apricot
Pure-blooded Human


Joined: May 31, 2003
Posts: 38

PostPosted: Sat Sep 13, 2003 2:41 pm    Post subject: looking forward to the next patch

I've sent you the test file over e-mail.

NeoJ is definitely ignoring DoubleCommand's key changes. In addition to ignoring my shift-Del = forward delete, it's ignoring my Enter=Fn patch on my Powerbook. Pretty small problem I think.

The USB mouse thing is more annoying, as I have to restart the program every time the computer goes to sleep to get any mouse click back.

- Is there some way to keep NeoJ alive even when the final window is closed? (I know OOo has the same issue.)

Thanks for your great work on this project. - Apricot
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nedrichards
Guest





PostPosted: Sun Sep 14, 2003 9:12 am    Post subject:

Apricot, the 'keep alive' (although not in the OS X manner) is in 1.1.

Yes the fact that NeoJ thinkinks the trackpad is always a right click is the only real bug I run into in my work. Thankfully my encyclopedic knowledge of OOo keyboard shortcuts (I knew it could come in handy one day) keeps me going.

But yes NeoJ is great, thanks ever so much Patrick.
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chris c
Guest





PostPosted: Wed Sep 24, 2003 1:39 am    Post subject: Re: little update

I used to work for the "phone company" well a baby bell but they all consider themselves THE phone company...anyway...

you would be amazed at the number of times per day you would hear employees say the exact same thing: I hate the phone company.....





OPENSTEP wrote:
Apricot wrote:
- NeoOffice.org keeps going down!! Smile


Blame Verizon for this one Wink My DSL flaked out on Monday sometime and it's taken them this long to try to fix it. Mysteriously, it came online sometime this morning, even without the repairman present. Of course, somehow my upstream bandwidth is now even worse then before, but I'm just stoked it's up again.

And they spend three days saying my DSL modem was the culprit. Bastards.

I hate the phone company.

ed
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