GSoC Ideas
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This page lists the project ideas for Google Summer of Code, see the general info about LibreOffice and GSoC. All applicants are required to complete at least one easy hack.
All tasks on this page already indicate mentors for the task. New tasks on this page should be added only by those with the experience and time to invest in mentoring new developers.
Note that the LibreOffice project selects GSOC projects that are well researched and show a good understanding of the scope of the problem. It is also possible to create a project proposal not based on the ideas given below, if the application of the contributor shows good understanding of the problem. In fact, if you apply with one of the prepared ideas below, we expect you to show you did research beyond the abstracts given below even more.
When doing that please use this template:
=== Title of the task === Some detailed description of the things to accomplish. Don't hesitate to provide details if you have some like code pointers, links to specifications, etc. ;Required skills / knowledge: C++, Reading other's code, and any other useful skill required go here. ;Size: 175 hours or 350 hours ;Difficulty: Range among easy, medium, hard ;Potential mentors :''Joe Devel'', IRC: jdevel, mail: joe@devel.org
Please move successfully completed projects to Development/GSoC/Successfully Implemented Ideas.
Tooling
Select tests (or flag patches with missing tests) to run on gerrit patches based on machine learning
Inspired by Mozilla's work in this area (https://hacks.mozilla.org/2020/07/testing-firefox-more-efficiently-with-machine-learning/), it would be great to:
- extract a training set out of git, gerrit, CI and bugzilla (might need some _very early_ preparations to perhaps retain CI failure logs) by finding regressions that could have been caught by running a proper test on the respective platform, in the right configuration
- extract a training set out of git, gerrit, CI and bugzilla by finding regressions that later added a test for a feature - thus correlating code areas, and the locus for needed tests
- and training a suitable AI algorithm with the above, such that:
- CI can smartly choose the right tests to run, based on the gerrit patch (instead of running _all_ tests on _all_ configurations, which is prohibitive)
- CI can -1 patches that don't come with test loci touched, if the gerrit patch suggests it
- Required skills / knowledge
- data science/machine learning/AI active, basic & hands-on knowledge. Ability to read and write C++ code, scripting languages, and some basic knowledge of the tools used in our CI chain (Jenkins, gerrit, cppunit, ASAN/UBSAN) - many, but not all of the before might be acquired before GSoC, while joining the community prior to the application phase
- Size
- 350 hours
- Difficulty
- Medium - provided the applicant has good machine learning/data science skills
- Potential mentors
- Thorsten Behrens, IRC: thorsten, mail: thb@documentfoundation.org
General
Porting / platform / infrastructure specific topics
Implement qt5 / kf5 theming using native Qt widgets (Weld interface)
Since a few years, LibreOffice has slowly created a new theming API (include/vcl/weld.hxx) while implementing it in the gtk3 backend to use native Gtk widgets. Qt5, like all other backends, just implements the drawing of QStyle themed LO widgets, which mostly look like Qt widgets, but their behavior is completely controlled / implemented by LO. This results in some bugs, which simply aren't fixable in any way inside LO. Some Qt style engines implement animation and color handling, which isn't even exposed by the QStyle API, like the default button text color in Breeze (black in LibreOffice, instead if white in KDE). The current state is documented in some kind of "meta bug" (tdf#130857), which has some closed duplicates of backend specific problems, mainly based on some KDE settings, which change the specific behavior of a widget.
The current Weld API is Gtk specific, so some things might need some more abstraction, but otherwise it should be some straight forward job to implement the needed interfaces. This task isn't very creative, but might be interesting for people, who like to work on lower level platform code, which never fails to surprise with unexpected behavior. That can become a bit tedious to implement correctly.
For some more information:
- Qt5 Weld bug: https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=130857
- Latest post on Caolans blog about Weld progress: https://caolanm.blogspot.com/2019/10/native-gtk-dialogs-in-libreoffice.html
- Required skills / knowledge
- C++, knowledge of one of the involved toolkit APIs, either Gtk or Qt will help, but this probably goes for any non-ancient API used to build GUI applications.
