Category: Tutorial

In the first part of the series on string types in LibreOffice, I discussed some of the string data types that are in use in various places of the LibreOffice code. I discussed various character and string data types briefly: OString, OUString, char/char*, sal_Unicode, sal_Unicode*, rtl_String, rtl_uString and also std::string. Now I want to explain string literals. (more…)

If you have ever tried to build LibreOffice code, you know that it can take a lot of time. LibreOffice has ~6 million lines of C++ and some Java code (<280k). But, there are tools that can help you build LibreOffice from source code much faster, if you do it repeatedly! Here I discuss how to use one of these tools: “ccache”. (more…)

Do you want to build LibreOffice alongside other applications that are open on your computer like the IDEs, and you want to keep the programs responsive during the build? Then you need to know how to tune the parallel build. Here I discuss how. (more…)

LibreOffice uses an internal GUI toolkit, named VCL (Visual Class Library). It creates the GUI widgets for LibreOffice, but it is not generally available for other applications. But there are ways that you can create standalone applications with VCL, at least to learn it better. (more…)

You may already know that LibreOffice uses its internal GUI toolkit, named VCL (Visual Class Library). This library is responsible for creating the GUI widgets for LibreOffice, providing abstraction from the operating system including the basic rendering. To see more details, you can read its documentation page: (more…)

Strings are very important types of data that are using in LibreOffice. Firstly, they are useful for storing textual data, and is essentially a sequence of characters. As LibreOffice has many modules that depend on various libraries and languages, there are different string types in LibreOffice. Here, we discuss some of them. (more…)

alsVarious data types are used in LibreOffice code and also in LibreOffice API. Here we discuss some of these data types, which are important when you are working with LibreOffice code and API. (more…)

LibreOffice uses a build system called gbuild which uses GNU Make. Migrating from the old build system to gbuild started in the OpenOffice days, but the migration took a while and a lot of effort, finishing around LibreOffice 4.1. (more…)

Do you want to submit a patch to LibreOffice Gerrit, and you’re wondering if your code will be accepted or not? Other than providing a good solution to resolve a problem (fix a bug, implement a feature or enhancement), you should care about the code conventions, and in particular, code formatting. Suitable code formatting for LibreOffice is what we discuss here. (more…)

One category of the bugs that we see in computer programs including LibreOffice is the unexpected crashes. You’re working with the application, and it is suddenly closed! In the previous part, I have discussed crashes that are caused by segmentation fault. In this article, I discuss the crashes from invoking abort() function. Please note that not an abort is not always a bad thing, or a bug. (more…)