Tuesday, March 17, 2009

Pierre-Eric Rocks

A while back I put out a blog entry about some bounty work with OpenOffice. I was contacted my new favorite hacker, and his name is Pierre-Eric. We built a machine with which to quickly compile OpenOffice, and he immediately started creating patches. We have been impressed with his professionalism, and his energetic approach to open source software. His first two patches were accepted by Sun and look to be merged into OOo 3.2.

The first patch creates a 2x2 picture layout for Impress:



The second creates a 3x2 picture layout for Impress.



He is currently working on a patch to add a "Sentence Case" option to Writer. We have a few more projects waiting in the wings, and are looking forward to continued bounty work.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

"Sentence Case"? what do you mean by that?

Dave Richards said...

anonymous: Sentence case compliments upper and lower case. If you highlight a string, it will make the first letter upper case, and all following letters lower case.

here is some text

becomes

Here is some text.

Zack Weinberg said...

What I wanna know is, why is there no built-in GUI for creating Impress templates? Why should you have to find someone to hack the source code for you?

Dave Richards said...

Zack: You can create templates, but you have to use an initial layout that has the right number of widgets to customized. The layouts are hard coded right now. I got the feeling the developers know this shouldn't be the case; but no one has initiated the process of making this a bit more dynamic. I'm also not sure if there are speed/startup issues when you have it scanning in this manner vs is being hard coded. You know of course how everyone complains about OOo startup times.

Unknown said...

The Sentence Case option is really great. But I still miss First Letter Capitalized, which I often used in MS Word, but which is unavailable in Open Office.

That's where "here is some text" becomes "Here Is Some Text" It would be cool if Pierre-Eric could work his magic on this option too!!!

--Simfox

Dave Richards said...

sim:
Now is the time to ask him to do it. He is on the IRC in dev.openoffice.org as "pepp". All of the areas he is in right now would have to be changed for your request as well. Throw a little $$ his way, and I think he might do it for you.