- Size
- 350 hours
- Difficulty
- Medium
- Potential mentors
- Jan-Marek Glogowski, IRC: jmux, mail: glogow AT fbihome.de
- Michael Weghorn, IRC: michaelweghorn, mail: m.weghorn AT posteo.de
User Experience
The design team collected a number of ideas in in the pad http://pad.documentfoundation.org/p/UX-GSoC_Ideas. Not for all ideas mentors have committed so far. If you are interested in a task that has no mentor you would need to find someone. If the topic needs further refinement feel free to contact the UX team in order to prioritize the usability engineering. Some examples for full-featured topics:
Sidebar deck for quick find
Currently we show a classic quickfind toolbar on ctrl+F. This workflow can be improved by showing the results with a short annotation of words before and after to more easily spot what you are looking for.
The requirements are:
- move the "find all" functionality from the quickfind bar into a new sidebar deck
- show some words before/after the reference
- jump to the place on click
- clearly identify the currently selected reference
- Mockup: https://bug-attachments.documentfoundation.org/attachment.cgi?id=184862
- Enhancement request on Bugzilla: https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=95405
- Required skills / knowledge
- (C++, Reading other's code)?
- Size
- 350 hours
- Difficulty
- (Medium)?
- Potential mentors
- Jim Raykowski
- Heiko Tietze, IRC: htietze
Block diagrams
Most expect feature in Draw is the better implementation of block diagrams. That includes the compatibility with Visio but also simplified workflows where entered data get formatted automatically. A couple of predefined styles/presets should allow to quickly switch from one diagram style to another.
- Required skills / knowledge
- (C++, Reading other's code)?
- Size
- 350 hours
- Difficulty
- (Medium)?
- Potential mentors
- Thorsten Behrens, IRC: thorsten mail:
- UX team, IRC: channel #libreoffice-design, mail: design @ global.libreoffice . org
Chart wizard
For experienced people, the current wizard distracts from the workflow and steps are not naturally implemented, for instance the range is selected first and then the type of chart. Over the modules we have different ways to insert charts plus the wizard design is inconsistent with other dialogs which are tabbed. Mockups
- Required skills / knowledge
- C++, UI, UNO, reading other's code
- Size
- 350 hours
- Difficulty
- Hard
- Potential mentors
- Katarina Behrens, IRC: bubli mail: bubli @ bubli . org
- UX team, IRC: channel #libreoffice-design, mail: design @ global.libreoffice . org
Multi-color gradient
While the area fill style dialog has been reworked nicely the ability to deal with more than two steps for gradients is missing. Furthermore, gallery items with gradients that consists of more than two colors or non-linear gradients are;Potential mentors interpreted as a collection of lines when ungrouped making a modification impossible. First analysis showed that multi-stop gradients are loaded well but not visualized as it. The project would need to implement the draw routines as well as the UI control in the area dialog as suggested.
- Required skills / knowledge
- (C++, Reading other's code)?
- Size
- 350 hours
- Difficulty
- (Medium)?
- Potential mentors
- Tomaž Vajngerl, IRC: quikee, mail: quikee @ gmail.com
- UX team, IRC: channel #libreoffice-design, mail: design @ global.libreoffice . org
Improve OpenPGP encryption experience
With LibreOffice 6.0, there's experimental PGP/GPG encryption support. A number of shortcomings are there still, that make using this cool feature unnecessarily hard, e.g. selecting recipients anew for every safe, or finding the right keys. Keyrings can get potentially infinitely large, so smart searching / traversing / filtering is needed. Additionally, some asynchronous querying would be great, as currently it takes several minutes to retrieve all keys for large keyrings.
- Required skills / knowledge
- C++, Reading other's code, some idea about public key crypto
- Size
- 350 hours
- Difficulty
- Varying
- Potential mentors
- Thorsten Behrens, IRC: thorsten mail: thb@libreoffice.org
- UX team, IRC: channel #libreoffice-design, mail: design@global.libreoffice.org
Base
Basic
Draw
Impress
Attach animations to styles
Currently, Impress styles control most of the visual shape appearance, but not the slideshow animation effect. Which is a pity, as the styles concept is pretty powerful inside LibreOffice, and provides a nice way to change animation settings and type for a great number of objects simultaneously. For a slightly different view onto the same problem, see this bug report, and this one from the LibreOffice side.
