Going mobile

When I'm drivin' free, the world's my home When I'm mobile

-- The Who, Who's Next, Going Mobile

As you might have noticed, work has started to integrate LibreOffice with the document viewer of Ubuntu core apps. Here is a screenshot of how the current code renders documents on a mobile device:

Kudos for integrating this go entirely to Stefano Verzegnassi, all I did was providing a tiny piece of example code. It loads a document and saves a rendered version of the document to a PNG file. The relevant part of that piece of C++ code is small enough to fit in one picture shown here, including build instructions et al., showing how easy it is to use LibreOfficeKit from outside LibreOffice now:

Thus the doc viewer was quickly integrated with LibreOffice in a basic way. This proof of concept isnt finished however: It just renders the all the document in one buffer. For small documents, this is reasonable, for bigger documents, tiled rendering -- which LibreOfficeKit nicely supports from the API by allowing you to render any part of a document in a buffer -- needs to be implemented on the clientside. The code for this can be found on launchpad, so if you are just curious how this works you are invited to have a look. If you are interested in helping out with moving this forward towards a nice all-around document viewer reading and rendering everything LibreOffice can, you are most welcome!

Update: A picture says more than a thousand words, but a video tells a whole story. Stefano created this awesome video, which you shouldnt miss:

Originally published on 2015-07-10 14:58:50 on wordpress.