Considering the quite low amount of proposals already filed on
Google Melange for LibreOffice, I'ld like to remind you all that the
application period has started on March 28th and will end up on April,
8th... which means very soon! Don't hesitate to spend a nice summer
hacking on funny stuffs in LibreOffice: apply now!
I already received several emails from students wanting to work on the new RTF tokenizer or the persisting the autocompletion words list, but there is a nice feature to be worked on: adding borders to characters in Writer. Hack on that and you'll be praised by loads of users awaiting this for more than 8 years! The idea is pretty simple: Word files and HTML can both have borders around runs of characters, but LibreOffice doesn't have that feature. The job here consists in:
- Enhance the UI for the character style: you will simply need to add the already existing border editing tab to the dialog.
- Enhance the Writer core by adding one character attribute to the data structure.
- Use that attribute to enhance the Writer layout and actually draw the borders on the screen and PDFs / printing.
- Persist the new feature in the different formats handled by Writer. This means improving the import and export filters like the ones for Word files, RTF, HTML and even ODF.
- Propose an ODF enhancement to standardize the use of fo:borders attributes in the \<style:text-properties> elements.
I hope to see loads of rock-solid applications to make free software progress while introducing students to LibreOffice hacking.