Original patch from GSoC 2010: https://cgit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice/build/tree/patches/dev300/sd_effects_styles.diff?h=master-backup
- Required skills / knowledge
- C++, Reading other's code
- Size
- 350 hours
- Difficulty
- Hard
- Potential mentors
- Thorsten Behrens, IRC: thorsten, mail: thb @ documentfoundation . org
- Katarina Behrens, IRC: bubli, mail: bubli @ bubli . org
Rework Impress slideshow to use DrawingLayer primitives
The Impress slideshow, while being designed to only interact with Impress via interfaces, had to resort to an ugly hack to be able to render all Impress content. That was ok back in the day, but is becoming a liability these days. Nowadays, what one want to use is the DrawingLayer Primitives (https://wiki.openoffice.org/wiki/DrawingPrimitives), which means porting over slideshow/source/engine/shapes/* to use this kind of abstraction, instead of the StarView Metafile previously in use.
- Required skills / knowledge
- C++, Reading other's code.
- Size
- 350 hours
- Difficulty
- Hard
- Potential mentors
- Thorsten Behrens, IRC: thorsten, mail: thb @ documentfoundation . org
Calc
Implement table styles
Calc so far lacks real table styles, which for example can be seen in Impress tables, with formatting of header row, header column, banded rows and columns, total row, rightmost column, ...
The existing old technology Format → AutoFormat Styles are visually similar, but very inefficient in that they apply individual attributes to individual cells, which a) is slow, and b) bloats the document size, and also can't cope with hidden rows or columns to keep a visually stable table style layout.
See also tdf#132780
(Actually, we don't have real table styles in Impress either; see bug tdf#151264. Perhaps the GSoC idea should be to actually implement these in one of either Calc or in Impress? -EyalRozenberg)
- Required skills / knowledge
- C++, Reading other's code, Debugging, Understanding the concept of different layers of cell attribution, Having an idea of how a single attribute with one value could be used for this
- Size
- 350 hours
- Difficulty
- Hard
- Potential mentors
- Eike Rathke, IRC: erAck, mail: erack
redhat.com
Writer
Document Themes
Document themes are a simple way to allow users to quickly & consistently restyle the entire document. There is an implementation of this in MSO, and also Calligra plans to something in this regard, so this task actually consists of 2 parts:
- Implementing user interface for the feature
- Implement the ODF support for that
More ideas about the feature you can get by reading http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jensenh/archive/2006/02/22/537054.aspx and https://blogs.kde.org/2011/12/14/fruits-css2-shared-themes .
The import code for DOCX is here: https://cgit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice/core/tree/writerfilter/source/ooxml, you might need to change also https://cgit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice/core/tree/writerfilter/source/dmapper
For XLSX and PPTX, it resides in https://cgit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice/core/tree/oox/source
- Required skills / knowledge
- C++, Reading other's code, reading specifications :-)
- Size
- 350 hours
- Difficulty
- Hard
- Potential mentors
- Tomaž Vajngerl, IRC: quikee, mail: quikee @ gmail.com
Filters
Improve Zoner Draw import filter
libzmf, a library for import of Zoner Draw documents, was implemented as a GSoC 2016 project. Currently the library only supports documents created by versions 4-5. There are two goals in this task:
- handle some of the missing features (blending, warping of the bounding rectangle);
- add support for the file format produced by versions 2-3.
Both formats have been almost completely reverse-engineered.
- Required skills / knowledge
- C++, Reading other's C++ code (to understand the existing libzmf code). Python (for OLEToy) is welcome, but probably won't be needed
- Size
- 350 hours
- Difficulty
- Medium
- Potential mentors
- David Tardon, IRC: dtardon, mail: dtardon
redhat.com
Improve Adobe Pagemaker import filter
libpagemaker, a library for import of Adobe Pagemaker documents, was implemented as a GSoC 2013 project. In the current state, the library only supports documents created by versions 6.5-7.0 on Windows. Documents of version 6.0 should be opened more-or-less correctly, but the support has never been specifically tested. Documents created on Mac are never opened correctly because of many oversights in the code.
The goals of this taks are to fix import of Mac 6.5-7.0 files, implement some missing features and add support for older versions, both Mac and Windows (starting at 6.0 and proceeding to older ones until we run out of time :-)
We will use OLEToy for any necessary reverse-engineering. We will also create documents for regression testing for all versions we add support for.
