Make Impress master slides copyable – difficulty interesting EasyHack

By Hossein Nourikhah On 22 February 2024 In EasyHack

When working with LibreOffice Impress, “Slide Master” is the place where you can change the templates used for different types of the slides used in your presentation. Here we discuss a possible improvement for the “Slide Master” by making the copy from master slides possible.

Copying the Master Page in Impress

To see the problem and the room for enhancement, open LibreOffice Impress, then choose “View->Master->Slide Master” from the menus. Then, try to copy the master page on the left in the slide sorter. Unfortunately, it is not possible.

Impress slide master

Having this feature is helpful, because different page types have many things in common, and being able to copy/paste helps creating templates much faster.

Impress Code Pointers

Looking into sd/source/core/drawdoc3.cxx, you can see a huge function SdDrawDocument::InsertBookmarkAsPage, which is relevant here. It contains ~600 lines of code. This huge function is in itself a problem. Therefore, to implement the enhancement, on should try to first refactor the function, then add a unit test in sd/qa/unit, find and then separate all the ~6 use cases, and fix the style/name merging.

After the cleanup, the main fix should be implemented. The suggested path to implement this comes from Jean-Francois. He suggest to improve the duplicate() method, which is described in the documentation:

XDrawPageDuplicator interface, duplicate() method

As described in the above documentation, its role is to duplicate a page:

Creates a duplicate of a DrawPage or MasterPage, including the Shapes on that page and inserts it into the same model.

However, the implementation does not work for master slides, as the macros in the attachment file implies. The solution should add the needed implementation for master slides.

The implementation is inside sd/source/ui/unoidl/unomodel.cxx inside duplicate function:

// XDrawPageDuplicator
uno::Reference< drawing::XDrawPage > SAL_CALL SdXImpressDocument::duplicate( const uno::Reference< drawing::XDrawPage >& xPage )
{

...

}