Re: [tdf-discuss] How difficult is it to port Libreoffice to theAndroid Tablets? Is there any plan yet?

On Friday, March 04, 2011 11:56:09 Mirek M. wrote:
> 2011/3/4 Jaime R. Garza <garzaj@gmail.com>
>
> > In my humble opinion it will be great to have the UI separated from all
> > the rest. Think of WebKit in the Browser! That would allow to have a QT
> > UI, a GTK UI, a Multitouch UI, etc.
>
> There are two projects already underway with this goal in mind:
> WebODF<http://www.webodf.org/>and
> ODFKit <http://gitorious.org/odfkit> (WebODF seems to be an evolution of
> ODFKit, and although it uses web technologies, it's still suitable for
> desktop and mobile applications).

I think I can shed some light on this.

OdfKit is indeed intended to be the WebKit of ODF.  Those of you who attended 
the OOo conference in Orvieto maybe remembers my presentation of the idea 
there. Since then we (KO GmbH) got funding from Nlnet to implement the idea.

WebODF is more or less OdfKit applied to javascript.  There is an 
implementation of an odf viewer with some limited editing capabilities. The 
way it works is that it reads the odf file, unzips it in javascript and then 
stores the data from content.xml into the browser document DOM. Then it does 
some clever rewriting of the ODF styles into CSS and applies that to the DOM. 
Since not long ago, it can also save back, thus achieving roundtripping.  See 
http://www.kdedevelopers.org/node/4393 for more info.

However...

These are not yet mature products.  If you want something more mature, look at 
the Calligra Suite, formerly KOffice.  Over the last 2 years, we have achieved 
a clear separation into what we call the Office Engine and the user 
interfaces.  So far we have a desktop interface which is not enough mature (we 
just started to modernize it since the break from KOffice) and an interface 
for the Nokia N900 mobile phone running Maemo 5. Other user interfaces are 
being worked on but are not yet released, including ones for tablets.  Qt 
Quick really is a marvellous technology that lets us do new user interfaces 
really quickly. I think you should have a serious look at it if you want to 
pursue the idea of LibO on Android further.

To read more about Calligra, go to http://www.calligra-suite.org/.  
Unfortunately there is not much there yet about the Office Engine or the 
mobile UI.  We will update the website in the next few weeks to make it better 
reflect the reality.

Also, the Calligra team will have a developer sprint at the beginning of April 
in Berlin.  It would be wonderful if somebody from LibreOffice could come and 
represent you.  I know there are several issues that we could cooperate on.  
Some that come immediately to mind are:
 - Test suites
 - How to store data that are not defined in ODF from converted MS Office 
files in ODF files so that we can improve roundtrip performance.
 - Default values for colors, etc for properties that are undefined in ODF 
styles, so that rendering looks the same over different ODF editors.

To find out more, see the page: 
http://community.kde.org/Calligra/Meetings/Begin_2011_meeting
If you want more info, just email me in private.

        -Inge

PS. 
Sorry to hijack the thread going out on a side branch.  



-- 
Unsubscribe instructions: E-mail to discuss+help@documentfoundation.org
Archive: http://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/discuss/
*** All posts to this list are publicly archived for eternity ***