- Required skills / knowledge
- C++, Reading other's C++ code (to understand the existing libpagemaker code). Python (for OLEToy)
- Size
- 350 hours
- Difficulty
- Medium
- Potential mentors
- David Tardon, IRC: dtardon, mail: dtardon
redhat.com
- Fridrich Strba?, IRC: Fridrich, mail: fridrich.strba
bluewin.ch
UNO
UNO is the LibreOffice component model, cross-language and intra- as well as inter-process. It is somewhat similar to Corba and COM. It is used to extend LibreOffice via document-related scripts and more general extension packages, as well as to use LibreOffice functionality remotely from another process.
Rust UNO Language Binding
UNO's cross-language abilities are implemented by bridging between various language-specific environments and a binary runtime representation (with a C API). Next to C++, Java, and Python, it would be great to have such a bridge also for a great language like Rust.
One aspect is to use Rust FFI to interface with the binary UNO C API. Another is to design the Rust representations of the various UNO constructs (its data types; objects with their multiple interfaces and methods; services and singletons), so that this language binding can not only be used to interact with existing LibreOffice services written in other languages, but also to create new services in Rust. A third aspect could be to create a pure Rust implementation of the UNO remote bridge protocol.
Some documentation pointers are:
Some code pointers are:
bridges/source/jni_uno
as an example of an in-process UNO bridge (for Java, via JNI)binaryurp
as an example of a remote UNO bridge (in C++)
- Required skills/knowledge
- Rust, interfacing to low-level C/C++, working against formal specifications
- Size
- 350 hours
- Difficulty
- Medium to hard
- Potential mentors
- Stephan Bergmann, IRC: sberg, mail: sbergman @ redhat . com
- Michael Stahl, IRC: mst___, mail: mst AT libreoffice DOT org
- Bjoern Michaelsen, IRC: Sweetshark, mail: bjoern.michaelsen AT canonical DOT com
LUA UNO Language Binding
UNO's cross-language abilities are implemented by bridging between various language-specific environments and a binary runtime representation (with a C API). Next to C++, Java, and Python, it would be great to have such a bridge also for a small, lightweight scripting language like LUA.
LUA is small (few K lines of C), and written with the goal of embedding in mind:
Besides hooking LUA up with LibreOffice's UNO subsystem, a taker for this project would need to map the various UNO constructs (its data types; objects with their multiple interfaces and methods; services and singletons) to suitable LUA types, so that this language binding can not only be used to interact with existing LibreOffice services written in other languages, but also to create new services. LUA should be expressive enough to permit that (its dynamic typing helps a lot there), just for exceptions and error handling, some extra thoughts might be needed:
- Basic might be a good starting point: https://wiki.openoffice.org/wiki/Documentation/DevGuide/ProUNO/Basic/Exception_Handling
- but see this article for LUA error handling concepts: http://lua-users.org/wiki/ErrorHandling
Some code pointers are:
bridges/source/jni_uno
as an example of an in-process UNO bridge (for Java, via JNI)binaryurp
as an example of a remote UNO bridge (in C++)
- Required skills/knowledge
- LUA, interfacing to low-level C/C++, working against formal specifications
- Size
- 350 hours
- Difficulty
- Medium to hard
- Potential mentors
- Michael Stahl, IRC: mst[_]*, mail: mst AT libreoffice DOT org
- Thorsten Behrens, IRC: thorsten, mail: thb AT libreoffice DOT org
- (Bjoern Michaelsen, IRC: Sweetshark)
Convert Writer's Java UNO API tests to C++
A big chunk of UNO API tests are still implemented in Java, but to minimise the dependency on Java during the build, we have a long-term plan to move them to C++.
Currently a small set of test are already converted and can be found in here. The Java test are located in here.
- Required skills/knowledge
- Java, C++
- Size
- 175 hours or 350 hours
- Difficulty
- Medium
- Potential mentors
- Tomaž Vajngerl, IRC: quikee, mail: quikee @ gmail.com
Ideas without a mentor
A number of ideas from previous years can be found at the Development/GSoC/Ideas without a mentor page. Please note that you need to find a mentor willing to mentor the task. There is no guarantee that anyone in the community is going to mentor one of these tasks this year.