Month: April 2014

LibreOffice Las Palmas Hackfest 2014

bmichaelsen

Sie singt Tag und Nacht neue Lieder,
von den Palmen am blauen Meer

— Kein Bier auf Hawaii, originally by Paul Kuhn

So, the LibreOffice Las Palmas Hackfest 2014 is over and it was awesome. I have to thank Alberto Ruiz and University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria for their excellent hosting and support. We had the opportunity to present the LibreOffice project to the students of the university, and we did so with a set of short talks to cover a lot of ground without too much boring details. Here is the hand of my slides:

You can find a video of all the talks in the session on youtube. My talk starts around minute 35 and is followed by Kendys nice intro on improving the LibreOffice UI. In addition to the video, I also made a few pictures on the event, you can find them in this album.

Hacking
Hacking

The achievements section of this Hackfest is still being populated, but despite being a smaller Hackfest, there seems to have been quite some productive work done in total. It was also very encouraging to see curious students from the university drop by, we tried to give them a gentle introduction on ways to contribute and learn more.

Our next LibreOffice Hackfest will be on June, 27-28 in Paris as has just been announced.

Announcing BundesGit for LibreOffice

bmichaelsen4 Comments

“I fought the law and the law won”

— Sonny Curtis and the Crickets — prominently covered by the Clash

So in a few minutes, I will be leaving for the meeting at Open Knowledge Lab in Hamburg for Code for Germany in Hamburg — but I dont want to show up empty-handed. Earlier I learned about BundesGit which is a project to put all federal german laws in a git repository in easily parsable markdown language. This project was featured prominently e.g. on Wired, Heise and got me wondering that having all those laws available at the tip of your hand would be quite useful for lawyers. So here I went and quickly wrote an extension to do just that. When you install the extension:

  • it downloads all the german federal laws from github and indexes them on the next restart of LibreOffice (completely in the background without annoying the user)
  • that takes about ~5 minutes (and it only checks for updates on the next start, so no redownload)
  • once indexed you can insert a part of a law easily in any text in Writer using the common abbreviations that lawyers use for these:
  • Type the abbreviation of the paragraph on an otherwise empty line, e.g. “gg 1” for the first Artikel of the Grundgesetz
  • press Ctrl-Shift-G (G for Git, Gesetz or whatever you intend it to mean)
  • LibreOffice will replace the abbreviation with the part of that law
BundesGit for LibreOffice
BundesGit for LibreOffice

Now this is still a proof-of-concept:

  • It requires a recent version (1.9 or higher) of git in the path. While that is for example true in the upcoming version of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, other distributions might still have older versions of git, or — on Windows — none at all: Packing a git binary into the extension is left as an exercise for the reader.
  • I have not checked it to parse all the different laws and find all the paragraphs. It also ignores some non-text content in the repository for now. Patches welcome!
  • While it stays in the background most of the time intentionally to not get into the way of the user, it could use some error reporting or logging, so users are not left in the dark if it fails to work.

On the other hand, the extension is a good example what you can do with less than 300 lines of Python3 (including tests) in LibreOffice extensions. Thus the code was hopefully verbosely enough commented and was uploaded to sdk-examples repository, where it lives alongside this LibreOffice does print on Tuesdays extension that also serves as an example. Of course, if there other useful repositories of texts online, it can be quickly adapted to provide those too.

So download BundesGit for LibreOffice and test it on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (trusty).

 

addendum: This has been featured on golem.de and linux-magazin.de (both german).