In the first round I have added the dotted and dashed border types. The challenging part of it was to draw the dashed lines everywhere in Calc, Writer and Impress / Draw. More informations can be found in the previous blog post. The second round aims at improving the interoperability with Word border types. The interesting features to support are:

  • Separated border types and width selection. For the moment, OpenOffice.org provides a small set of predefined borders... but what if one wants 1.75pt dashed border? As shown by the border tabs screenshot, there are now 2 separate controls: one to select the border type and one to set the border width.
  • Support the other types from Word. Some of them are already supported by ODF but not implemented in OpenOffice.org. For example Word inset, outset, threeDEngraved and threeDEmbossed can be mapped to ODF / CSS inset, ouset, grooved and ridged border types.

Implementing these features brings its lot of problems. One of the most important one is that I needed to reengineer Word's behaviour to have something approching for the lines colors and widths. After some time measuring Word borders and getting its different colors I could get some useful infos. For curious readers, I have placed the spreadsheet that I used to determine the functions for the embossed/engraved colors in the go-oo git repository.

Here are some screenshots of what I have already implemented in my local build.

The new borders selection

The new borders selection

Some of the new border types

Some of the new border types

A Writer table with a nice embossed border

A Writer table with a nice embossed border

This work is still not published as there are loads of remaining problems and stuffs to fix:

  • As I have changedSvxBorderLine, I need to adapt all the code using it in Calc and Impress. Writer is almost completely update now.
  • The changes aren't persisted in the files for the moment.
  • The whole border width calculation has to be reworked at least in Writer because of the ouset and inset widths in Word. Word adapts the total width of these borders to the maximum width of the borders in the row or column., whereas OpenOffice.org doesn't take care of the other widths. Here is a small screenshot from Word to better see the problem.

Outset widths in Word

Outset widths in Word